Taze (Rise of the Pride #11) - Theresa Hissong Page 0,2
office?
“If you are done with me, alpha, I’d like to request leave,” Calla said under her breath with a bit of mortification.
Taze watched Calla’s brother as he leaned against the wall after his sister left the room. All of the older Guardians were ignoring what had just gone down in the alpha’s office. He couldn’t hide his mating scent if he tried. It was a natural release of hormone, and he’d been trying to deny the scent over the past two years, but it hadn’t been that strong.
Until today.
Taze exhaled slowly, trying to calm his beast. It took several seconds for his eyes to return to their normal icy blue. His panther was still on edge, wanting to fight for the female, but it knew the alpha would calm him enough.
“So, now that we know where to find the Khat supplier,” Talon began, his eyes landing on Taze. The male saw a bit of worry in the alpha’s gaze, but he ignored it and let the male finish. “I want our night team to watch them. We need to catch them in the act of distributing the drug.”
“If the Amburos are selling Khat, the ones picking it up will be part of a pack,” Tabor announced. “Khat isn’t widely used by humans. We need to cut off the middle man and get this stuff off the streets before it kills another shifter.”
The Guardians agreed with nods. Taze wanted all of the Gadaí out of the area. Wolves were a hard subject for him, and knowing that Calla was exposed to someone connected to them caused a new fear to roll through his body.
“If you are on the night shift, you may be dismissed,” Talon announced. “Come back here an hour before you leave tonight. I will have more information for you. Get some sleep.”
Taze took that as his queue to leave. He didn’t want to be in that office any more than he had to with his mating scent still lingering in the air.
As he left the alpha’s home, he had every intention to stop by Calla’s house, but she was already pulling out of her spot in front of her tiny cabin. She didn’t even look over at him as she hurried down the driveway and off the pride’s land.
“Son of a bitch!” he snarled.
That female was stubborn as hell. She was willingly going into the belly of the beast they were trying to stop. At that point, Taze didn’t care she was the best tracker they had…he wanted her safe.
The moment he walked into his home, he grabbed his laptop and pulled up the camera he’d left at her work. He spent the next few hours looking through the footage. Nothing out of the ordinary captured his eye, but one of the cameras needed to be recharged. That would give him an excuse to snoop around the building if he could get away from Tabor and the other Guardians for an hour later that night.
The sun was bright in the sky, and no matter how much he’d done to black out his bedroom, sleeping wasn’t going to come easily. His panther wasn’t helping matters either. He was focused on Calla and her safety. Taze’s human side knew she could protect herself while she was at the human’s law offices during the day. Plus, no one would be that stupid to cause a scene in a public place.
At least, he hoped they wouldn’t.
It was close to sunset when Taze finally gave up, crawling out of bed to find something to eat. The leftovers were enough to give him a needed boost of energy. It’d been a while since he’d shifted, and with a few hours before he had to be back in Talon’s office, he stripped and headed out to the woods behind the alpha’s home.
He forced his beast to keep from going to Calla’s home, because doing so could be dangerous. The last thing he wanted to do was cause her to be upset, and that always happened when her brother got involved. If the male scented Taze around her home, he knew Malaki would cause trouble.
Things between Malaki and Taze had always been the way they were. Malaki’d had a lot to say when Calla had first showed interest in learning to fight. Hell, he’d tried to forbid her to step foot in the Guardian’s facility, but being the strong woman she was, Calla had done what she wanted to do.