That’s when I hear the sirens. “Shit.” How is the police force so goddamn fast in this town?
I start running back toward the exit, but I hear tires screeching, and I know I’m too late. My best bet is to abandon this and get the fuck out of here. I drop the grinder and race to the door. My hangover is forgotten as adrenaline and shifter instincts flood my system. I’m running full out as I start to cross the threshold...only to slam face-first into a cop.
I go sprawling back, my ass hitting the floor so violently that my teeth bite into my tongue hard enough to draw blood. The cop hauls me up, immediately pulling me out of the shop and shoving me against the outside of the building to frisk me.
“I didn’t take anything,” I tell him, holding perfectly still in case he gets trigger happy.
He ignores me as he makes sure I have nothing on me, only finding the plastic bag in my jacket pocket. He looks inside, finding only the sad remnants of a bag of peanuts, some dollar store makeup, and a protein bar—the bane of my existence.
“Slowly turn around with your hands on your head,” he instructs.
I do as he says and as soon as I’m facing him, his eyes flick down to my collar. “Shit. You a shifter?”
I balk at him, my mouth opening and closing a few times before I can answer. Maybe I’m more hungover than I thought, because this guy smells human. “Uhh…”
At my hesitation, the orange-haired thirty-something cop waves me off. “My grandmother was one. She married a human though. Had human kids. Their kids had human kids.”
“Okay,” I say, surprised. Shifters don’t often mate with humans.
“Who the hell collared you?”
I don’t answer him. I don’t care what his story is, I’m wary as hell and I don’t trust this guy one bit.
“You in Pack Rockhead?”
“Fuck no,” I answer before I can stop myself.
He nods as if he expected that answer. “Makes sense. Collar? That points to you being an owned rogue.”
This guy sure does know a lot about shifters for not even being one. I want to ask him how he knows about Rockhead and collared shifters, but his police radio goes off at the same time that I pick up the trace of sirens in the distance.
“Dammit. Holder is on his way. We gotta go.”
Grabbing me by the arm, he starts leading me toward his police car that’s parked behind the building, but I wrench out of my grip. “I’m not going.”
“I’m not gonna take you to jail, girl,” he says, exasperated.
“Not jail, but maybe Pack Rockhead?” I challenge, my anger rising. “They have you on payroll or something?”
He scowls at me, but he doesn’t deny it. Instead, he reaches for me again, but I instinctively cock my arm back and punch him right in the face.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he curses, grabbing his eye. I snatch my plastic bag that he has in his other hand, but he catches me off guard by hunching over and tackling me like a football player.
His shoulder hits my stomach, eliciting an oomph, and I nearly vomit right then and there. But instead of taking me to the ground, he straightens up with my top half draped over his shoulder and hauls me to the back of his cop car, tossing me in and slamming the door behind me before my ass even hits the seat.
I let out an enraged scream as I pound on the window, but he ignores me as he stalks around to the other side of the car and gets into the driver’s seat. He throws it in gear and takes off, heading in the opposite direction of the nearing sirens.
Dread collects in my stomach. “Let me out! I didn’t fucking steal anything.”
“Yeah, but you would’ve if I hadn’t shown up so quick, right?”
My mouth pinches closed, and I glare at him in the mirror.
“That’s what I thought,” he says with a shake of his head. “Besides, the other officer that picked up the call? Name’s Holder. He’d take you to Rockhead in a second, and trust me, you don’t want to go there with them.”
He’s right about that, but I don’t say so. I just glare out the window as he flies down the street, watching as the scenery changes as he takes all sorts of turns.
“You wanna tell me what you were doing in that hardware store?” he asks after a while.