Howl

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

When Lukas arrived back at Sophia’s house Monday night, he immediately went to find Emma. He found her asleep in one of the bedrooms and when he was satisfied she wouldn’t wake anytime soon, he took a quick shower. Once clean, he returned to make sure Emma still slept, and then sat down outside the door. He wanted to stay in the room with her but he wasn’t sure how well she’d take that if she woke up and found him in the room.

Jason found him there and tried talking to him and convincing him to find an empty bedroom or at least a couch to sleep on, but Lukas wasn’t interested in listening to him or anyone else. He needed to make sure his mate was all right before he could deal with anything else.

At some point, Lukas fell asleep on the floor. He woke up with someone shaking him and whispering his name. He instantly felt alert but managed to restrain himself from grabbing the person crouched down over him. He usually had a bad reaction when someone woke him up, but his instincts must have let him know it was his mate.

“Lukas? Why are you sleeping here?”

“Wanted to make sure you were all right,” he grumbled, still a bit groggy.

“I’m hungry.” She hadn’t had anything to eat and barely had anything to drink while being held captive. When she arrived at the house, she had some water, but was too tired to think about eating. When she woke up, however, she was starving.

“Come on,” he said as he stood up. He offered a hand out to help her up, which, to his surprise, she took. “I’ll take you to the kitchen. They should have some food down there.”

He walked with her downstairs and had her sit down while he went through the contents of the kitchen, and asking her what sounded good. He ended up making her a sandwich and an omelette and pouring her several glasses of orange juice.

“I suppose I owe you an explanation,” Lukas said. He sat down next to her once he had finished preparing her meal. He’d already gone over how to explain things to her several times in his head, but it simply didn’t seem right with her in front of him. He desperately wanted to tell her the truth about everything, about what he was, but he knew it was a bad time to spring that on her. As he thought about it, he realized he didn’t have his contacts in. She could see the natural color of his eyes. It was dark, and he only hoped that a combination of that as well as her hopefully being tired and distracted kept her from noticing.

“The people that had you,” he started, trying to come up with a better way to explain things than what he originally had planned. “They’re a group of crazy fanatics that I’ve been after for the past seven years.”

“No shit they were crazy. Going on about werewolves and shit.”

“I know. They kill anyone they suspect of being a werewolf, but they’re very careful and hard to find. You can get rid of one of them, but there’s always more. So my job is to get entire groups of them. When a larger group of their people get caught, they get more paranoid, slip up, make mistakes. Makes it even easier to find them. Unfortunately, they eventually disappear completely and I’ve got to track them down all over again.”

“Holy shit,” Emma said as she finished off her sandwich. “This is some big, secret thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “I really shouldn’t be telling anyone anything about this, but you got mixed up in it. You deserve to know.”

“Is this why you didn’t want to tell me anything about your job?”

“There wasn’t much I could really say. But in a sense, “security consultant” sorta describes it. Just not very well.”