Her head shot up at his words. “And what are you going to do? Go shoot him with your big gun? Or show him your teeth and scare him until he pees in his pants?”
She had a sarcastic tone, most of the time. Now was no different, but it kind of made X want to laugh. Was this how she pictured him? The man that handled things with violence. If so, she wasn’t exactly wrong. His plan was to find the bastard and snap his neck—okay, no, he wasn’t going to snap the guy’s neck, but he was going to make sure he’d never mess with Caprise again.
“I’m going to handle the situation, that’s all you need to know.”
She took a deep breath. “Well, all you need to know is there was a man and now there isn’t. It’s been over for a really long time.”
“But judging from his texts to you, he’s not on board with that decision.”
“That’s not him,” she said, and the scent of her lie almost suffocated X.
That alone made him just a little edgier, if that were possible. “Then who is it?”
She shrugged. “Wrong number.”
“Wrong answer, Caprise,” was his response.
“So what did Hernandez have to say after your overnight ultimatum wore off?” Bas asked several hours later when they were in his office.
X and Caprise still hadn’t said more than two words to each other. But he had received an email from his office with the information on the phone number trace he’d done before leaving DC. The results weren’t good, but at least they gave X a place to start looking for Caprise’s stalker. Unfortunately, it would circle him right back to Athena’s.
“He wrote down some dates—I guess for when meetings occurred—and some amounts that he knew were exchanged. I’m going to take all the info back to DC and work on it from there.” That wasn’t all that Hernandez had told him, but it was all he planned to tell Bas for now.
“Intel from Comastaz came in just before you arrived,” Bas said.
He sat back on the chocolate-brown couch that was across the room from his desk. After the early morning they’d all had, coming back to the room to get some food and some rest had been first and foremost. And instead of the cat X had seen a while ago, he was definitely looking at the man now. He wore cream-colored linen pants and a matching shirt; his shoes were some type of loafer, something X would never try to squeeze his feet into. But on Bas it looked right, as if these things were made for this man. Whatever, X shook his head and took a seat in a chair across from him.
“What’s going on there? You thought it might be a leak or something,” he said, recalling their conversation from a few weeks ago about the government-owned lab in Sedona.
“It’s not good. We were able to get a shifter inside, sent him in as a rep from a waste management company. He found some interesting emails on one of the computers.”
“The joys of technology,” X replied grimly. Bas wasn’t looking like his normally suave self; in fact, X noted the guy’s brow was just a bit furrowed, his eyes a little shielded.
“Well, that technology has confirmed one of our greatest fears. I’m telling you this before I tell the other FLs because I know you’ll report directly to Rome the minute you return to DC.”
X sat up, resting his elbows on his knees. “Give it to me,” he told Bas.
“Somebody’s asking questions about another species. There was talk of some photos and containment. They don’t sound like they have specifics, just a hunch. But it’s the government, you know where they can go with a hunch.”
X let out the breath he’d unwittingly been holding. “I know what the government doesn’t do with important hunches and tips. But this, they’ll run with this until the end of time.”
“You’re right,” Bas said. “Just like they’re still secretly looking for UFOs.”
“Great, now we’re in the category with UFOs. Fucking perfect. Rome’s not going to like this. Do we know who received the emails, who the sender was, all that?”
“I’ve got a written report in my office.”
“On a secure USB, I hope,” X said.
Bas nodded. “All our computers are secure. You should know—you installed most of them.”
“Right. But we’ve got to start being real careful about what we say and to whom. Last month at the raid on Rome’s place there was a Rogue found on the property. Baxter thinks he came in with the landscape group earlier that week. And then there was the Rogue that was working at the firm with Rome and Nick. They’re everywhere now.”
“Yeah, I know. But they’re masking their scent. We’ve got to figure out how they’re doing it.”
X agreed. “As for the chick at the firm, we think she may have been sleeping with a human. If that’s the case he would have carried her scent and she would have been virtually scent-free.”
“Damn genetics,” Bas swore. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about our kind. Like I was thinking the other day, what if one of us was to get a human pregnant. What would that be like?”
For a moment X was quiet. Actually, he was stunned because pregnant and human were not generally words that went together in Bas’s vocabulary. For all that he was a womanizer he usually stuck to shifters because he figured they were safer for whatever reasons he may have had. This was different, and the look he was giving X was even stranger.
“You got somebody knocked up?” X asked, trying to keep this conversation as light as possible.
Bas shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I was just thinking. You know with thousands of us here in the United States and spreading out across the country, it’s entirely possible that one of us would hook up with a human and a pregnancy could occur.”
X shrugged. “I don’t know. Nick’s mate is pregnant now and that’s strange enough. We’re all kind of just waiting to see what’s going to happen. I mean, shifter births are fairly common now or else we wouldn’t be here. But none of us has ever witnessed any.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on in my head,” Bas said rubbing a hand over his face. “So anyway, you and Caprise—where’s that going?”
“Nowhere” was X’s instant reply. “What I mean is there’s no mating or joining on the horizon.”
“You sure about that?” Bas asked skeptically.
“Come on, man, you know me.”
Bas nodded. “I do.”
“You and I are kind of alike. Commitment’s not on our agenda,” he replied, watching Bas carefully.
“Right. It’s not on my agenda. But you’re pretty damn protective of her.”
“She’s a female, Bas. And she’s Nick’s sister.”
“And she’s what to you?”
X stood. “She’s Nick’s sister and she’s a shifter. Damn right I’m going to protect her. As a matter of fact I’m going to go see what she’s doing and let her know we’ll be flying out in the morning.”
But as X opened the door Jewel was on the other side. The smile she gave X wavered as he figured he was probably scowling at her instead.
“Sorry, I was just leaving,” he told her.
“What is it, Jewel?” Bas asked.
When she spoke her voice was decidedly feminine and very serious. “There’s an urgent call for you from a Roman Reynolds.”
Chapter 17
Washington, DC
Kalina Reynolds was no longer a detective for the Metropolitan Police Department. She was no longer a candidate for employment with the Drug Enforcement Agency. What she was—and most would be absolutely amazed at her transformation—was the First Female of the Stateside Shifter Assembly. She was part woman and part jaguar, and she was absolutely gorgeous in her four-and-a-half-inch-heeled cobalt-blue Jimmy Choo pumps and white sleeveless V-neck Victoria Beckham mini dress.