Chasing The Night: Big Easy Shifters: Book Three, Knox, Abby [book series to read .TXT] 📗

closed for the day because of the wedding, he was surprised to see Manny.

“Manny, what are you doing here?” Gavin asked.

His longtime employee answered, “Oh, just cleaning up a mess.”

Weird. Gavin let it slide and then asked, “Hey, it’s a good thing you’re here, ‘cause we need to talk. Remember yesterday when I asked you if you’d seen me in here the morning after Ash’s bachelor party? Why did you lie?”

Manny was staring creepily at them in the dark, the streetlights from outside the window making ominous shadows along his square face.

“Because my plan didn’t work.”

Gavin’s stomach suddenly tied into a knot. And then the truth started to dawn. A memory came back. The needles. When he and Chas were drunkenly getting prepped for their matching tattoos, Manny had said something like, “Here, boss, use these needles, I just cleaned ‘em.”

“Manny? What did you do?”

Manny scoffed. “You know what I did. You know the clans are not supposed to mix. I did what I had to do.”

“You poisoned us? How?” Gavin was dumbstruck.

Manny laughed. “You’re so naïve, man. I put a hex on the ink so you would lose control and turn on each other. So you would show yourself to her and then the wolf would do to the cat what a wolf is supposed to do.”

Chastity laughed out loud. “That voodoo stuff isn’t real!”

Manny pointed a finger at her. “You’re a shapeshifter, but you think voodoo isn’t real? How do you think we all ended up this way? I bind you, little girl.”

And with that, Chastity was shoved by some invisible force to sit down. She struggled to get up out of the padded client chair, but it was no use.

Gavin felt the knot in his stomach grow to a full-blown urge to kill Manny with his bare hands, but at the same moment, Manny was faster. Gavin’s arms and legs were not responding, but moving as if controlled by magic.

“Gav, buddy, just because you hired a wolf doesn’t mean you hired a friend. If you want to prevent a dark practitioner from coming into your space and using the magics to protect the clan, then you really are not seeing the big picture. It’s too bad the hallucinogens didn’t work on you two, but this is better. It will be so much more of a tragic story. The debutante and her forbidden lover found dead in a murder-suicide pact.”

“You’re demented,” Gavin spat out.

“And you’re almost dead,” Manny said. “You won’t listen to reason, and spells don’t seem to work. So now I do what I have to do. Say your goodbyes, lovebirds.”

Gavin watched helplessly as Manny sauntered over to Chastity, who was struggling to move away from him, fighting against invisible restraints. Manny pulled out a .22 pistol from inside his leather vest. He pressed it against her temple, then traced it down toward the lower back side of her skull. She whimpered and tears fell as she made eye contact with Gavin. Gavin grunted and kicked.

“Don’t worry,” Manny said, his voice flat with the tone of a sociopath. “I’ll make it quick.”

Gavin finally stopped his fighting and snarling and just stared into Chastity’s eyes with as much tenderness as he could muster. He did not want her last memory to be of him acting like a mad, caged animal.

If this was going to be their last moment on earth, he wanted her to feel calm and loved. Gavin could lay Manny flat as a pancake in a fair fight. But this was not a fair fight, and unless the voodoo spell wore off soon, this was the end of everything.

Chastity looked back at him and seemed to understand. The two lovers would their last moment together by making it their own. They both understood that no matter what happened, there was no Manny, there was no pistol, and there was no invisible magic holding them apart. It was just them, and in the end, that’s all that mattered.

And then, something strange crossed over Chas’s face.

It started with a smile.

Gavin was not sure what this meant, but he was sure of one thing: He had hope.

Chapter Fourteen

Chastity

Leave it to Chastity to give away the element of surprise.

She wasn’t expecting to see in the dark a pair of wolfish eyes reflecting the light, lurking in the shadows behind Manny. So when she and the wolf made eye contact, Manny followed her gaze.

Chastity didn’t know which was worse: him tracing lines around her face with the barrel of his handgun like a freaking psychopath, or letting her captor know that the cavalry had arrived.

Her inability to maintain a poker face was going to get this new wolf killed—a wolf she hoped and prayed was one of Gavin’s pack matess.

In the split second before the chaos, Chastity also spotted another presence, her fellow bridesmaid, Pen, her silver gown glinting in the light. No, god, what was she doing here?

The flash of white fur in that room looked like an enormous, flying ghost barreling at Manny, and both wolf and man tumbled to the ground with a thud drowned out by the firing of a gun.

Chastity screamed. Gavin howled as he watched the wolf get hit.

But it wasn’t the wolf who got shot.

The puddle of silver glinting in the shadowy space on the floor was neither wolf nor Manny. It was Pen’s dress.

The gun had skidded across the room.

The white wolf loomed over top of Manny.

And then another shape became visible in the dark, a huge black wolf, and its canine jaw was locked on to Manny’s neck.

Chastity and Gavin both struggled and snarled against their magical restraints.

Manny screamed. Doubtless, he was trying to shift into his full wolf as well, to make it a fair fight. But neither the white nor the black wolf were going to let him go anywhere, even if he did shift.

That’s when Chastity realized that the black wolf was bleeding badly. Liquid spread across the floor beneath it. But as soon as her mind