The first thing Nick did—after brushing his teeth—was clean up. Hiding the body was the worst. He wasn’t squeamish, and he knew how to do it. As a Pack werewolf, you never know when you’ll run into a mutt and have a body to get rid of, so even if Nick had never done it alone, he knew the basics of disposal. He wrapped her in the sheets, carried her into the woods on the property and buried her.

It was a quick job. Too quick, and that was the problem. This "body" was the remains of a person, someone with parents, maybe a husband and kids, and treating her like a bag of trash made him feel like shit. If she’d been in a hospital, her friends and family knew she was gone and would perform the proper services without a body. Still, it wasn’t right.

With the body went the clothes—even if they’d never been on her—and the pillow and sheet. There was no blood on the mattress, but he switched it with one in the house, just to be sure. When Antonio got home next week, he’d tell him what happened and let him decide whether the mattress should be replaced.

Nick cleaned up as best he could—washing surfaces, vacuuming the carpet—but he knew it probably wasn’t necessary. You didn’t need to watch CSI to know that an autopsy would show the woman had been dead before her throat was cut. Even the most haphazard investigation would identify her, and the hospital she’d vanished from.

Whoever put that woman in his bed had no intention of calling the cops and reporting the "crime." They just wanted to make the threat. Blackmail. It could be a human—Nick certainly had the money to make a good target. But if his blackmailer knew him, he’d know that the easiest way to get Nick would indeed be with a woman in his bed—maybe the mistress of some mobster or a sixteen-year-old who had said she was twenty-five. A dead woman meant his blackmailer was exploiting another vulnerability: his dual nature.

It made sense then that his blackmailer was also a werewolf. When he’d sniffed closely, he picked up the intruder’s scent. Whoever dropped off the body wasn’t a werewolf, but that only meant he’d been smart enough to hire some lowlife to do the body dump, then killed him. It had to be a mutt, either trying to get money from the richest family in the Pack or information from the member reputed to have the lowest IQ.

Nick had heard the jabs about his intellect before, and while he told himself it was all relative—of course he’d seem dumb compared to a genius like Clay—this was too much. Did some mutt honestly think he was so stupid he’d find an ice-cold corpse in his bed, stinking of hospital disinfectant and pig’s blood, and believe he’d killed her?

That stung. But he hadn’t been tricked, and that was the important part. Now all he had to do was wait for the blackmailer to make his move . . . and they’d see who was the fool in this game.

 

Nick was late getting to the office, but when his family owned the company, late was relative. He was inside, computer on, jacket off, coffee in hand, when his father called, and that was all that mattered.

The call was supposed to be a business update. Any concerns? Questions? Issues? Truth was, if there were problems, Nick would never hear about them. A fleet of managers handled the day-to-day running of the New York plant and office, and they all had Antonio’s cell phone on speed dial. Most had been with the firm long enough to know that Nick wasn’t the go-to guy for problems. Someone to hook up with for a drink and a laugh? Take along to charm clients over dinner? Sure. Business matters? No.

Over the last few years, Nick had been working to change that, but he’d also been working to accept that he’d never take his father’s place. His goal instead was just to understand the business well enough that those managers would bring problems to him when Antonio was away.

As for the call, Antonio got business out of the way quickly, moving on to the real purpose of the call: catching up. How was Nick doing? What was he up to? A twenty minute chat, all about nothing more important than sharing their day.

Nick’s relationship with his father was complicated. Typical for werewolves. With their slow aging, they started playing with relationship labels early in life, so no one would question why a teenage boy was bringing a father who looked twenty-five to parent-teacher day. With only sixteen years between them, that had been all the more important. Nick had grown up calling Antonio "uncle" in public, dad at home, Antonio sometimes, and almost exclusively as he’d entered adulthood.

While Nick usually shared everything with his father, that morning he didn’t mention the woman in his bed. If he had, Antonio would have been on the first flight home to handle the problem and protect his son. Nick would solve it alone and Antonio would be pleased, and while maybe Nick was a little old to be worried about making his father proud, it was a complicated relationship.

When the call ended, he wondered whether he’d get the blackmail notice here or at home? Would it be a call or a package? Either way, it was bound to be interesting. He smiled. Nothing like a little blackmail to spice up a dull work week.

He connected his flash drive and downloaded the files he’d been working on last night, before being drugged. A few keystrokes and the layout for a new college recruitment package appeared.

His job wasn’t analyzing market statistics to determine the best way to attract bright young minds. Someone had already done that. Nor was he creating the incentive package or determining which programs to target or even writing the brochure copy. Someone else had done all that too. Nick part was designing the layout—presenting the information in a way that was readable yet eye-catching, businesslike yet fun.

Ten years ago if anyone had offered him this job, he’d have been horrified. And insulted. Making recruitment packages look pretty? Revamping the customer website? Designing print ads and sales brochures? Exactly the kind of superficial, artsy job one would expect from a rich industrialist’s playboy son.

The company hadn’t always been so wealthy. It had done well enough, started over two hundred years ago in Italy, moving to New York at the turn of the century. A parts manufacturing business—very dull, very low-key, profitable enough, perfect for a family whose werewolf lineage traced back to the earliest recorded days. Then, when Nick was a boy, his father had seen the industry of the future: computers. His grandfather had scoffed. The company had a small technology division, but Dominic considered it a failure and planned to close it. Nick could still hear their impassioned debates, sometimes degenerating into shouting matches. Eventually his grandfather gave the tech division a year’s grace period, probably to teach Antonio a business lesson.

Today, the technology sector was their biggest division and the entire company was twice as big and as profitable as it had been in his grandfather’s day. That was the example Nick grew up with. That was the success he aspired to. No matter that he lacked his father’s foresight, ingenuity and business acumen. The genes had to be there—it was Nick’s job to find them.

Twenty years of passionate ideas and crushing failures. Whether it was Nick’s first grand scheme or his tenth, Antonio gave him the money, advice and support he needed, and never blinked at the losses. When Nick finally realized he was never going to have that grand revolutionary idea, he’d been furious with his father for humoring him. But he soon realized Antonio thought the projects made Nick happy, and if it made Nick happy, he was behind it one hundred percent.

Three years ago, hunting for his place in the business, Nick surfed the customer site and was appalled. It was perfectly serviceable, but ugly as hell. Definitely not a site to attract clients or young employees. When he’d made a few suggestions, Antonio suggested he take it on. Nick declined. A Sorrentino fussing with graphic design? Humiliating.

But over the next few months, he kept returning to that site, sketching out ideas, and finally agreeing to work with the designers and programmers, if only to guide them in the right direction. Two years later, he wasn’t head of graphic design. Wasn’t even a manager. His office was in the executive suite, but within those walls, he did the same work as kids in cubicles downstairs. And he didn’t care. He’d found his niche.

So at 11:15, he was on the phone with a fifty-five-year-old copywriter, breaking thaenews, as gently as possible, that his upbeat, hip copy for the brochure read like it was written by a fifty-five-year-old trying to sound upbeat and hip. The guy wasn’t getting it. That was fine—how about a chat over drinks this afternoon? In person, in a social setting, Nick could get the guy to relax, stop worrying about impressing the boss’s son, understand his point and make the changes.

He was setting a time when his secretary dropped off a courier envelope. He watched her leave, ass shimmying against her tight short skirt, and he sighed, making a mental note to check the progress of his request for a new secretary—an older secretary, preferably much older. Not that he minded the eye candy, but screwing your secretary was so cliché.

Janine had been with him a month now, and from day one, let him know she was willing, able, even happy, to provide extra services. The more he ignored her overtures, the shorter and tighter the skirts got, and the farther she bent over in it. There was only so much of that he could take. Time to get Janine a new job—and a raise so she didn’t take it personally—and then, when she was someone else’s secretary, he could reward himself for his good behavior.

He was still thinking about Janine as he opened the envelope . . . as he pulled out the page within . . . as he read the first few words . . . Then she evaporated from his brain. He reread the typed note.

Did you get my surprise this morning? 12 noon, Pensacola Coffee.

Below, in handwriting, was the restaurant address, as if the sender got to the FedEx depot, feared Nick might not be able to handle looking up an address himself, and added it. At least Nick wasn’t stupid enough to go through the bother of printing a typed note . . . only to hand-write on it.

He shook his head, flipped to a web browser and did what he’d been avoiding all morning—tracking down the woman in his bed. After fifteen minutes of searching, he found twenty-eight-year-old Anita Wills, dead from an apparent overdose, her body disappearing from the hospital where they’d tried to revive her. It was a thankfully short article, with no mention of grieving parents or children to make Nick feel worse than he already did. Putting a name to the body was bad enough. He wondered whether there was some way of returning her body, when this was over. He’d check with his father and Jeremy, but suspected the answer would be "no." He’d just have to live with it and remind himself he hadn’t killed her.

Nick jotted down the woman’s and hospital’s name as ammunition against his blackmailer, should he try to deny where the body came from. Then he checked his watch, pushed to his feet, and grabbed his coat.