Chapter 14

Squatch.

I paid for a hotel room on the first floor so Kitty could have thirty minutes to eat in peace. She smelled of men and sex, but I’d known she would. This wasn’t about me, it was about giving her some down time and making sure she ate. The shapeshifter bring food in and then take it to the hotel to nuke it in the breakfast area, but this was better than stopping for burgers on the way and then heating them back up four hours later. The human strippers don’t appear to eat very often.

I ate with her, walked her back to Blaze, handed her off to Dementor, and then returned to the hotel to turn my keycard in. I was due to walk a two-hour patrol around the apartment complex from nine until eleven, and then I’d be free to hang out in the clubhouse. Mad Dog doesn’t schedule me to walk as many patrol rotations as the rest of my brothers, but I make sure to do at least two a week. I need to keep my finger on everything, and that means showing up everywhere at least once or twice a week.

I was a little over halfway through my patrol when I got a call on the app from Dementor. “Have you heard from Kitty?”

“Not since I left her with you. Isn’t she at Blaze?”

“She left. Walked out the door saying she’d lost an earring when she ate and needed to look for it, but the hotel never saw her. I have the control room looking through the parking garage feeds and checking her cellphone.”

“Let me know if she turns up. I’m headed back to the clubhouse now.”

I took off at a run and made it to the clubhouse in under three minutes — it would’ve been sooner, but I had to be conscious of how fast a human is supposed to be able to run.

Mad Dog and Gears were in the control room when I entered, and Mad Dog answered my questions before I asked.

“She made a single phone call to a number we can’t track down. It looks like she was talking to them while she exited the parking garage. Her phone goes off the grid when she hangs up from talking to that person.”

My phone rang and I looked at the screen. Soul. I answered. “Yeah.”

“There was a man here, a tiger, asking about her. He smelled a lot like her. Family, maybe?”

I sat in a chair. Hard. I should’ve made her tell me about them. I shouldn’t have given her so much space.

“Thank you. Can you move the chair he sat in, please? Maybe into Bobcat’s office. Let Dementor know what you told me, and what I need from ya’ll. I’ll be by there in a little while to see what I can get from the scent.”

Mad Dog and Gears had heard what Soul had said, and I shook my head. “She’s afraid of her family. Bad memories. I don’t know why.”

I tried calling the number she’d called before her phone went off the grid, and it said it wasn’t a valid phone number.

McGyver occasionally came to help us out with the control room, but we had more people now and could get by without him easier. I called him, explained the situation, and asked him to see if he could figure out where she went using traffic cams and private cams. It meant he had to hack into the private ones, and it was a big ask, but I knew he’d do it.

“On it. I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Thanks, Brother.” I disconnected and turned to Mad Dog. “I’m going to go smell the chair. Keep me in the loop.”

I parked my bike just outside the door to Blaze and dared anyone to say something about it. I walked past the line and into the building, straight to Bobcat’s office. No one was in there, but the chair was in the corner with a plastic sheet over it. I stood beside it and breathed a few moments, settling my human and wolf sides before I lifted the plastic and took in the scent.

My stomach turned over and I nearly lost what was left of the meal I’d eaten with Kitty a few hours earlier.

A male tiger with a scent far too close to my kitten’s. Not a twin. Probably brother or half-brother. Possibly cousin.

But no doubt there was a close relation. I put the plastic back and walked into the club. D took over the door, and I walked with Skippy to the office to smell the chair. “Do you remember this man? Tiger? When did he arrive? What can you tell me about him?”

He breathed it in and nodded. “Tiger, yeah. White dude. Raw power rolling off him, but he wasn’t huge. Five ten or eleven, not much over two hundred pounds, but it’s all muscle. His head was shaved. He was here last night about an hour. Came in tonight around...” He shook his head. “Between nine and ten, maybe. I wasn’t watching the time. Sorry.”

“Thanks. That’s more than I had before. I’ll need you to look through the feeds and point him out.”

“Is Kitty okay?”

“I hope to god she is. I think she left when she realized he was here, but I don’t know where she went. If this guy comes back, I need you to let him in and alert Dementor, so we can detain him and question him.”

He left, and I sat in the office, focused on finding her, because if I gave my fear even a tiny bit of acknowledgment, it might take me over. I was terrified they’d had someone watching for her to leave. If they had her, she might never escape from them again.

By rights, I should’ve checked in with Mad Dog before I called Brooke. The club’s relationship with her was built on a treaty that allowed us certain allowances within her domain. However, I’d been feeding her regularly for years, and it felt like I could go to her personally.

Still, I knew it was wrong, but I called her anyway. One of her assistants answered, and I told him, “This is Sasquatch, from Rolling Thunder. I need a personal favor from Brooke.”

“Brooke is occupied. It may be a few hours before she’s available.”

“If you can tell her I have an emergency, please. I understand her time is valuable, but someone I love may have been abducted and I need to see if she can help find her.”

“You are blood-bonded to this person?”

I squeezed my eyes closed with regret. I hadn’t wanted to push. I’d been afraid of losing her.

“No, but we’ve had a lot of unprotected anal sex, so she has my essence in her.”

“I will pass your message on.”

The call disconnected, and I didn’t have a good feeling about the tiny Master Vampire calling back. No one knows for sure how strong Brooke is, and if she did this, she’d give clues about her powers and abilities. Or the lack of them.

Next stop, the dressing room. My heart hurt when I saw Kitty had taken her car key off her key ring, and she’d taken her ID and credit card from her wallet. She usually carried a few hundred dollars cash, and that was gone as well.

“She said she’d lost an earring,” Dementor said from the doorway.

I looked around and found the earring under her makeup station. “Fuck.”

“Didn’t come off as a lie,” he told me.

No, because she’d tossed the earring and hadn’t looked to see where it went. It was lost because it wasn’t in her ear anymore and she’d never see it again.

“She left of her own accord,” I told him. “Let’s hope she can keep herself safe until I can find her.”

I tried to think of my next step in finding her, but there was nothing else to do unless McGyver found something on traffic cams or private security systems. I knew the address of her supposed family, but I’d already been there once — enough to assure myself it was part of her fake identity. If nothing else showed up the following day, I’d ride down there for the hell of it, but I knew it’d be fruitless.

With nothing else to do, I rode back to the clubhouse to see if I could get a look at this guy from the Blaze security cameras. Maybe his license plates would lead us somewhere.