Page 136 of Her Wolf

Newbs tended to disagree

“So you’re telling me that’s supposed to be a building?” Lars asked, stabbing at the computer monitor.

Finn leaned closer still, until he and Lars both brushed against Kane’s shoulders. The man didn’t seem to mind their proximity as much as he minded them questioning his authority.

“It’s too geometrical to be natural.”

“One blurry pixel,” Lars mused, straightening as he crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s what we’re going on?”

“They’re hundreds of miles apart.” Finn shifted his weight. “We’d be taking a huge risk choosing any of them over the other.”

“So let’s split up,” Bailey chimed in from behind. “We can each take—”

Finn lifted his hand, the back facing toward Bailey, and the man cut off mid-sentence.

Zachary West—and the dozens of shell corporations and business entities he was involved in—owned close to eighty properties. Those included manufacturing plants, small businesses, real estate…and three islands.

Granted, they were so small that Google Maps didn’t even have names for them, but when Kane had zoomed in on the satellite footage, it had been clear two of the islands had a runway.

The only difference between this island and the other two was one insignificant spot of white.

“That could be nothing,” Lars waved a hand toward the monitor. “It is nothing. I say we wait for someone to call us back.”

Lars had gone through Duncan’s entire call history, trying to build an itinerary of the man’s flight plan. All he’d been able to come up with was that Duncan had rented a helicopter from Lajitas that had taken Zachary to an airport in Tamaulipas, Mexico.

A private airport whose sole owner wasn’t answering their phone.

“Look, either way, we have to get ourselves to that airport,” Kane said, tapping the mouse button as he rose to his feet. “That’s where the trail leads.”

“And if we get there and they’re all hard ass about telling us anything?”

Kane shrugged, and looked straight at Finn. “Then we’ll have to extract it from them.”

He didn’t like the way Kane seemed to assume he knew Finn. That they were simpatico or some kind of shit. But Kane had been the one to track down the islands, using some data filtering tactic he’d been taught in the early days of his DEA training.

Bailey had called bullshit. Then again, Bailey had been calling bullshit since they’d left Zachary’s farmhouse behind.

Finn nodded at Kane. His argument was logical to a fault; the airport was the end of the road. They’d either find more clues there, or realize they’d finally lost all hope of tracking down Cora.

But which was worse: giving up now, or dragging out their failure for another few hours?

“Road trip,” Lars said, but with hardly a trace of his usual enthusiasm.

Kane came past Finn, and clapped him on a shoulder blade. “We’re going to find her,” he said, giving Finn a warm, encouraging smile. “We just gotta keep looking until we do.”

His eyes tracked Kane across the small study until he disappeared down the hallway. Finn was about to follow, when Bailey tugged at his sleeve.

“You sure we can trust him?” Bailey asked.

Finn stared Bailey up and down for a moment before replying. “I don’t know what his reasons are, but I know he wants to find Cora as badly as we do.” Finn gave a small shrug. “Either way, he’s an extra set of hands. Trained hands. We’ll use him until he stops being useful.”

Bailey’s expression hardened, but Finn didn’t wait to hear his reply.

He knew there was something wrong with Kane; his beast skulked in a distant corner of his mind, fearful of leaving the shadows whenever the man was around.

As if something worse waited in the light.

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