By Hook or by Wolf Page 3

  “Where all have you looked?” I ask him.

  He blushes, and I realize that he’s definitely broken proper police protocol. He’s not supposed to investigate the inside of the building without following the right steps. Something tells me this guy wasn’t exactly wearing gloves or booties over his shoes when he was prancing around before.

  “Uh, over there,” he says, motioning to the ballroom behind me.

  “Anywhere else?” I ask, curious.

  “No. I just went back outside, reported it, and came to see you.”

  “Fair enough. Listen, I want to thank you for your time, officer,” I say. I peer over his shoulder and see my brothers pulling into the parking lot out front. Cody hops out of his car and strides up. Like me, he’s dedicated and focused. Trevor, ever the artist, follows closely behind. He arrives on a motorcycle and hops off before jolting up the front steps. “My brothers and I will have a look and let you know if we find anything out of place.”

  After a few gentle and careful words, the officer seems to understand that we don’t really want to talk anymore. He takes the hint, gives us each a copy of his card, and turns to leave.

  “Wait!” I call out suddenly. He turns, confused. “Did you turn off the security system when you came in today?” I ask. The officer blushes and nods.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he says. “I forgot to reset the alarm when I came to see you.”

  “How did you get the code to turn it off?” I ask. The man seems surprised at the question, but I feel like it’s a legitimate one. Our security system is a pretty good one.

  “The security company shut it off remotely for me,” he says. Then he turns once more and heads to his car. He climbs in, takes a breath, and then leaves. Apparently, investigating gallery break-ins isn’t this guy’s idea of a good time. That makes two of us. It’s a bit curious that there was only one police officer today, but at the end of the day, it’s a closed building. Nobody comes to the gallery anymore. Nobody’s been here in years. It’s not exactly top priority for the police to spend a lot of time here. Besides, I doubt they have any idea how much the remaining art inside is actually worth. If they knew, the place would be crawling with cops. My mother made quite the show of selling off many of the items after Dad passed away. Most people probably assume the building is completely empty and devoid of anything valuable. If they didn’t, it would have been robbed a long time ago. Once the officer is out of sight, Trevor turns to me.

  “What happened?” He asks. His eyes narrow and he, too, sniffs the air. As wolf shifters, scent is one of our biggest assets. We use it constantly and in ways we probably shouldn’t. Smell lets us determine where someone is located, where they came from, what they’re feeling, and what their emotional state is like. Just last week I had a client who was in the building next to mine. I could smell him from my office because I knew his scent.

  More importantly, I could scent how agitated he was.

  When I arrived for our meeting, I could tell that he’d recently come from the bakery and was feeling pissed off. That enabled me to figure out how to speak to him a way that would help him calm down and relax. In the end, we managed to have a wonderful talk and he shared more of his feelings with me than he’s probably even shared with his therapist. Using my scenting abilities in this way, I was able to connect with this client in a manner that was mutually beneficial.

  Now, I’m using my scenting abilities to figure out what the hell happened here.

  “A police officer came to my office,” I tell my brothers. “They had a report of a break-in.”

  “That’s really weird,” Trevor points out. “This place has been closed for, what? Three years now?”

  “Two years and ten months,” I say.

  Since the day our father died.

  None of us had planned to close the gallery when he passed away. It had just sort of worked out that way. The art gallery had been his passion project. It had been something he loved more than anything else in the world. Then he died and none of us knew what to do with the gallery. None of us was in a place where we could emotionally handle running the gallery. Isn’t that just the littlest bit sad? If my dad could see the gallery now, he’d be devastated, but I can’t do much about that.

  “So why now?” Cody asks. He shakes his head, looking around. “Why rob us now? And it doesn’t look like they took anything. Is there even anything missing?”

  “Time to find out,” I say. We walk toward the ballroom and follow the scent of vanilla through the room. We can tell exactly where our mystery-thief stopped, what she looked at, and what made her pause.

  “Seems like she likes art,” Trevor murmurs. “She stopped enough.”

  Her scent really is all over the room. It makes it very difficult to determine exactly where she moved and what she was looking for.

  “She must have been searching for something,” I say. “If she was just an ordinary thief, she could have taken any of this stuff. It would have fetched a pretty price.”

  “And there are a lot of small things,” Cody adds. “So even without an accomplice, she could have gotten out of the room easily.”

  “Are we sure it’s a woman?” Trevor says, looking around. “You know, it could have been a man.”

  Cody and I both look at our brother like he’s an idiot. We’re triplets, but there’s still a definitely order of bossiness that falls into our family. Me? I’m your typical, run-of-the-mill, oldest child. I’m only two minutes older than Cody, but I’m a full twenty minutes older than Trevor. That kid did not want to be born.

  “It smells like a woman,” I say.

  I can’t quite pinpoint how I can tell. It’s just that women have a very distinct scent. They’re feminine, yeah, but it’s more than that. They’re soft. Sweet. Their smell is a little bit gentler than their male counterparts.

  “Plus,” Cody squats down and considers the footprints in the dust. “Look at these. They’re tiny. Narrow. No man has feet that small.”

  He’s right, but it didn’t doesn’t explain what our little thief was after.

  “Come on,” I say to my brothers. We follow her footsteps up the ballroom stairs. Along with the cop’s footprints, there are two distinct sets of feminine prints: one coming, one going. If I had to guess, we’ll find the point of entry for our little thief if we follow them. She entered through the back of the building somewhere before moving to the front. What she did in the lobby, though, I have no idea. We’ll start from the beginning.

  We locate the room where she entered. The window still flutters open.

  “The police officer didn’t close it,” Cody says.

  “He was here, though,” Trevor points at the man’s footprints. “That much is for certain.”

  “He got his scent everywhere,” I say. Even if we hopped out of the window and tried to figure out where the little thief went, something tells me that we would have a really hard time tracking her.

  Damn.

  “So she came in through the window,” Trevor says, scratching his chin. “Then what?”

  Perplexed, we once again walk through the halls of the gallery we once spent so much time in. We explore the places our little thief may have wandered. We go back through the ballroom and then to the lobby once more, but there’s nothing missing.

  She didn’t take anything.

  “Wait a moment,” Cody says. His eyes narrow. “We’ve been walking through here for what? Half an hour? I get that the alarms are shut off, but they weren’t last night. How could someone make it through all of this without the heartrate detectors going off?”

  We have a unique set of alarms that go off when someone’s heartrate is too fast. We only installed it after my father passed away and we closed the gallery down. The alarms are designed to ensure that nothing living passes through the gallery. It’s not an exact science as far as alarm systems go. Sometimes a wind or breeze will set off the motion detectors which is why we adjusted our alarms to detect heartrates.

/>   Only, I can tell that my heartrate is through the fucking roof.

  I’m pissed I came here.

  I’m not a fan of missing work and I’m not a fan of raising the dead. Instead of immersing myself in business possibilities, I’m stuck in a gallery full of lost memories. My father loved this place and I loved spending time with him here.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I never turn them off. The place was definitely secured last night.”

  Cody works with me in real estate, but Trevor left after dad died. He works at an elementary school. He says that kids are full of life in ways adults aren’t. I think part of him misses the relationship we had with our dad, too. None of us have mates or kids, so being a teacher lets him spend time around families who are happy and around kids who need him.

  “Then why didn’t they go off?”

  With a sigh, I realize that if the alarms are not working, they might actually be malfunctioning. Getting them back up and running won’t be easy. I sell houses and businesses. I’m not a tech expert. Cody is pretty good, but I realize that we’re going to have to call in a professional who can work on our alarm system. Great.

  “Guess I’ll make some calls,” I say, pulling out my phone, but then something catches my eye: something I didn’t notice before. “Did you walk over there?” I motion to the side door: the one that leads to the basement.

  “Uh, negative,” Cody says, eyeing the door. The dust that coats the gallery is really out of control. Note to self: hire a cleaning team. This is totally unacceptable, even for an abandoned building. There’s a space where the dust is pushed back, as though the door has been opened recently.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say, marching over. I yank the unlocked door open and the scent of vanilla wafts over me. “Boys, I know what she was after.” Then I go downstairs.

  Chapter Three

  Cody

  Lee doesn’t always have the best self-control. His temper tends to be a little wild and run a little hot, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about this. No matter what we’re facing, one thing is for certain: it’s a female thief that we’re dealing with. When Lee noticed the door to the basement had been opened, we all knew exactly what the woman had been after.

  The jewels.

  We keep them locked in the basement because it’s the safest place for them. A series of heartrate detection monitors keep both thieves and stray animals out of this area.

  Not anymore, apparently.

  As we noticed upstairs, the alarms down here have all been turned off. I shouldn’t have been able to make it halfway through the hall without receiving an alert on my phone about an intruder.

  I glance at it, anyway.

  No alert from last night.

  As the police officer said, the alarm system was shut down after he received his report. I can see now that it’s been shut off for about two hours. That’s not a terribly long time. As far as I can tell, though, the system was working fine until the cop’s phone call.

  So how did someone make it all the way down here?

  Whether we’re dealing with a human or a shifter thief, I don’t know. Either way, unless someone purposely knew about the alarms and was able to somehow control their stress and tension to the point of having a resting heartrate while robbing an art gallery, they couldn’t have gotten down here without somehow disabling the alarms.

  I just don’t know how they did it.

  It’s going to bother me for days, I realize. It’s going to be like a little itch in the back of my throat that I just can’t seem to scratch, no matter how hard I try. It’s a pity, really, because I was really hoping to relax a little bit this week. Now I know that no matter what I do, I’m going to be worried about the gallery and thinking about the little thief who did this.

  There are no lights down here, but it doesn’t matter. We’re wolf shifters, for dragon’s sake. We’re all able to see perfectly in the dark and what we see is not what we were expecting. We make our way down the twists and turns of the hallway. By the time we reach the bottom, my own heartrate is pounding out of control.

  How could this thief have come down here?

  How could she have found the room?

  Even if she located it, though, there’s no way she could get inside the jewel room. The lock was designed by none other than my father and he didn’t make mistakes. He never made mistakes. He ran this gallery for twenty years and he never had a single problem with it being robbed or with thieves breaking in.

  Apparently, that luck has run out.

  We turn the corner and there’s a collective gasp as we see the door to the jewel room is open.

  “Fuck,” Lee says. He darts forward and into the room. Trevor is close behind him and I bring up the rear. I don’t run, though. There’s no point in that. If this woman cleared out the family jewels, there’s no stopping her. Someone so intelligent that she could break into the room, take our shit, and escape without detection is obviously a genius.

  I enter the room and sure enough, it’s her.

  There’s so much of her filling the room that I can’t quite handle it.

  My inner-wolf is going nuts. He’s just begging to come out and play, but I think my wolf has the wrong idea about this woman. He thinks she could be our mate. What the actual hell?

  I don’t want a mate.

  I don’t need one.

  He thinks that she’s someone we would like, though, and I don’t know that he’s entirely wrong about that. Would it really be so bad to date someone who was able to pull off a heist at a place like this? Someone brave, clever, and smart? Someone who smells incredible? Sounds exactly like the woman I’ve been waiting for.

  But I’m not going to date a thief.

  I’m certainly not going to take one as my mate.

  “What did she get?” I ask, looking around. The diamonds that were gifted to my father by the dragon clan of Fablestone are still in place. The ruby necklace my mom got at Dragon Isle is still there. Hell, even the Gem of Malice is still in place. It’s my parents’ prize possession. They claim they got it from another world, another planet.

  I’ve never bothered to question them about it because it’s always seemed so impossible, but my mother swears up and down it’s the most important thing she has.

  “Nothing,” Lee says, obviously confused. “She got nothing. It’s all here.” He scratches his neck as he looks around, visibly confused. He looks the way I feel. None of this is making any sort of sense at all and it’s driving me crazy.

  “So, you’re telling me that we’re dealing with a thief who broke into our building, disarmed our tech, got through the locks on the door to the jewel room, and took...nothing?”

  “Not exactly,” Trevor says. He points to the wall where our family portraits are hanging.

  Or were.

  Now my mother and father’s pictures are still there, but there are three empty spaces on the wall where our own pictures used to be.

  “What the hell?” Lee says, scratching his head now. So apparently, anxiety goes right to my brother’s skin. Watching him scratching himself makes me want to do the same thing, but I refuse. I’m going to stay totally in control until we sort this whole thing out.

  Lee’s looking at the wall like there’s something none of us are quite getting and I know that he’s right. Why would someone break in only to steal our pictures? Footprints in the dust show that our little thief was definitely the one who took them. She wandered all over this place.

  But why the pictures?

  Why nothing else?

  If I was going to rob an art gallery, especially an abandoned one, I would take my time choosing only the best and most wonderful items. I would choose one of the paintings of dragons flying over Dragon Isle. The artist, Olivia, was a dragon shifter herself. Then I’d choose diamonds that had been intricately placed in pieces of jewelry by shifters in Beeswax, Colorado. The women who designed the delicate diamond designs were absolutely unbeatable. There was nothing quite as
lovely or wonderful as artwork designed by shifters.

  Not that everything in our gallery was created by shifters.

  Some of our artwork was locally designed and detailed. Both of my parents loved the idea of helping local artists get a leg up in the world. My father had reached out to colleges in the area and managed to get art students from all walks of life to dedicate sketches, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Even now that Pops has passed away, Mom is still heavily involved in the local art community.

  So why didn’t the thief take any of that?

  Why did she take our pictures?

  Not just any pictures, but pictures of me and my brothers?

  Then I remember something my mother told me long ago, something I’d once forgotten. I think, for just a moment, that I might feel sick. It can’t be. No, I silently shake my head. I must be wrong.

  Only, I know that I’m not.

  Not about this.

  Not this time.

  “Gentlemen,” I said quietly. “Tell me where your Tokens are.”

  My brothers are silent, but I can practically hear their hearts dropping into their guts as they realize suddenly what we have lost: exactly what we have lost.

  We stare at the empty spaces on the wall and I wonder how she could have known.

  When a wolf pup in our pack is born, each one is given a small token. Usually, this is a sapphire. Sometimes it’s a diamond or an emerald, but most of the time, a sapphire is what’s given. This is called the pup’s Token. Later, when the shifter grows up and is old enough to be mated, the jewels are bonded together in a new piece of jewelry: two jewels representing the two families that have been joined.

  My mother always valued our Tokens more than my brothers and I. She’s of the belief that when we find the right woman to love, our Tokens will feel more important. She also thinks that finding the right woman in our wolf pack is not an impossible task, while my brothers and I feel that it definitely, absolutely is.