Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 by Vivi Andrews Read Free Book Online

Alpha’s residence. “The Hawk is bringing Dr. Russell in for debriefing.”
    Following the raid the day before, the infamous Hawk—a former military sniper and bird shifter named Adrian Sokolov—had taken Dr. Rachel Russell to a cabin that was on pride lands but well beyond the main compound. Grace trusted Adrian—he was a good guy and he wouldn’t hurt Rachel, no matter how angry he was with her for the months he’d spent in captivity because of her—but she had still planned to make an unscheduled visit later today to make sure Adrian wasn’t doing anything to the good doctor he would later regret. Just another thing on her never-ending to-do list.
    But it looked like that trip wouldn’t be necessary if Adrian was bringing Rachel to the main compound for debriefing. Grace could look the doc over and make sure she didn’t seem frightened or damaged in any way.
    She shoved her chair back and rose. “Are any of the other prisoners talking?” she asked as she rounded the desk.
    Kye somehow managed to make his shrug convey a negative as he fell into step beside her. “How did Dominec take the news that he’s banned from future strikes?”
    Grace mimicked his shrug, hers not nearly as eloquent. “He didn’t attack me, so that’s a win.”
    Kye remained silent—his usual tactic for getting more information—and Grace obligingly filled the silence with the details.
    “He thinks we aren’t being aggressive enough. Not going after them hard enough or fast enough.” The pride pathways weren’t crowded at this hour of the morning, but neither were they abandoned. Grace lowered her voice, pitching it for Kye’s ears only as her long strides ate up the ground. “I’m not convinced he’s wrong,” she admitted. “If he wants to commit suicide by going after the Organization like a one-man wrecking ball, maybe we should point him in the right direction and stand back.”
    Kye grunted softly.
    “I’m not saying we should be reckless,” Grace argued. “I just wonder if we could be doing more.”
    “With what army?” Kye asked softly.
    Grace grimaced. It was entirely too good a point. The pride had swollen in recent weeks to nearly two hundred members—and she could count the number of shifters with actual military experience on one hand. The Hawk had been an army sniper, but his control was unusual. Most shifters would shift during times of intense stress—like, for example, battle —and couldn’t risk joining the human military and exposing the shifter secret.
    Grace herself had always had uncanny control—but she was female and female cat shifters went into heat three times a year, becoming ravening sex monsters with claws for a week at a time. So enlisting was out of the question. She’d trained as an EMT, and taken courses in combat and as a field medic, but the courses had always had to be strategically timed to miss her breeding cycles. Most shifters only knew as much about warfare as they could pick up training at the pride—which left them largely untested.
    The current incursion team consisted of eight shifters—now that they’d lost Dominec, and the Hawk had declared he wouldn’t be going on the next strike so he could guard Dr. Russell. They were training new recruits to guard the perimeter and bulk up the security forces, but they were too green to take against the Organization.
    They might all be predators, but they weren’t an army by any stretch of the imagination.
    “Have you and Mateo picked the next target yet?” she asked as they began the climb up the hill to the Alpha’s mansion.
    “Not yet,” Kye murmured, and she heard the worry for their friend underneath the words.
    “I don’t know what to say to him,” she said. Mateo had always been a sweet kid, quick to laugh, but driven by a single consuming desire to find his sister. Now that the Organization files had revealed he was too late to save her, he hadn’t shattered completely, but there were a thousand brittle