Outlaw (Wolves of Royal Paynes #4) - Kiki Burrelli Page 0,4

against us. He played dirty, and he was smart. Give him the backing of a hellish organization and he became an actual threat. One that we shouldn't face while distracted.

The front door opened with a long squeak, and cold air hit my face, much cooler than the air outside. It carried a scent of must and rotten food, sour and sweet, but muted…old.

Inside was silent. No low hum of an air conditioner like I'd expected. There wasn't any fuzzy, electronic static as there would have been in a normal dwelling. Fridges, heating and cooling devices charging in outlets—they all made noise. But if the place had power, nothing was using it. I motioned over my shoulder for the others to follow, and we spread out in the large entrance. A chandelier hung overhead, immense, crystal, and, quite fucking frankly, garish.

Sitka must've agreed because he tsked and shook his head.

Tan drop cloths were draped over every piece of furniture, each covered in more dust than could've reasonably accumulated in a year.

The place wasn't in disrepair. The doublewide stairs leading to the second floor looked intact. The rugs were dirty but not worn. There was a musty smell, but no mold in the air. Time wasn't responsible for this. A leaky pipe wasn't either.

"Do your missions usually take you to places so…ghoulish?" Jazz whispered, his face turned up to the tall ceiling where webs hung like leaves.

Sitka danced through the spooky space, his dark eyes falling on the room around him unimpressed. "Not ghoulish. No ghosts. Nothing."

Only Sitka would sound irritated by that.

"We continue with the plan. Clear the building." Knox surged forward, Jazz's hand clamped in his. "Even if he isn't here, he might've left something behind."

Hand holding wasn't encouraged in the field. Neither was the way Faust had his arm wrapped around Storri's waist, nor how the twins stood on either side of Sitka, mirroring his movements so he was never more than a foot away from either of them.

Every room on the first floor was exactly the same as the entrance: dark, taken over by insects, with several layers of dust and plates of moldy food that had dried, shriveled beyond recognition. The stairs to the second floor creaked appropriately. When we ascended to the top, I half-expected the sound of rattling chains and ghostly moaning to greet us.

"I don't get it. Why sell your soul for a mansion you let fall to shit?" Huntley remained in step with Sitka, moving where and how he moved.

"This way, we should go this way." Sitka drifted down the hallway to the right. Jazz and Storri trailed behind him.

The vines grew along the hallway walls like arrows directing which way to walk. My wolf howled, urging me to go first, stay in front. There wasn't room to push through with the other alphas clamoring to also be close to their mates.

A flurry of cockroaches scurried along the carpet, passing a red centipede that wiggled down into a crack in the floor. At the same time, the cockroach swarm parted, half taking to the wall. This far down the hallway, I saw spiders, rather than just their webs. A black widow dangled from a single thread in front of my face, spinning in a slow circle like a lazy acrobat.

"Do you feel that?" Jazz whispered.

"Yeah." Storri wasn't the person I expected to hear from next. His voice was soft and his tone questioning.

The hallway looked like it narrowed, but really, it was the walls closing in. The paint and wallpaper peeled off the walls, more and more of it the farther forward we walked. The webs thickened, heavy with insect carcasses and strings of dust bunnies, growing thicker and thicker, making the hallway look like an ever-narrowing tunnel. At the end, there was a single wooden door smeared with dried blood.

"Demon," Knox hissed.

A demon's blood glazed the door, but that wasn't the only scent present. The spicy, rotten egg scent was cut with something sweet. A scent that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was a wrong scent, one that shouldn't even exist, though I didn't know what it was. Just that I didn't want it in my nose or in this space.

"We need in," Huntley, Jagger, and Sitka all said at one time.

I eyed the door, my chest tightening with something that felt most like fear. What would I be afraid of? Other than the mates being harmed, there wasn't a thing that scared me. I