Page 167 of Marked

A massive lion stepped out of a shadowy, man-made concrete cave, eyeing me with hungry, yellow eyes. Instinct nearly took over. My inner wolf wanted to bolt and get away from this thing. My human side overrode those feelings, and I stood my ground.

The lion took several steps toward me, his massive tongue flicking out to lick his lips. A disconcerting movement, to say the least.

Easy, big guy.You stay cool, and I’ll stay cool.

My plan must have been working. The shifters chasing me didn’t appear to want anything to do with this enclosure. Yet, I was still in terrible danger. In a straight-out fight, the beast stalking toward me would end me in seconds. It easily outweighed me by over three hundred pounds. I was, in my own personal estimation, a pretty massive alpha wolf. But next to the lion, I was a puppy.

It moved closer. The look in its eyes was that of a hungry animal who’d just happened upon a midnight snack. Either I’d get out of here alive, or I’d go down fighting.

Glaring at the lion, I peeled my lips back and let out a deep growl, my alpha aura surging out. To my surprise, the lion flinched back, blinking in confusion. It was either shocked at my boldness, the sensation of my aura, or some combination of both.

After a standoff of several more seconds, the lion turned and padded back to his cave. Staring after him in shocked wonder, I sat back down. How thefuckhad that worked? It was a story I’d probably tell until I died. Whether anyone everbelievedit was true? Well, that wasn’t for me to decide.

Over an hour later, the sounds of the men searching for me had faded and vanished. I waited an additional fifteen minutes to be sure they were really gone, then leapt into the water and paddled back to the fence. I shifted into my human form again to climb. Halfway up the fence, I glanced back. The lion had poked its head out from its cave again and stared at me in what was an almost human look of dumbstruck confusion.

“I know,” I said to the lion as I climbed. “Pretty fucking crazy, right?”

As I dropped over the other side, my boots slapped wetly on the concrete. I needed to get back to Cameron. These guys probably didn’t know where our hotel was, but this was getting too dangerous. The longer I was away from her, the worse I felt.

Running toward the front gate, I pulled my phone out and called her. It went to voicemail. Skidding to a stop outside the front gates, I tried again. Voicemail again.

A tremor ran through me, and fear unlike anything I’d ever known surged through me. I couldn’t think of any good reason she wouldn’t answer. It was late, sure, but she knew I’d try to make contact. Something was wrong.

Scrambling over the outer gate, I shifted again and ran. I ran like my life and Cameron’s depended on it. Because, as far as I could tell, it very well might.

43

Cameron

The words on my computer screen had begun to meld and twist together. I was reading a police report about Rick’s great-aunt on his mother’s side. The rabbit hole I’d fallen into was getting ridiculous. The most remarkable thing was how squeaky cleaneveryonearound Rick and his family was. His biological mother, a moderately well-known model, had been busted when she was twenty-two for a half ounce of weed. Other than that? Nothing but Lincoln’s speeding and parking tickets and that shoplifting incident.

In the time Nate had been gone, I’d made almost no headway in finding anything concrete we could use against the Masters family. Madison Masters née Revell, Rick’s stepmother, had an even more law-abiding past. Nothing of note stuck out, though she came from old money, which meant anything unfavorable might have simply been washed away with money and threats. It frustrated the hell out of me. At this point, if I didn’t know better, I’d have said it was impossible that Lincoln or Rick were anything but good little boys toeing the line.

My phone rang beside me, where it lay face down on the couch. Without glancing at it, I reached over and answered, assuming it was Nate giving me an update on his detective work or Ollie giving us more leads.

“Hello?” I said, leaning forward to squint at an old photo of Madison Masters’s grandfather, a railroad magnate named George Stevens Revell. He seemed as boring and pointless as the rest of the people I’d researched.

“Where are you, Cam?”

My eyes snapped open, and I leaned away from my computer, horrorstruck to hear Rick’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Cam? Can you hear me?” Rick said again after my terrified silence stretched on for several seconds.

“Rick?” I said dumbly, hands shaking.

“Are you okay?” His voice was low and worried, almost as if he were scared.

“Why are you calling me?” It was all I could say. My eyes automatically shot to the windows and door. Was he outside right now? Had he somehow found us again? Was he about to kick the door down and drag me into the night?

With a start, I realized now was the time to gather information. Just like that, my journalistic instincts drowned out my fear and shock at hearing Rick’s voice. I quickly turned on my phone’s recording app, ensuring this conversation would be saved.

“Cam, I’m only looking out for you,” he said. “This is all one big misunderstanding. You have to see that.”

“A misunderstanding? You tried to kill me!”

Rick sighed wearily. “No, no, no. Not you, I tried to kill that prick cop.”

“Becausethat’swhat a normal fucking person does,” I hissed, standing and pacing from window to window.

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