Page 22 of Monster Mistake

When he was done, Riordan whistled. “Wow. That’s…a lot. But I didn’t hear anything in that story that makes me think something’s wrong. Maybe she just thought you needed your sleep.”

Yeah. That did make sense. Justine was thoughtful like that.

But that didn’t explain the bad feeling he had in his gut. The gnawingachescreaming at him that something waswrong. “Maybe,” he murmured.

“Did you try callingher?” Riordan asked gently.

The ache intensified. “I can’t explain this, but…she’s not going to answer. I just know it,” he admitted.

Riordan sucked in a sharp breath. “If I’ve learned anything from my relationship with Roxie, it’s that your gut is never wrong. If you think something is going on, then something is going on.”

Khill stifled his fight-or-flight instincts when Riordan appeared out of the fuckingetherin front of him.

Oh, yeah. Did he mention that Riordan could teleport?

“What the fuck, man?” he asked.

Riordan shrugged. “You helped me find my wife when she was missing. So, let’s go find your wife.”

Nowthatwas the best idea he’d heard since waking up alone.

CHAPTER 15

Waking up from chloroform was not as easy as Hollywood would have you believe. Justine was, sadly, figuring that out the hard way.

In fact, now that she was thinking about it, it wasn’t all that different than waking up in Vegas with the worst hangover of her life. The toxic-waste taste in her mouth, the pounding headache, the slight numbness in her extremities…yeah, that was all similar.

The difference was that when she had her hangover, Khill was there to take care of her. Now, she was slumped over in a wooden chair with her ankles zip-tied to the chair legs and her wrists tied behind her.

This wassonot good.

But she’d seen more than her fair share of police procedurals on TV and watched a shit ton of true crime documentaries, and she felt like if anyone should be able to handle this situation, it was her.

(Of course, she was halfway convinced that because she could operate on animals and had watched eleventy-billion episodes ofGrey’s Anatomyshe could perform a lap coli on a human, too. So, sometimes her confidence overrode her reality.)

Taking a deep breath, Justine took stock of her situation.

Low, exposed ceiling beams, bare concrete floor, unfinished sheetrock walls, dampness in the air, no natural light…all hallmarks of a basement. Not good news. Tied to a chair in a murder basement sounded like the start of a horror flick. Or a bad Netflix documentary about a serial killer—a documentary she would not be the titular character in. She’d just be, like, victim number five or something. That’d really piss her off.

She had to swallow a squeal when a giant dude suddenly appeared within her line of sight. And from there, her fear bled away, allowing annoyance to take its place.

Fucking hell. Sheknewthis guy.

She narrowed her eyes on him. She hadn’t recognized his voice, but she knew that stupid face. “You’re…Desmond, right? What the hell is going on?”

That handsome face twisted into an expression so angry Justine braced herself for a blow. But to his credit, the werewolf reined in his emotions quickly. “It’s David,” he corrected through obviously gritted teeth. “And you’d remember that if the orc hadn’t interrupted our date.”

He saidorcin the same tone she used when describing how heart worm killed dogs, wearing the same expression her vet tech wore when expressing a grumpy Doberman’s anal glands. But pointing that out didn’t seem wise.

She swallowed hard. “David, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind the night we met. I’d just had a bad breakup. I never should’ve been at the Monster Match.”

He knelt in front of her, and the wild look in his eyes made her heart rate kick up. “You were exactly where you should’ve been, Justine. It was fate.”

Now, admittedly, Justine wasn’t great at romance. She loved it in fiction, but in reality? Not as much. She generally believed in what she could see, feel, and quantify. So, while she wasn’t close-minded to the concept offate, she couldn’t say she fully endorsed it. Not to the extent that it’d put her in a murder basement with a werewolf, at least.

Except…if she hadn’t been storming out of that Monster Match, half-cocked, looking for someone to fuck her misery away, she wouldn’t have ended up in Vegas, which meant she wouldn’t have ended up drunk-marrying Khill. Would he ever have confessed his feelings for her if she hadn’t drunkenly agreed to marry him?

Huh. Maybe she believed in fate, after all. “I guess it’s possible,” she admitted quietly, more to herself than to the wolf.

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