Addie (Pack of Misfits #1) - Raven Kennedy Page 0,3

really riles us up. We’re a touchy-feely lot, and sometimes, our animals can get attached.

“I’m Penn. Coyote shifter,” he says, confirming my guess about him being a pred. “It’s nice to meet you Aderyn Locke,” he says like a damn gentleman. I narrow my eyes at him to show him that I don’t appreciate it. He just smiles at me like he finds me adorable, which really raises my hackles. “I promise I’m not usually this bad at first impressions,” he tells me.

“How do you know?” I challenge.

He gives me a look. “I’d know,” he says assuredly.

“Maybe you give bad first impressions all the time, but you just don’t know it because the other person always lets you down easy.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Is that what you’re doing, Aderyn? Letting me down easy?”

“If I was letting you down hard, you’d know,” I say with excessive sweetness. “Have a good day.” Then I turn to look at the next person waiting in line. “Next!”

He stays at my teller window and opens his mouth to argue, but when the next customer walks up behind him, he has no choice but to turn and leave with a grumble under his breath. I just bested a pred, and it feels pretty damn good. My lips tilt up in triumph…only to immediately fall back down when a gun is shoved into my face.

2

Addie

There’s nothing like the view of a gun barrel in the middle of a workday. And to think, twenty minutes ago, I was yawning and thinking about taking a nap after work. Now that’s out the window.

“Get your fucking hands up where I can see them!”

My wide eyes shoot across the bank to find that the shouted command is coming from a second gunman. Great.

I lift my nose in the air a bit to pick up their scent. Not shifters. Not any kind of Canes, in fact. They’re both humans, and by the look of the one shouting at everyone to lay on the ground, they both have a superiority complex. You know the type—arms out, swinging like a gorilla, chin tilted up so that he can look down at everyone. He probably drives a lifted truck with tires big enough to haul around his huge sense of entitlement with him everywhere he goes. And when a dude has a big sense of entitlement, it usually means he has a very small...well, penis. There’s no point in beating around the pube bush about it.

My eyes flick to Penn Weiss, Mr. Hotshot Coyote. He’s currently on the ground near the door with the rest of the customers, but I can see his body is tense and ready for action.

As if he can feel my eyes on him, he suddenly glances over, his gaze locking with mine. When he sees that I have a gun currently pointed at my face, his lips curl back in a snarl. I try to give him a look to communicate with him not to do anything crazy, because that might make the gunmen panic and get the innocent humans shot.

“Hey, bitch,” Gunman Number One says, waving the gun back and forth in front of my chest to regain my attention. Apparently, he doesn’t like to be ignored.

“How can I help you?” I ask politely. Because I’m a professional bank teller even when I’m being robbed.

The gunmen are both wearing ski masks—how unoriginal—so I can’t really see the face of the one in front of me except for his blue eyes. Make that bloodshot blue eyes, and his pupils are huge. This guy is higher than the waistband on mom jeans. Which means he’ll be even more likely to react to things without thinking them through first.

“Open your fucking drawer,” he orders, feeling pretty high and mighty behind his gun and mask.

I lean forward and try to get a sniff of him, but really, all I can pick up is some god-awful cologne. I think I wrinkle my nose on accident, so to cover up the reaction, I quickly grab my keys and sort through them for the right one. It takes me embarrassingly long, considering I’ve worked here for four months. But seriously, there are a shit ton of keys.

“Here it is,” I chirp. I fit the key into the lock and...nope. Definitely not the right key. “Shoot,” I say. Freezing, I look back up at the gunman. “Not shoot shoot, like the gun,” I tell him quickly. “I meant shoot like shit. Bad word choice on