Danny wasn’t most people. His family and friends weren’t most people. As an idealistic kid, he’d thought joining the NYPD would be enough. That changing the system from the inside was the best way to fight it. Now, just shy of thirty and wearing a detective’s shield by day, he knew better. Because he’d learned quickly that idealism and reality were like oil and water. And he’d nearly quit the force a dozen times. It was his sister, Sarah, who’d talked him out of it. “Think of how much good you can still do, Bro. They need people like you to de-escalate situations. You can’t let it be a white, human boys’ club.” And she was right. As much as it hurt to deal with all the racist crap behind the impenetrable blue line, being able to advocate for minority citizens and keep an eye on his pale police brothers was invaluable. Too many Asian-American cops were complicit in police brutality. He refused to be one of them. If his efforts to be the change he wanted to see in the world didn’t do nearly enough to fix a shitty system… Well, that was where moonlighting paid off. He could use his investigative skills and his inside knowledge of the NYPD’s operations for bigger things.
That was where Third Shift came in. For all intents and purposes, it was a PI and security firm, staffed primarily by people who needed a second job in a gig economy. Several military veterans. A few lawyers. Cops like him. IT pros. Doctors. They were a ragtag crew who moonlighted fixing other people’s problems. Except the ragtag crew included some werewolves and vampires and sorcerers. And, these days, many of their clients happened to be highly placed government officials sympathetic to the Resistance—and their problems involved weapons smuggling, petty dictators, and circumventing global crises. And, oh, putting down supernaturals who were aiding in those endeavors.
One such supernatural crisis was occupying the team now: the ever-increasing Russian shifter foothold in American politics and the criminal underworld, and the blurring of lines therein. Danny would be lying if he said it wasn’t personal.
“Hey. Hey, you know you can call me any time, right? I’m here for you.”
“You don’t understand. Danny, it’s too dangerous.”
“Not for me. Never for me. Yulia, I can handle it. I have connections, too.”
Eight months. It had been eight terrible, nerve-wracking months since he’d last seen Yulia Vasilieva in person. The surveillance photos from a few days ago didn’t really count as anything but proof of life. And they were only transmitted to his personal tablet because Finn thought he was “helping.” Third Shift’s founders, Elijah Richter and Jackson Tate, didn’t exactly approve of using company resources to track women you had a thing for, but rules had never stopped Finian Conlan. Neither did rope. Or a gag. The vampire was impossible. He’d somehow secured shots of Yulia outside her brother’s club, Kamchatka. “We’ve our eye on Vasiliev anyway. What’s a few extra pictures?” he’d reasoned. “Consider it an early birthday present!” As creepy a gesture as it had been, Danny cherished the photos. Because they told him Yulia was alive.
Tired-looking. Too pale. Perhaps a bit thinner. But alive. Her dark-blond hair longer than he remembered, well past her shoulders. Poured into a sparkly cocktail dress that overemphasized how hot she was…but made him miss the Yulia who’d dressed how she liked to dress, just as gorgeous in long-sleeved T-shirts and jeans as she pulled pints and filled cocktail shakers.
Elijah’s voice cut into Danny’s sentimental ruminations. A lion shifter, Elijah had one of those voices. What Danny’s sister would call “panty-melting” in a romantic context, but what was just plain authoritative and, if need be, scary in a professional one. He’d just walked off the elevator from the public-facing floor to this one, the secure inner sanctum. A burner cell phone was practically surgically attached to his ear as he growled into it, “Four weeks? I want in. Get me on the detail for the event.” And then he snapped the flip phone shut and raked his gaze across the rows of cubicles. Until his dark, penetrating eyes landed on Danny.
“Heard you got a present today?” It was less a question and more of a statement. Because of course. Nothing happened around here without Lije’s knowledge. He stopped by the short wall of Danny’s cube, leaning one thickly muscled arm across the top. “You know how we feel about misappropriation of resources.”
Yeah. It was why he didn’t even steal pens from the office—just in case they turned out to be spy pens or something. But this was different. This was about Yulia. “Finn’s a regular Santa Claus,” Danny acknowledged with a sigh and a what-can-you-do shrug. “But I can’t say I’m sorry he broke protocol. I’m glad to know Yulia Vasilieva’s okay.”
“For now,” Elijah said grimly. “Vasiliev’s days might be numbered. Our contacts abroad tell us that his friends are none too happy with him at the moment. Mirko Aston, especially. He’s been increasingly dissatisfied with Vasiliev since Peluso hit that club last year and got in the way of that shipment of women. He’s up to something even worse now, so the pressure is on for Aleksei to handle Peluso once and for all and prove his worth.”
Joseph Andrew Peluso. Age 42. Depending on who you asked, he was a hero or a hoodlum. Former Marine turned construction worker, he was the kind of headline-grabbing vigilante that gave a lot of people hope…but turned others into cynics. Danny fell somewhere in the middle. He knew full well what could happen if someone who looked like him or like Elijah shot at a bunch of white guys. And throw in the fact that Peluso was, according to their contacts, a turned shifter from an elite intermilitary unit…? In the same position, he and Lije probably wouldn’t have lived to see a first trial, much less a second. As for Peluso’s impact on the local shifter-controlled Russian mafia…well, that had the potential to blow back on a woman that Danny cared about. That was a fear he would never be able to shake.
He didn’t really give a rat’s ass about Joe Peluso himself. But Elijah and Jack were invested in the case for reasons at least two levels above his pay grade. As far as he could tell, they considered Peluso another piece of the larger puzzle they’d been putting together for years. Human-shifter alliances. Government corruption and conspiracy. Peluso taking out Vasiliev’s men and dropping a dime on their trafficking plans had messed with something much more complicated. Something involving a Slovakian arms dealer who went by the name Emeric “Mirko” Aston. So many people, so many crimes, so many wrongs to right. Whatever the bigger picture was here, it wasn’t a pretty one. But Danny wasn’t in this for watercolors, was he? The past few years in the Divided States of America had fixed his path more securely than his time at the police academy or his experiences on the beat in Flatbush and Kensington.
He was going to fight for freedom and equality in the only ways he could—and protect innocent shifters like Yulia, or die trying.
Chapter 4
Neha had no solid explanation for why she was walking back into Brooklyn Detention just a week after Nate and Dustin had introduced her to Joe Peluso. There were other cases on her desk; she had plenty of other things to do. It wasn’t strictly necessary to do a follow-up visit this soon. And yet here she was. Because there was a puzzle to solve, and she hadn’t even started cataloging all the clues.