Wolf Untamed (SWAT - Special Wolf Alpha Team #11) - Paige Tyler Page 0,80

to bring up, you know. Especially after sleeping together.”

“I don’t see what’s so complicated about it,” Hale said. “Just tell her she’s your soul mate and that you’re destined to be together. Easy peasy.”

Diego opened his mouth to tell Hale he was an idiot, but Trey cut him off.

“Don’t listen to him. He hasn’t been in a serious relationship since he was sixteen years old, and that ended with him getting his face punched in. Go as fast as your instincts tell you to go, and everything will work out fine.”

Diego wasn’t so sure of that, but before he could say anything, the sounds of heavy footsteps heading down the hallway outside the break room caught his attention. There’d been hundreds of different sounds coming from various parts of the prison the whole time they’d been there, from the clank of cell doors slamming closed to the shouts of angry inmates, but right now, he was only interested in whoever was finally coming to talk to them.

Three uniformed correctional officers walked in. Two of them were men whose name tags read Beasley and Garcia. The other was an older woman with graying hair and a stern expression wearing the rank of sergeant and carrying a black backpack over one shoulder. Her name tag read Clark.

“The shift supervisor said something about you wanting to talk to anybody who knew an ex-con named Dave Cowell,” the sergeant said, eyeing them curiously as she set the backpack on the floor beside her. “Let me guess. You think that piece of crap has done something that’s gonna get his ass shipped back here, don’t you?”

“Sounds like you wouldn’t be surprised if that happened,” Diego said.

Garcia snorted. “Cowell showed up here with an impulse-control problem for the record books and left a cold-blooded manipulative killer. To say we expect him back would be putting it mildly.”

Diego threw a glance at Trey and Hale to see they were almost certainly thinking the same thing he was—that they’d come to the right place.

“We did a little digging in Cowell’s prison file.” Trey leaned forward to rest his forearms on the table. “But other than some minor comments about run-ins with other prisoners and a lot of time in solitary, there wasn’t much there.”

“Official records are like that. Nothing but the facts,” Beasley said in a deep voice. “Of course, they rarely tell the real story about a person like Cowell.”

“What is the real story about him?” Diego prompted. “The one that’s not in the official records.”

“First, you tell us what he did,” Clark shot back. “Must be something good if they’ve sent SWAT down here to talk to us.”

Diego didn’t answer right away. This could get tricky if the wrong thing got back to the wrong people. But if he wanted the prison guards to talk to them about stuff that was off the record, there’d have to be an exchange of trust. That’s the way the system worked.

“We don’t know anything for sure. That’s why we’re here.” He glanced at Trey and Hale, who both nodded. “Officially, we’re not supposed to be messing around in this case, but we think there’s a good chance Dave Cowell is involved in the delirium attacks.”

That announcement should have provoked at least some kind of response, but the three corrections officers barely raised their eyebrows.

“Cowell came in thinking he was a tough guy,” Clark said. “He probably figured beating a man to death would give him some kind of street cred in here. But Coffield is full of guys who make him look like a Boy Scout, and most of them took an instant dislike to his attitude.”

“That’s where all those scuffles you saw in the records came from,” Garcia added. “He’d mouth off to someone and a fight would start. He spent a good part of his first four years or so in solitary or restricted to his cell, usually for his own protection.”

Interesting.

“His first four years?” Trey said, catching the significance of that the same way Diego had. “Did something change?”

“Yeah, it did,” Clark murmured. “In the form of a new cellmate named Will Bremen. And a more unlikely prisoner you’d never meet. The man had been some kind of scientist—a biologist or chemist, I think—before receiving a four-year sentence for possession with intent. Police in Houston found him passed out naked in a hotel room surrounded by a couple kilos of heroin. Swore it was for personal use, but with an amount like that, no one believed