Page 48 of Wolf Claimed
“Now who’s avoiding? We need to talk about it.”
“I heard enough from the hall. I don’t need to know the details.”
She kept forgetting about shifter hearing and how much harder it was to keep certain encounters private. “You know what happened, but not why.”
“They wanted you and you wanted them. What else is there?”
“Why do you make everything seem so black and white?”
“Because it is.”
“Then explain it to me. I never sought to be with anyone in this program. Far from it. The next thing I know, I have one shifter who says he’ll go feral if I don’t blood-bond him and another shifter—an alpha who follows my every move with his eyes as if he wants me—pushing me toward the near-feral shifter. And then there’s you, the brooding shifter who flirts with me, driving me absolutely crazy at times, who pulls away the second I feel like I’m starting to get to know him. And all the time, there’s this inner part of me that is drawn to each of you, like you’re my other half. Something’s wrong with me, Maddox, and I don’t understand it.”
He sat up straight. “Why are you really in this program, Alyssa? And don’t lie. Not after everything we’ve been through together. You’re not like the other agents here. They’re resentful and antagonistic, as if they were forced to be here. But you’ve been afraid of getting kicked out.”
“The others are agents undergoing disciplinary action in their respective agencies. They were given the opportunity to come here to save their careers. I was recruited. The DSA asked me to go undercover as a trainee. They thought a woman might have an advantage here.”
“To do what?”
“To ferret out a mole.” She picked up the empty cans and took them to the garbage in the kitchen. “The DSA has reason to believe one of the trainees in the program is working for the WSSO.”
“Fuck. To do what precisely? Kill Graves?”
“The DSA suspected the WSSO was trying to sabotage the program. An alliance between humans and shifters is the last thing the WSSO wants. But killing Graves doesn’t break the alliance, not by pinning the murder on a human. Had they pinned it on a shifter, then maybe.”
“The mole probably recognized you.”
“I don’t know how. No one knew my real name, not even the DSA agent who recruited me.”
“The agent who recruited you just happened to pick you, the daughter of one of the top men at the WSSO,” Maddox said. He didn’t like coincidences.
“There aren’t a lot of women agents who—” She stopped talking.
“Who what?” he pressed. He hated when she hesitated with him. She should know by now that he’d never do anything to hurt her, no matter what secrets she had.
“Who aren’t anti-shifter,” she finished.
“I don’t buy it. It’s too great a coincidence. How did they convince you to do it? Pay raise? Reassignment to any city you wanted?”
“They told me what was going on, and I saidyes. Same pay.”
“So you thought, ‘Gee let me take on a dangerous assignment for fun’?”
The smile and relaxed expression on her face from earlier disappeared completely. Instead, he saw a vulnerability there, one she was reluctant to share. “It wasn’t like that,” she finally said. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn about shifters. To learn about. . . me.”
* * *
ALYSSA
“What doyou meanlearn about you?” Maddox asked.
Alyssa had been waiting and eager to get some time alone with Maddox so she could tell him how she felt about him. And now that she had him all to herself, she wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know what he thought about her, especially after she’d been with Rafe and Tiernan, both at the same time, too. Trying to tell him how important he was to her would come off as insincere. How could it not after being with two other guys?
On top of making a mess of her relationship with him, she’d practically told Maddox her secret, a secret no one knew.
“I don’t know much about shifters,” she said, not sure how to backtrack without making him more suspicious. Maddox was a trained guard, someone who picked up on the minutest of details. “There aren’t any books about shifters unless you count the propaganda published by my father and other anti-shifters. I’d never met a shifter before coming here.”
Black eyes bore into her. “You’re lying.”
