Page 33 of Act of Passion

Malik satat his desk in what he and his coworkers called the bullpen and worked on the last of his reports. Paperwork had piled up during his recent forced leave of absence. He hadn’t had a chance to catch up on it since his return because there had been one mission after another. All were important and none could be missed. If he wasn’t going on missions with his current team, he was being loaned out to others. Such was the way of things withPSI.

And when he finally had a moment off from work, he tried to get a lead on where Brooke was. It had been five years since their night together. Five years since he’d asked her to move in with him and to be his wife, and five years since he’d lost his shit and nearly shifted fully in front ofher.

And five years since he’d learned that she’d beenabducted.

In all that time, there hadn’t been a single clue as to where she’d been taken or who the men worked for. For the first few months, his PSI teammates had all assisted when they could in his search for Brooke and Edee, but after a while they began to look at him with pity in their eyes. As if they knew the women would never be foundalive.

Only Striker brought possible leads about the women to Malik anymore. Even those were few and far between, and they never went anywhere. There wasn’t a day that went by that Malik didn’t think of Brooke. He suffered in silence, never letting his teammates or co-workers know just how much the human still meant tohim.

He knew deep down that she wasn’t dead, though he couldn’t explain how or why he thought as much. But he did know the odds of him ever seeing her again were nearlyzero.

Malik had to force himself to focus on finishing up his reports. He had enough pull and time in with the organization to be a division head with PSI, but that held little appeal to him. He’d been offered advances too many times to count. Somewhere around sixty or so years ago his superiors had stopped bothering to ask, knowing what his response would be. No. He didn’t want to be one of the men in charge. Had he wanted a position of authority, he’d have taken his father’s throne long ago. He hadn’t. He liked being able to walk away from the job when need be. At least he used to like the idea of walking away fromwork.

Being forced away was an altogether differentmatter.

It had left him with far too much time to think. Time to dwell on the past and the future. Time to think about how much he’d screwed up everything with Brooke and time to obsess over why it was he couldn’t get the human out of his head. Time to wonder where she might be and if she was hurt or, worse yet,dead.

He liked working to avoid facing his personal issues. He liked helping others and taking evil bastards off the street. There had been a time in his life when he’d walked the line between good and evil. And there were days he felt as if he’d step over the line, never able to return again. It had been that way since his last trip toEgypt.

SinceBrooke.

As of late, he worried nonstop that he’d give in to the darkness that he’d lost so many friends and loved ones to. That he’d become what PSI dealt with all the time. Already PSI had to step in to clean up the mess Malik had made in a crowded plazarecently.

The beast within him stirred as he thought about it again. As a lion-shifter who was thousands of years old, he’d had a long time to learn to be one with the animal inside him. To learn to control it with ease, and it had learned to submit to his demands. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d ever struggled with his beast. Oddly, they had all happened within the last five years. The first being in the resort in Egypt the night he’d been with Brooke. The most recent incident had been the worst—as there had ended up being countless human witnesses. The fact that he’d lost his shit—and shifted in front of humans nonetheless—hit him hard. It shook his faith and trust in his control and hisbeast.

And he didn’t know why it had happened. He’d been fine one second and the next, he’d caught the scent of honey and lotuses—the scent of Brooke—and his body had contorted in the most painful of ways. Shifting had never hurt before but what he’d done that day had been excruciating. His body ached just thinking aboutit.

All the rules had gone out thewindow.

What they left behind was a man who was a shell of his former self, and Malik wasn’t sure he liked the new version. Of course, he hadn’t exactly been the man he used to be for nearly five yearsnow.

Malik glanced around the open bullpen area of division headquarters. For as late into the night as it was, the place was full of operatives. All seemed to be in a mad dash to get their required reportsdone.

Entering the last of the required data for his reports, Malik hit submit and waited for confirmation of receipt to show before closing his laptop. He wasn’t one who liked to leave anything to accumulate. And he was about as far from a procrastinator as one couldget.

Though, as of late he’d been off hisgame.

Yeah, really off my fucking game, he thought as a snort broke free fromhim.

Duke sat at the desk next to Malik’s. Duke’s dark brown hair was pulled up in a haphazard way that spoke volumes to how much the man didn’t care about fashion. Since Duke had mated and found a wife, his clothes always matched and he no longer came in wrinkled, looking as if he’d slept in his attire. Which was ironic considering Duke’s wife, Mercy, was absentminded on her best days and often wore mismatched shoes. Malik strongly suspected that Duke had simply started to care more about his appearance now that he had a wife—someone to spend the rest of his immortally long lifewith.

Something Malik knew he’d never have. Hell, he couldn’t even have sex any longer. Finding a mate was simply out of the question. His lion unfurled and began to make itself known. It’s interest in mating was hard to dismiss. Malik clenched his hands behind his head and fought the beast back into submission, refusing to permit it even a taste of freedom since its outburst in theplaza.

Normally, he made a point to shift shapes at least once a week and run through the acres of land that surrounded Division B headquarters. The woods were stocked with game, all there for the alpha males to hunt. It helped to take the edge off. But Malik had refused to do so since his return towork.

He didn’t trust that he’d be able to return to human form. Throughout the ages, he’d known far too many shifter males who had gotten locked in animal form due to a loss of control. Each and every one had needed to be put down in the end as they became too feral to be permitted tolive.

He’d even been charged with dispatching some. He didn’t like thinking about it, but it was hard not to considering he was now showing all the signs of mentally breaking down. It was merely a matter of time before he became the mission—before he became the hunted. The shifter in need of a mercykill.

“I fucking hate reports,” growledDuke.

Duke was considered something of a luddite around the office. He tended to break the technology first and tried to figure it out later. He was well on his way to killing yet anotherlaptop.

Corbin had already gone rounds with Duke over breaking two in the past four weeks. Victim three would be headed to IT soon from the looks of it. At the rate Duke was going, IT would make him send smoke signals in place ofreports.

They’d probably get the information faster that way aswell.

Malik leaned back in his computer chair, eyeing Duke’s screen as the man continued to delete everything he’d spent so longing using two fingers to type. Malik had caught up on several months’ worth of paperwork in the same time it had taken Duke to do one report. With the wolf-shifter’s refusal to learn to type, that wasn’t toosurprising.

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