Page 75 of The Healer and the Wolf: Part One

“You okay?” I asked, unable to keep any of the satisfaction out of my voice. Why would I want to? I was sure Ven liked knowing she’d made me feel good just as much as I enjoyed knowing that I made her feel good.

“I’mperfect,” she murmured, eyes hazy as she looked up at me.

I gave her a little kiss on the forehead at that. She was just too adorable. However, that wasn’t enough, so I added a kiss to her cheek, then the other. But it seemed that once I started, it was quite hard to stop, so then I pressed another tender little kiss to those petal-pink lips of hers.

The ones on her face, of course. Considering it was me it couldn’t have gone either way.

“Why don’t we go upstairs and get cleaned up together? Maybe have a bit of a lie down?” I suggested, taking a slight step back, still keeping my hands on her so I could help her to her feet. She swayed slightly, which stroked my ego all that much more.

“That sounds like a great idea.”

“I do have them from time to time.”

She gave the slightest little chuckle as we walked upstairs to the bathroom. Although I had no idea what the next day was going to bring, if we would find any more of my pack or be met with failure, I couldn’t help but think it would all be okay.

As long as I had Ven by my side, what could go wrong?

“Arewe sure this could really be so easy?” I asked, staring at the nondescript building.

When I had first imagined storming the medical testing facility, it involved a lot of stealth, sneaking up in our wolf forms, and possibly trying to con our way in through some sort of service worker or something like that.

“It should be,” Ven said, flipping through notes she’d written in her phone. “As far as I can tell, this place completely shuts down on the weekend. Like, completely locked up. Most protesters tend to hit on either a Saturday or Sunday, so I guess it’s a way to avoid them.”

“Whatever the reason,” Ricky said, “let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. Now, how are we supposed to get in here?”

“That’s the harder part,” Ven admitted. “I’m not a hacker, so it wasn’t like I could find some flaw in their security. I don’t even really know what kind of security system they have set up, just that there are no cameras on the outside. But in one of the videos, I saw a manual lock for the docking bays in receiving, and I figured if there was anything the two of you could break, it would be that.”

As much as Ven often downplayed her research, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Surely her bosses at the grocery store had to know they were wasting so much of her potential. They had her stocking shelves and letting her coworkers harass her.

“That’s a great place to start,” I said, already heading toward the back of the building.

Sure enough, she was right. Chains and large padlocks secured the large metal doors. Humans would need tools to break it, but Ricky and I could use our strength.

My beta must have been thinking the same thing, because he clapped his hands together. “All right, let’s do this.”

With our combined strength, it took less than five minutes for us to get in, with Ven keeping watch for us the entire time. Once the locks and chains were taken care of, we quietly slid the door open high enough for us to get under.

Huh, it really could be justthateasy I supposed.

“Here is where we’re pretty much in the dark,” Ven said as she straightened and turned the flashlight on in her phone. “And I do mean that both literally and figuratively. There aren’t going to be any lights on, and I have no idea what the inside of this building looks like. I couldn’t find a tour, I couldn’t find any sort of PR, not even staged pictures for a feel-good article. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this thing was a giant, empty box.”

“Hey, what you did find was amazing,” I assured her, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “Let’s look around.”

Because we weren’t idiots from a horror movie, we didn’t split up. Instead, we moved in a loose cluster, with Ricky and I taking turns between the front and rear position, and Ven always somewhere around the middle. We started off in the loading area, then quickly progressed into the most banal, office-like setting I’d ever been in.

When we reached the lobby, I held up my hand, signaling for us to stop. I could hear the faintest heartbeat barely on the edge of my senses, but on the other side of the door. There was something else with it. A slow, but rhythmic scraping, almost like the cutting of wood.

Wait a minute.

Was I hearingsnoring?

I couldn’t believe it. There was at least one guard on the other side of the door, but he was fast asleep, metaphorically sawing logs on the job.

I sank into the slowest shift I’d had in a long time, trying to keep the steam and heat that came from the transformation at a minimum. Ricky followed suit, which would allow us to communicate without verbally speaking.

“Is that guy sleeping?”he asked in the mental language shifters often could use to communicate. It took a lot of practice to understand another species, but as pack Ricky and I could speak as easily as we did in our human forms.

“Seems like it,”I answered, more amused than I ever expected to be during a stealth mission.

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