Read Wolf at the Door for Free Online

begging her
to shut up. He wouldn’t believe me anymore, but if he thought I was
trying to shut her up? That...that worked.”
    A knock sounded at the front door and Brandt
bit off a curse. “Stay right here, won’t be a moment.”
    She didn’t even look at him as he went to the
front door, no doubt too lost in her gruesome memories. It had to
be a horror film, one he wished she didn’t have to relive. He
shoved open the front door. Tate stood there, hands in his
pockets.
    “What?” Brandt bit out.
    “All clear. He didn’t linger. From what we
can tell, the car was parked out on the road. He dropped her gift,
walked around the house, lingered below the second story window at
the back of the place. The one by the oak out there? Smelled like
he tried to climb it. Walked around the rest of the house and left.
Can’t do anything about the rest of the pack without names and
addresses.”
    “Leave it for now. Pass the evidence over to
the night shift pack and go home and get some rest. What little you
can before we have to officially be on shift, anyway. I have to
finish up here first.”
    Tate’s eyes narrowed. He should have known.
There was no way Tate would go home to sleep while Brandt kept
working. “Boss?”
    “Charles Wolfe. Run the name. Dig up every
scrap of information you can on him. Find out everything.”
    There was a question in the other Hound’s
face, but thankfully he held off on asking. Brandt didn’t want to
explain, he just wanted to get back inside and let Timber finish.
As if he knew, Tate gave a slight nod. “Yes, sir.”
    Brandt turned back to Timber. She was
watching him, and he could practically feel her trying to figure
him out. “You okay?” he asked softly.
    “You’re the first Hound I’ve ever met who
actually seems to give a damn.”
    He’d heard her story. He could believe that.
“I hate to admit it, but we’re still few and far between. Times are
changing, but not fast enough. And it doesn’t undo the past.”
    “Fair enough.”
    “So you escaped the night the twelfth victim
died three years ago?”
    Timber nodded. “She convinced him that he had
to be bitten by a shifter in wolf form while fucking his mate. But
I couldn’t be touching silver. He had to let his inner beast out,
and mine couldn’t be restrained.”
    Nausea churned in Brandt’s gut.
    “I think she was hoping we could overpower
him...with him focused on me and her in wolf form, she might be
able to kill him and save us both.”
    “But it backfired.”
    “Yeah. He insisted she had to bite him where
he could watch her. He wasn’t stupid. She attacked him, but he shot
her before she could kill him. He was pissed then. All-out
rampage.” Timber blew out a long, slow breath. “He knew I’d played
him again. He grabbed his knife. He never used the gun on me. Too
easy for me to end up dead.”
    “And a knife wasn’t?”
    “It was a little one. He could control the
cuts.”
    “Jesus,” Brandt said, his body on the verge
of shifting to predator form. He wanted nothing more than to find
that bastard. Wolfe wasn’t human anymore, and the moment he’d
gotten his wish and became a shifter, he’d lost the right to a
prison cell. The only thing coming for Wolfe now was a silver
bullet.
    “At first it was just the normal shit. Then
he decided I needed a more severe punishment. Maybe I’d stop
fighting him so much then.” Her hand moved to her left breast and
Brandt remembered the way her night shirt had hung flat there when
she hadn’t had time to dress. He’d thought breast cancer. One look
at her face then, and he knew he’d been wrong. “I blacked out from
the pain or blood loss or something. I don’t know. It was hazy
after that. When I woke up, he’d done a shitty job stitching me up,
but he and the body were gone.”
    “Let me guess, he forgot the chain?”
    Timber gave him a weary smile. “I think he
thought I wasn’t going to wake up in any hurry. But the moment I
came to and realized