Echoes of Fire (The Mercury Pack #4)(80)

The sound of a boot scuffing the dirty floor brought Bracken back to the present. Again, he stared down at the hyena. The claw wounds on his face probably stung like a bitch—especially with the sweat gathering on his skin. They were deep and ugly and gave his wolf a sense of grim satisfaction, but the beast was no less impatient to gut the bastard right there and then.

Bracken unscrewed the cap off his bottle and downed a long swig of water, eyes still locked on the hyena. The guy swallowed, and the movement looked painful. His mouth was probably as dry as a bone.

“I really need to take a piss,” the hyena declared.

Bracken pursed his lips. “Don’t let me stop you.” He took another gulp of water and, keeping his tone conversational, added, “You carjacked my mate. Why?”

The hyena sighed. “Look, nothing I say here is going to calm you down or save my life. So why don’t we just get this whole thing over with, and you kill me right now.”

Bracken tipped his head to the side. “You want me to kill you?” He screwed the cap back on his bottle. “A lot of stories went around about what I did to those extremists. Did you hear any of them?”

For the first time, a hint of apprehension briefly lit the male’s eyes. “I heard.”

“They say it takes a special kind of darkness to be able to skin a person alive.” Bracken rubbed at his jaw. “I didn’t skin them all. Just one. Not his whole body. It was just his arm. I wanted him to see what my sister’s arm looked like after she got burned by the fire from one of his grenades, and that was close enough. I can’t say I enjoyed doing it. But I also can’t say that I didn’t. Which is fucked up, I know. But no one could have called me rational back then.” Bracken put his bottle on the worktable. “I’m not always rational nowadays. But my mate . . . she centers me. Keeps me stable. And you tried to take her away from me. How is that fair?”

The hyena’s jaw flexed. “I didn’t know she was yours.”

Bracken lifted a brow. “Is that so?” he asked, voice skeptical. “Was your plan to shoot her?”

The hyena looked almost offended by the question. “I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

“Your gun was loaded.” Bracken had checked when he’d pulled it out of her car on the way here.

“But I didn’t shoot her. I’m no hit man. I’ll do jobs, sure, but I don’t do hits.”

“Jobs?” Bracken echoed. Well, that confirmed his suspicions that the hyena was a lone shifter. Shifters didn’t do jobs; they had roles and followed orders. But lone shifters often provided services, including assassinations. “What kind of jobs do you do?”

The hyena clamped his mouth closed, as if remembering he’d meant to stay silent, but then he sighed. “I specialize in retrieval.”

“And what exactly is it you retrieve?”

“Mostly assets like cars, cash, or other possessions that people want returned to them. I’ve been doing it five years now.”

“Retrieval is how you earn money and protection?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were hired to retrieve Madisyn.” Bracken narrowed his eyes. “By who?”

The male licked his lips. “Look, I have no loyalty to the person who hired me. I’ll tell you what I know . . . if you give me some incentive like, oh, I don’t know, the promise to free me. Otherwise, I’ll take this shit to my grave.” And now the hyena looked satisfied.

His wolf peeled back his upper lip. “Free you?”

“Wouldn’t you demand the same thing in my position? I swear, I’ll tell you everything I know, but not for anything less than my freedom.”

“And why would I give it to you? If I let you go after what you did to my mate, what kind of message does that send to the outside world?”

“I didn’t hurt her.”

A growl rumbled in Bracken’s chest. “I saw the rake marks along her sides. I cleaned them. Washed away the blood. Stroked over the ugly bruises. And the whole time, I kept thinking . . . I’m going to kill that motherfucker.”

Sweat now trickling down his face, the hyena said, “I was defending myself. That cat . . . I don’t even know what she is, never seen anything like her before, but she’s a craz—”

“Careful,” clipped Bracken. “Let’s look at the facts. You carjacked my mate. Pulled a loaded gun on her. Tried to force her to go somewhere she didn’t want to go. Then you clawed her. Struck her. Made her bleed. And then—”

“I didn’t know she was your mate!”

“I don’t believe you.” The words were whisper-soft, but they carried a wealth of menace. “It’s no coincidence that you struck on the day I wasn’t with her. My guess is that your employer either told you about her patterns or you yourself have been watching her. You saw her alone, and you pounced. Only it didn’t work.” Bracken took a slow step forward. “You knew she was mine. You didn’t care. In fact, you probably used that fact to bargain for more money.”

The hyena’s eyes flickered, and Bracken knew he was right.

Bastard. “You’re not leaving this shed alive. Nor will you be leaving it in one piece. Whether or not you’re already dead when I’m slicing you into pieces depends entirely on how talkative you choose to be.”