Page 5 of Savage Fate

Two

I boltedto the left and scaled the brick wall, my boots finding purchase on the rough surface. When I jumped down on the other side, a small crowd of humans gathered around a lump on the ground.

“Someone, call the cops!” An older woman yelled.

“An ambulance too.”

“I think it’s too late for that.”

Dread sank to the bottom of my gut as I slinked through the crowd unnoticed. As the gruesome sight unfolded on the sidewalk, the dread grew into a giant rock that ripped a hole in my stomach.

The corpse of a woman sprawled out at an unnatural angle as if someone had shoved her out of a moving car. Blood leaked from several wounds on her arms and legs, staining her clothing. Long black hair tangled around her face.

She wasn’t just a woman, though. She was a shifter. A bitten one.

A man squatted to check her pulse, but the scent of death already clung to her. After pressing two fingers to her neck, he shook his head and then rolled her onto her back.

Gasps ricocheted through the cluster of humans, and acid oozed up my throat. A gaping, bloody hole tore into her chest.

Where the hell was her heart?

“What’s going on?”

Fane’s voice in my head startled me. He must have felt my panic.

“Get here now. We have a problem.”

Had The Collective Hunt decided straight-up murder was the way to go?

Once Fane alerted Ari and the others, they rushed out of the compound. Thankfully, Barric had placed shifters in the police department, so when they arrived to clear the onlookers, we grabbed the deceased and snuck it into Silver Ridge.

Ravens had been called in to bring a nightworlder with compulsion abilities to wipe the memories from the human witnesses. We couldn’t have a coroner examine a shifter corpse, and we certainly couldn’t afford to have the news catch wind of a murder victim with a missing heart.

“Why would someone take her heart?” Saint studied the hole in the woman’s chest. “They used a knife too. In fact, there are no marks from claws or teeth. I only see stab wounds.”

Fane’s brows lowered down his forehead as he loomed on the other side of the metal table in one of the medical rooms in the compound’s basement. “Why would a shifter use a knife to kill?”

“It doesn’t make sense.” Saint straightened and jammed his fingers through his hair.

Ari pressed his palms into the table, his lips flattening into a thin line. “The Collective Hunt wouldn’t need to use a knife to kill.”

“Unless they were trying to throw us off their track,” Olivia said as she anxiously drummed her fingers on her arm. “But then they wouldn’t have dropped a corpse right outside Silver Ridge for us to find.”

Chills raked down my spine. There was something oddly familiar about the panther shifter. She didn’t belong to Silver Ridge, but maybe she’d visited or I’d seen her in Lunar Souls.

“The Collective Hunt has to be involved,” I said.

Gerry shook her head and flicked her hand toward the dead shifter. “This could simply be a separate situation altogether. Maybe this woman had a dangerous enemy.”

Ari nodded. “Unless any other victims turn up, we can’t assume this had anything to do with The Collective Hunt.”

Fane and I shared a look, but we didn’t need to speak words to know what the other was thinking. This wouldn’t be the last body we found. More were coming. And if it wasn’t The Collective Hunt, who else would have it out for shifters?

I shutoff the scalding water, grabbed my towel from the rack, and stepped onto the plush rug outside of Fane’s shower, my hands trembling the whole time. They hadn’t stopped for the last hour after returning to Mohan Wilds. Fane would have noticed if he hadn’t made himself scarce, something he’d been doing lately.

He battled with himself daily, the mate bond pushing us together while his fear over Kaspin’s spell forced him to keep his distance. Most nights he slept on the floor beside his bed, unless my nightmares woke him, and only then would he crawl under the covers to hold me.

We hadn’t had sex since the morning he nearly killed me at his mother’s safe house. If we didn’t soon, I’d explode from all the desire and lust brewing inside.

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