Winston (BBW Bear Shifter Wedding Romance) (Grizzly Groomsmen Book 3) by Becca Fanning Read Free Book Online Page B

lights of the cargo bay. His cheekbones were high and sharp, his jaw clean-shaven. His eyes were, of course, gold, but they seemed to be lighter than his crew mates’. She could see nothing marring his pale skin, giving him an illusion of youth only disrupted by the smirk on his full lips. He seemed to Delphine for a drug-addled second to be made of gold and marble. Then he ruined it by talking.

    “No, of course it isn’t the smugglers,” he said, his smile morphing into something that assumed victory. “They can find other work. Not as good, of course, but still better than chasing down someone with our collective reputation. The suppliers, on the other hand… we switched to a source our friend recommended when we took over, which means someone suddenly came into the frankly ridiculous money that comes with supplying Lytos with its favorite drug. That means someone suddenly lost all that money, and I’m thinking that just might be enough to kill for. Glare at me silently if I’m right.”

    He didn’t need the confirmation; the look in his eyes was full of certain. Delphine drew up all the dignity she could muster tied to a chair and stared at him coolly.  

    “I see it wasn’t a fluke that you scored so highly in your courses, Mr. Monroe,” she said. “Your deductive reasoning skills are impressive.”

    The change that came over his was so small that if the person talking to him wasn’t both observant and looking for it they wouldn’t have noticed. Delphine was both of these things. His eyes shuttered, and though neither his facial expression nor his posture changed he suddenly gave off an air of stillness.

    “My, my,” he said. “You’re well informed. And here I don’t even know your name.” Delphine didn’t answer, and Monroe clearly wasn’t expecting her to. He turned to Kane. “Zosha, please go ask your spidery friend if he could pretty please find out who the previous U4 supplier to Lytos was.”

    Kane looked like she had more to say, but turned and left anyways.

    “So. Is there anything else about my past you’d like to tell me?” Monroe asked in a tone that would be perfectly amiable coming from anyone else.

    “What would you like to know?” she asked blandly.

    “How about your name?” he said. “We’ve been referring to you as ‘the assassin’ and ‘that bitch that punched Zosha.’”

    Delphine thought it over. “I’ll tell you my name if you tell me something.”

    Monroe raised an eyebrow. None of his expression, Delphine noted, felt real. It was more like he was imitating what a genuine expression would look like. “You’re trying to trade information? Information, by the way, that we don’t actually need for information you probably do? While you’re drugged and tied to a chair in our cargo bay?”

    “Yes,” Delphine said. “You knew I was coming. How?”

    It had been a niggling feeling of irritation in the back of her mind since she’d woken up. She had been meticulous in her planning and flawless in her execution. And yet, she hadn’t been able to do more than land a blow to the weakest link on the ship before the cold kiss of a tranquilizer dart landed on the side of her neck. The only way it could have gone down like that was if they were tipped off. That meant one of two things: either there was a mole at Mason Corporation or there was someone intelligent and with enough resources to get past Mason Co.’s security. Most likely, the answer was both. The idea stirred something frightened and nervous in the pit of Delphine’s stomach that she thought she’d killed years ago.

    “Zosha’s friend is very interested in her continued well-being, which is one of the only reasons we survived meeting her,” Monroe said.

    Delphine frowned ever so slightly. It confirmed her suspicions, but didn’t tell her anything new. She never did this sort of investigative work on her targets. Mason Co. was a well-oiled machine, every cog in place. She had never