He laughed mercilessly. “She was human, you know. And she’d overheard my plans as I was talking to one of my men over the phone. She was suspicious of me. Knew something was different about me after I was turned. So we used her as one of the hostages. She was worth a hell of a lot more than a ransom to me.

“When she died, I’d inherit everything that she was to get. And you know how it is. When a human learns of our existence, they either have to be turned or die. It’s our way. No way in hell was I making her one of us. So it was the perfect solution. Kill her off in a hostage-taking situation, and I would get the inheritance.”

Meara stared at him in disbelief, unable to fathom how someone could hate a sibling that much. “So you planned the whole affair? Had the women taken as hostages so you could get the money? But you didn’t intend their release?”

“That’s about the gist of it.”

She couldn’t imagine anyone so unfeeling that he would kill for a handful of money. “What did your sister ever do to you?”

Cyn narrowed his eyes at her. “My parents didn’t like me, didn’t like what I was doing, and when they died, they left every bit of their million-dollar estate to my sister. Hell, I received a dollar to show they hadn’t forgotten me in the will. A frigging dollar!”

Meara took a deep breath, wondering how his parents had died and what he had done to deserve being cut from the will. “Why did you send the message to Hunter to change the location of the beach landing?”

“Hell, I didn’t do that. I certainly didn’t have his email address. One of your own pack members did that. Chris Tarleton was the defector.”

She still had a tough time believing Chris could be behind all this. Chris had always been quiet and had absolutely no sense of humor, but he did a good job as one of Hunter’s sub-leaders. “Why had he been involved in all of this?”

“Hell, Meara, think about it. Hunter hasn’t been around that much over the years, off fighting one cause or another. Chris is tired of playing second fiddle, so to speak. He kept thinking Hunter would get killed on a mission, and that would solve that, but the Navy SEAL just wouldn’t die. And then when the fire destroyed your home in California, Chris had the perfect opportunity to convince a bunch of the pack to mutiny and—”

“Chris did that? He split the pack up completely! Damn him.” Even now the pack was split up, with some living in southern California without any plans to return.

“Yeah, well, he hadn’t exactly meant for that to happen. Those who went to southern California weren’t supposed to. Chris would have succeeded with the group he took off with if they hadn’t wound up in a red wolf’s territory in Portland. Leidolf, I think the pack leader’s name was, wasn’t about to put up with your pack’s encroachment. Chris was forced to return to the coast with the rest of the pack. Then Hunter had the trouble with that gray pack, and Chris thought that would be the end of him.”

“But Hunter survived.”

“Yeah. He always managed to survive. And he took up with that woman photographer. It looked as though he was giving up his contract work and staying here with her for good. No more missions. No more leaving the pack under Chris’s control. And that wouldn’t do. So Chris contacted me. Said he’d pay me again to gather a group of men and get rid of Hunter and his team for good.”

“So this wasn’t about me.”

“Hell, yeah, it’s about you.”

About revenge for her not wishing to see him further, so he thought. “The two of you concocted the hostage crisis?” she asked.

“Me and my own team and Chris. We wanted the money. Chris wanted your pack. You were up for grabs.”

Right. As if she’d go along with it.

“What about the Knight of Swords?”

“The what?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. Although she suspected that Chris was the Knight of Swords, she wanted to know if Cyn knew for certain. “Someone left the tarot card as a calling card of sorts with Allan when he was shot.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Feeling chilled with the cool ocean breeze whipping across her skin, she asked, “Didn’t you have Allan shot?”

“No, Chris did.”

Finn would kill Chris if Hunter didn’t do the job. She felt nauseated all over again. How could they have missed the signs that one of their own pack members had been a traitor? “So you hadn’t intended for Hunter and his team to die on the beach?”

“Hell, yeah, we had. If I’d been with the team, I would have been the only survivor. Somehow I don’t see Hunter as the kind of guy who would have allowed me to take the ransom money after making sure my sister was dead. Some of the women would have made it out with me, so I would have gotten all the honors. I would have been a team leader instead of just a team member, and the ransom would have been paid to the bad guys. Which would have been me and my men.

“Only it didn’t work out as planned. And we didn’t get any of the ransom money. My sister had changed her will so that charity would get every dime of her inheritance, should she die. I hadn’t planned on that. Not only that, but she left a message that if she died an accidental death, the investigating officer should check me out because she suspected I had killed our parents.”

“Had you?”

He smiled. “In any event, she was killed in a terrorist activity, and no one suspected me. Although you can’t imagine how angry I was that she had changed her will and I didn’t receive anything from it.”

He waved his weapon at the trees. “During the operation, Finn returned fire and hit me in the leg, although he didn’t know it, and then rescued the women who were still alive. It took me a while to recuperate, devise the forest-fire plan, and then come after you and Hunter.”

“And Chris?”

He shrugged. “What can I say? He couldn’t fight Hunter fair and square as a wolf, but he has been running the pack. Then Hunter mated, planning to settle down and really run the pack full time. The last straw was when Hunter accidentally turned that reporter, decided to go on a honeymoon with his mate, and stuck Chris with baby-sitting Rourke. You don’t even want to know how mad Chris was about that.”

“Hunter would have continued to watch over Rourke. He really likes the guy. He wouldn’t have given the job to anyone else in the pack except someone he really respected.”

Cyn shook his head. “Maybe so, but Chris didn’t see it that way.”

“Who set the fire?”

Cyn ground his teeth and looked in the direction of the wolves growling. He turned back to Meara and said, “I meant to get Hunter and his whole blasted pack that time. I came to get you, and then some wolf was skulking around after a woman who was taking pictures of the fire—the woman who became Hunter’s mate. When the wolf saw me in the vicinity, he chased me off. So I missed my opportunity.”

“But Chris couldn’t have wanted you to set the fire that destroyed all of the pack members’ homes.”

“No, he didn’t know I’d set it. But he did take advantage of the calamity and convinced Hunter’s pack to mutiny.”

Bastard. “So this all started with coveting money, wanting your sister to die because she’d learned your plans and gotten all of your parents’ inheritance, and wanting to get even with Hunter for not taking you on his team. And revenge against me because you thought I chose not to see you any longer.”

“That about wraps it up.”

“So now what?”

His eyes took on a maniacal gleam. “You come with me, or you die here.”

Meara didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t strip and shift and have a chance against an armed man. She couldn’t run away. She couldn’t fight him for the gun and wrest it away from him. Not when he was a SEAL, trained for any kind of confrontation.

“Come on, Meara, you really don’t have a choice here.”

She knew that, damn it. All but one. She’d never believed she’d need someone as much as she needed Finn now. Nor that she’d do what she was about to do. Not when she was a wolf. The pack leader’s sister. A woman who had rescued others when they had needed her help. But it was her only choice. And if she could, she’d kill Cyn herself for making her do this.

She filled her lungs with air and screamed.

***

Finn had tried to poke his nose through the wolf door to Hunter’s house, but it was locked. Damn it. He could hear the growling inside, two wolves fighting, and he feared for Rourke’s life. But when Hunter and his mate had gone on their honeymoon, he must have locked the wolf door. And Finn couldn’t get in.

Finn suspected that Chris hadn’t locked the door after he most likely picked the lock. So wasting more time, Finn shifted into his human form and grabbed the door handle, twisted, and found the door locked.

Without a lockpick, and seeing nothing on the patio that wasn’t bolted down, Finn was fresh out of luck.

“Hold on, Rourke,” he muttered under his breath, naked as the day he was born and headed down the path to the beach to locate a good-sized rock he could use to break a window.

His heart racing with concern, he was at the bottom of the steep incline before he found a rock he thought might do.

Rock in hand, he headed back up the steep path. Halfway up it, he heard a woman’s blood-curdling scream. He froze. His first thought was that it couldn’t be Meara. Never in a million years would she scream about anything. But there was no one else out here. He shifted into his wolf form, silently apologized to Rourke and prayed he’d last until Finn could return, and dashed back to where he’d left Meara all alone.

***

Meara’s heart was still beating a million miles a minute as she screamed and ran into the woods, shoving aside branches, climbing over a fallen tree trunk, and traversing limbs torn from trees in a recent storm. Okay, so she didn’t think she could run away from an armed nutcase, but she did think that Cyn might just chase after her and not shoot her.