The WOLF Gene (WereGenes Book 4)
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE
WOLF GENE
WEREGENES BOOK 4
AMIRA RAIN
Copyright ©2017 by Amira Rain
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
What if you were a werewolf but you didn't know it yet?
When Tiffany Abbott found herself kidnapped by government agents she had no idea what was going on.
She was thrown into a cell with a handsome stranger named Nick who appeared to know more than he was letting on.
What Tiffany was about to discover would shock her...
She was a carrier of the WOLF gene which meant she was a werewolf. She just hadn't been activated yet.
And her cellmate Nick knew just what to do to bring the wolf out of her, in more ways than one. ;-)
But was this precisely what the government wanted to happen?
*
Also available in the WereGenes collection:
Book 1 - The Dragon Gene
Book 2 – The Bear Gene
Book 3 – The Lion Gene
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
I was twenty-six years old when I was kidnapped in the spring of 1983. Later, I wouldn’t remember much about my actual kidnapping, only my time in captivity. About my kidnapping, specifically, I would only remember being grabbed from the parking lot of the museum near downtown Detroit where I worked. A cloth of some sort was pressed against my face. Struggling against strong arms that held me fast, I smelled chemicals for maybe just a second or two. Then I was out.
When I came to, I was in a room similar to a prison cell, with a narrow cot, a metal toilet with adjacent sink, stone floor, and concrete walls. Disoriented and scared out of my mind, I called out for help, pulling against the locked bars of my cell. Almost immediately, a middle-aged man in a black suit came striding down the hallway, speaking in a flat, uninterested voice when he reached my cell.
“Please calm down, Miss Abbott, if you want an explanation.”
I did “calm down,” but only because I was stunned speechless.
Still seeming almost bored, the man continued. “We’ve abducted you because you possess something called the ‘were-gene.’”
“The…the what? And who’s ‘we?’”
The man may as well have been speaking Greek.
Standing in a relaxed lean against the bars of my cell a couple of feet away from me, he explained that “we” was the United States government. “And as far as what the were-gene is, it’s an extremely rare gene that will cause your offspring to become wolf shifters, which is to say humans who have the ability to shape-shift into wolves. Or, if you were ever to have a child with a vampire, that child would be a vampire-wolf hybrid, and probably the most powerful supernatural creature the world has ever seen. And that, by the way, is why we had to abduct you.
“With the Russians seeming to want to escalate this cold war business, we can’t ever allow a weapon such as a ‘vamp-wolf’ to be released into the world. The Russians could kidnap the child for their own, or ‘buy it off’ for its service when it gets older. And obviously, we Americans can’t ever allow that to happen.”
Stunned, and thinking that I’d clearly been kidnapped by a deeply delusional person, I couldn’t speak right away. “Look. I don’t know who you are, but you’re crazy. I don’t have some kind of a ‘were-gene.’ I’m just a regular human woman, and I know that ‘shifters,’ as you call them, don’t exist. Vampires don’t exist, either. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re clearly…well, you’re clearly crazy.”
I’d thought for a few moments before saying that last part, not wanting to make my strange captor angry, but had decided to say it anyway. He didn’t seem at all phased by the fact that I’d called him crazy, and instead just shrugged before speaking again.
“Think what you want…but shifters and vampires do exist…and you do possess the were-gene. We can show you video evidence of all this sometime of you’d like.”
Still stunned and disoriented, I didn’t respond, and the man abruptly turned on his heel and began walking back up the hall.
“You’ll be brought food and drink in a little while. You won’t be starved or mistreated here.”
I wasn’t mistreated, and over the next few days, after being shown video footage, I came to believe in the existence of shifters and vampires, as absolutely unbelievable as it all was. I still couldn’t believe that I possessed something called the were-gene, though. It just seemed impossible. On the other hand, I had been adopted, and I had no idea whether or not my birth parents had been some sort of supernatural creatures.
After several days of being confined to my tiny prison cell, with the various government agents who visited me refusing to tell me my fate, I was transported to a more comfortable prison cell of sorts. It was more like a comfortably-furnished one-bedroom apartment, located in the basement of some government building in the heart of downtown Detroit, and there I remained.
I didn’t have a choice but to remain. I was given all the material possessions and comforts I could want, but I wasn’t given my freedom. I wasn’t even allowed to call my few close friends to tell them I was okay. Essentially, I was being kept an indefinite prisoner of the government. I had hardly any visitors, no access to a phone, and no trips out to the city, even supervised. Which was probably smart on the part of the government agents holding me captive because I would have definitely tried to make some sort of an escape attempt.
Preventing me from doing this while being held captive, my apartment door was one that locked from the inside and the outside. The key to the outside lock could lock and unlock both, but, by some mechanism I didn’t even fully understand, I couldn’t unlock the outside lock from the inside. This was how Nora, the older woman who did my laundry and brought me fresh food every day or so, had been able to keep me contained.
She kept saying that it was for my own good. As a woman possessing the were-gene, there was great concern about something “happening” to me, like me being kidnapped by the Russians, if I were to be allowed to go out and about. I suspected that t
his was really less about something “happening” to me, and more about me trying to make an escape.
I’d heard a hushed conversation between Nora and one of the government agents in my kitchen, something about everyone being concerned about me “using my powers” to aid me in an attempt to flee. I hadn’t been aware that I had any “powers,” and I certainly didn’t know what they were. I still wasn’t a thousand percent sure that I hadn’t simply been kidnapped by a group of insanely delusional people.
Once I’d been in my “new apartment” for about a week, I seemed to fall into some sort of a depression and stopped really caring that much about being confined. Or at least, I stopped feeling as bothered by it as I’d felt the second day, when a low-level sense of panic I’d had since awakening in the jail cell had peaked in some sort of wild tantrum that had just kind of happened. The panic had soon left me, but while I’d been in the throes of it, I’d heaved my body against the door, unsuccessfully trying to break it down and yelling at the top of my lungs.
Then later, when Nora had come with some groceries, she’d seen me trying to break the tiny, frosted, high windows covered with steel bars with my shoes in some desperate, half-ass attempt to escape the apartment by climbing through one of these miniscule windows, which I wouldn’t even have fit though anyway.
They were so tiny that I probably wouldn’t even have fit a single leg through. I’d done the attempted window-breaking right in front of Nora, right when she was in the apartment, and I hadn’t even cared.
She’d called a government agent guard, some tall, stern-faced, gray-haired man in a black suit, and when he’d warned me to cease all efforts to escape, I’d thrown several pairs of shoes and a book at his face. He’d ducked, making me miss, and he and Nora had then removed all shoes and books from my apartment. Nora had said that anything else I tried to use to escape or attack people with would go, too.
That had been one of the very few things she’d said to me all week. She’d asked me if I finally believed in the existence of supernatural creatures, and I’d said yes; she’d told me that I was still in the city of Detroit; and she’d told me that she had no clue as to my “eventual fate,” so to not even bother asking her. Other than a few other things of no particular importance, that had been about it.
Now in the present, Nora had just left my apartment after coming by to inform me that the “head government honcho” had just returned from a trip and would be by to pay me a visit shortly. Whoever he was, I’d never met him before. Nora hadn’t said anything else, just this, and then had immediately left, leaving me to wonder just exactly what kind of a “visit” I was soon to receive, and just who, exactly, the “head government honcho” was.
If it was just a visit to make introductions and explain to me what the government was ultimately going to do with me, I was definitely ready for that. However, part of me wondered if the government had long since figured that out and the “head government honcho” was code for some sort of assassin who was coming to kill me. I knew this eventually might happen; there was just no way around it. Not unless I could manage to kill the assassin first.
CHAPTER TWO
Anticipating the visit from the “head government honcho,” whoever the hell he was, I couldn’t figure out why in the hell I was in such a frenzy about finding a matching sock. After only finding a single sock in my drawer and putting it on, I’d been in search of another one, hopefully a matching one, when Nora had come to deliver the news of the head honcho’s impending visit.
The moment she’d left, I’d thrown my search into overdrive, rechecking my sock drawer for any additional socks, maybe a stray one in the back, but I’d found it empty, maddeningly. I’d then flown into the bathroom to check the laundry hamper. No luck there, either. The hamper was empty. And that’s when I’d remembered that Nora had taken my laundry in a bag that morning. The single sock on my one foot was likely the only sock in my apartment.
“Oh, dammit.”
With all my shoes having been confiscated earlier that week, I realized that I now had two choices. I could greet my “visitor” and possible assassin barefoot, which I absolutely did not want to do, or I could greet them with one sock on, which I absolutely did not want to do, either. It just seemed a very undignified and bizarre way to greet a man I might be attempting to kill, if he made any attempt to try to kill me, anyway.
I didn’t want to greet him with one sock on for the obvious reason of not wanting to appear like an imbecile, and I didn’t want to greet him barefoot because, in addition to the fact that that just seemed overly casual and strange, I’d always hated my feet. On the smaller side and blocky, with short toes pretty much all the same length, they’d always struck me as borderline disfigured.
People often described them as “cute” or “precious” or “darling,” which, although I understood that people were just trying to be kind, always rankled me. I’d always wanted feet that were longer and elegant, feet that I could show off instead of always trying to keep them hidden and disguised with socks and shoes.
When it came to the man who’d be arriving at my apartment soon, I really wasn’t sure why I even cared. So he'd see my little block feet if I answered the door barefoot. So he might think my feet were weird, on top of the general weirdness of a person receiving visitors barefoot. So what.
This was a man who was possibly coming to kill me, and who I was possibly going to kill first. It shouldn't have mattered to me what the head honcho man thought about me or my feet. But it did, at least a little. I really wasn’t even sure why, except for maybe just a touch of simple human vanity, or maybe a desire for full dignity was the right way to put it.
Lord only knows that living as a captive during the previous week, a captive who’d had her shoes confiscated, and a captive not even allowed to step foot out her own apartment door, I’d felt more than slightly deprived in the dignity department.
I hadn’t yet made up my mind whether to go with bare feet or one sock-foot when I heard a knock on the door.
“Oh, no. Dammit.”
I was in my bedroom, but the knock had been loud enough for me to hear it, even though the apartment door was down a short hallway and across the fairly large living room to the foyer. It had been the knock of a person who was insistent on being let in and wasn’t used to waiting. This almost struck me as funny, since I was pretty sure the head honcho could just let himself right in with a key.
I jerked open my underwear drawer, wondering if I’d maybe accidentally thrown a pair of socks in there the last time I’d put laundry away. However, I found nothing. “Dammit.”
The loud, insistent knock sounded again, and I began striding out of my bedroom, feet padding on the hardwood flooring. “Just give me a minute!”
In the foyer, there was a shoe rack that used to contain some of my shoes before they’d been confiscated, and I had a sliver of hope that maybe at some point, I’d peeled off a pair of socks and set them on the rack. I knew this hope was one in a million, though. For one thing, being that I’d been confined to the apartment as a prisoner, I hadn’t been taking off shoes and socks upon entering and exiting the apartment because, of course, I hadn’t been entering and exiting the apartment.
For another thing, even if I had been, leaving socks hanging around just wasn’t something I’d ever normally do. I’d always been into order and cleanliness, unable to even sit down and relax until everything was in its place.
When I reached the foyer and the shoe rack, I saw that my suspicion had been right. I hadn’t left any socks on the rack, not a single one. Frustrated, I heaved a sigh, and a moment later, the loud, insistent knocking sounded again. It was so loud, in fact, that now that I was near it, I jumped a mile, thoroughly startled.
“Just a minute! Just a damned minute, okay?”
I glanced down at my feet, wondering again if I should go sockless or at least keep on the one I had. I wondered if maybe the latter would make the man that was surely behind the door feel a
bit bad about having made me come to the door so hastily with only one sock. Like he had a conscience and could feel bad about anything, though. I knew that as a government agent holding someone captive, he probably didn’t even have a conscience.
Having a flash of inspiration, I realized that Nora hadn’t confiscated a soft, fuzzy pair of sky blue slippers in my closet. With my mind racing, I tried to imagine which of the three scenarios would afford me the most dignity. First scenario, me answering the door barefoot; the second, me answering with only one sock on; and the third, me answering wearing fuzzy slippers with my jeans and sweatshirt.
I’d just decided to dash back to my bedroom for the blue slippers when another knock sounded, followed by the sound of a deep male voice.
“I’m allowing you to answer your own door as a courtesy to you, but if you don’t open it within three seconds, I’m going to assume you're trying to make some sort of escape attempt, and I’m going to go ahead and let myself in. Your door is already unlocked. You have three seconds.”
Suddenly my block-shaped feet, dignity, and fuzzy slippers were the furthest things from my mind.
With my pulse accelerating, I grabbed the doorknob and yanked the door open. “Oh, you're allowing me to answer my own door as a courtesy to me? Well, how terribly courteous of you. How very….”
I swallowed and fell silent. The burning lava that had flooded my veins at what had been said to me had quickly cooled upon me getting a look at the speaker. He certainly didn’t look like any government agent I’d ever seen in my life.
Tall, dark-haired, impossibly handsome, and extremely well-built, he stood with a hand on the door frame with his expression expectant, as if waiting for me to continue. “‘How very’ what? Please…go right ahead and finish your thought.”