Taze (Rise of the Pride, Book 11) Read online

  Copyright © 2020 Theresa Hissong

  Disclaimer:

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead is purely coincidental. The names of people, places, things, songs, bands are all created from the author's mind and are only used for entertainment. Any mention of a song, or band, in the book, has been given proper credit for use.

  This book is for adults 18 and older only; due to content.

  Cover Design:

  Gray Publishing Services

  Editing by:

  Heidi Ryan

  Amour the Line Editing

  Cover Model:

  Jason Titus

  Cover Photographer:

  Randy Sewell

  RLS Model Images Photography

  Table of Contents

  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 Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dedication:

  To those of us who’ve been through hell and crawled our way back stronger than before.

  Chapter One

  Taze Malone kicked his muddy boots off before entering his cabin. The sun was starting to peek over the horizon on what was the coldest day of January. Spring couldn’t get here fast enough.

  Working for the government was beginning to wear on him. They’d found two more females at midnight, detained them, and sent them on their way to Colorado. The male they’d found was already deceased from what he assumed was the Khat in his pocket. They’d know more after a toxicology report. It didn’t matter what the report said, Taze knew what had happened to the male the moment he’d found the drug on him.

  He tossed his dirty shirt into the already overflowing laundry basket in his closet before heading back to his kitchen to grab a beer. It might’ve been morning for most people, but for him, it was his evening.

  He stopped as he walked by his living room window that was angled enough to see Calla’s tiny home. He would never in a million years admit that he’d made sure the blueprints were correct when he’d designed his home on the pride’s land.

  She stepped out in a business suit and flipped the keyring around her fingers as she approached her car. She froze for a second and looked over her shoulder as if she’d sensed him watching her. He was going to lose his mind over that female one day. He just knew it. With a shake of her head, she got into her car and backed out, driving down the road to head to work.

  He’d been watching her office through the cameras he’d set up three weeks earlier. The war with the Gadaí was getting worse, and he didn’t see any signs of stopping. They’d caught several rogues already, but they wouldn’t reveal the name of the man supplying the drug or the location of the alpha who had changed them.

  Calla working out in the human world scared him to death. Just thinking about it now had his heart rate at its max. The cameras hadn’t caught anything out of the ordinary, and thank fuck for that.

  She’d given up on so much after fighting her way out of her trauma. Now, she was studying to become a lawyer, hoping she could do something for her species. While he appreciated that, Taze wanted her back at the pride where it was safe.

  He hadn’t touched her since she’d turned twenty, and all of the time he’d spent training her was met with mixed emotions. God, that woman drove him wild with lust, but he had to restrain his feelings because of her asshole brother. She’d made the decision to stop fighting right before her birthday and had never looked back, giving the excuse of her brother and his short fucking temper.

  Okay, so, Taze really couldn’t put all the blame on Malaki. They both had their fair share of hatred toward each other, but Taze felt his was warranted. Malaki was too damn protective of her, and if he didn’t stop with his attitude, she would never mate. No one was good enough for Calla in his eyes.

  Since she’d stopped training, they’d come to an unspoken agreement. They were cordial to each other, but other than that, they steered clear unless they were forced to communicate. Taze had pushed those boundaries with her, and she’d pushed him right back. As far as Calla was concerned, Taze was as no-good as her brother had claimed him to be.

  A message alerted him to a meeting with the alpha. Noah and Taze had worked with Storm the night before, and he was sure the alpha wanted to fill everyone in on the dead human they had found during the late-night hours.

  He had twenty minutes to shower and eat something before he needed to be at the main house. The hot water cascading over his tired body felt amazing, but he was more tense and anxious in his mind. Calla always popped up when he was at his weakest, and his panther liked to remind him that maybe, just maybe, she was his mate.

  Like clockwork, his mating scent mingled with the steam of the shower, weighing it down enough to drive him mad. His cock had a mind of its own when it came to her, and he tightened his abs to fight off the need.

  It didn’t work.

  He’d relieved himself too many times to count when it came to that female. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her…if she’d let him.

  Like a recall button had been triggered in his brain, he remembered her natural scent mixed with the soft sheen of sweat during their training. There was nothing more he wanted to do than lay her flat on the mat and lap up her essence right there in the training facility.

  “You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” he scolded his cock.

  With a quick release, he hoped it would hold him over until the next time he thought of her…which would be in fifteen minutes. Sometimes, it was less.

  Throwing on his clothes, he hurried out the door and entered the main house where the alpha lived with his mate. Seeing her with their young, it reminded him to check in on his parents. They lived next door to Kye and Evie, and he’d been too busy to check up on them.

  Agent Tabor was already there when he arrived, so he gave the human male a curtesy nod. Taze noted how he stood to Talon’s right…the usual place of Winter, Talon’s second-in-command. In the last several months, the human had become an ally in their fight, and Talon was trusting him more than the others. He’d been the one to alert them to some weird happenings with Agent Murdock, and since that time, Tabor had been going behind his partner’s back to send the Guardians to the correct locations to round up the rogues.

  “What’s going on?” Taze asked as Noah entered the room. He took a position against the wall where Storm and Taze were perched.

  “For once, I really don’t know,” Noah whispered.

  Taze shifted from foot to foot in anticipation of their leader. As he glanced around the room, he noticed the others were on edge, too. Whatever the alpha had to say must be important. He hoped it was a lead in the case against Holden Manzelli; the alpha who was turning the local wolves.

  He was looking at his feet as the door opened. Her scent hit him like a ton of bricks the moment it crossed his nose. Calla came in through the door without knocking, and made her way over to Talon’s desk, standing at his left side. She carried a manilla folder tight against her chest. He wondered why she was even at the pride, because she’d just left not an hour before to go to work.

  “We’ve gathered you here today because there have been some new developments,” Talon began as he stood. Calla’s eyes scanned the room, lingering on his for a
n extra second before she brought her gaze back to their leader. “Agent Tabor has been conducting a side project for the last several months, and we have some very important information to share with you.”

  Taze felt the wave of calm his leader sent out among his Guardians. With the magic, Taze felt his shoulders relax for the first time in weeks.

  “As we’ve known, Agent Murdock has been seen with Magan Amburo,” he stated. Everyone nodded their understanding. “Her brother is a major drug dealer in the United States, and we’ve been looking for a connection between the three of them regarding the Khat we’ve found on the Gadaí. I asked Calla to use her tracking skills to dig up any information she could on the brother and sister. I was shocked to find that she already knew them. Calla, would you like to present the information?”

  “Sure,” she said, holding her head high. Taze felt a moment of pride. He’d always known Calla was a great tracker. In their training, she could hunt better than most Guardians. “The alpha came to me for help in finding Magan and Axlam Amburo, hoping they had some ties to Agent Murdock. The moment I heard their names, I informed Talon, against the human’s laws of keeping private information private, that they were clients to one of the lawyers in my firm.”

  “What?” Taze and Malaki barked at the same moment. Talon’s eyes narrowed as he sent out more of his magic to calm the males. The panther inside Taze’s mind didn’t get the memo, though, and he cursed inside when his mating scent filled the air.

  “Stand down,” Talon roared, pointing a finger at Taze and Malaki as they both lurched toward the other. Savage was there with a strong hand against Malaki’s chest, stopping her brother from going after him. “Both of you!”

  Taze didn’t even notice his eyes had shifted to the amber of his beast, and didn’t that say something the moment his mating scent traveled through the tightly packed office?

  “If you are done with me, alpha, I’d like to request leave,” Calla said under her breath with a bit of mortification.

  Taze watched Calla’s brother as he leaned against the wall after his sister left the room. All of the older Guardians were ignoring what had just gone down in the alpha’s office. He couldn’t hide his mating scent if he tried. It was a natural release of hormone, and he’d been trying to deny the scent over the past two years, but it hadn’t been that strong.

  Until today.

  Taze exhaled slowly, trying to calm his beast. It took several seconds for his eyes to return to their normal icy blue. His panther was still on edge, wanting to fight for the female, but it knew the alpha would calm him enough.

  “So, now that we know where to find the Khat supplier,” Talon began, his eyes landing on Taze. The male saw a bit of worry in the alpha’s gaze, but he ignored it and let the male finish. “I want our night team to watch them. We need to catch them in the act of distributing the drug.”

  “If the Amburos are selling Khat, the ones picking it up will be part of a pack,” Tabor announced. “Khat isn’t widely used by humans. We need to cut off the middle man and get this stuff off the streets before it kills another shifter.”

  The Guardians agreed with nods. Taze wanted all of the Gadaí out of the area. Wolves were a hard subject for him, and knowing that Calla was exposed to someone connected to them caused a new fear to roll through his body.

  “If you are on the night shift, you may be dismissed,” Talon announced. “Come back here an hour before you leave tonight. I will have more information for you. Get some sleep.”

  Taze took that as his queue to leave. He didn’t want to be in that office any more than he had to with his mating scent still lingering in the air.

  As he left the alpha’s home, he had every intention to stop by Calla’s house, but she was already pulling out of her spot in front of her tiny cabin. She didn’t even look over at him as she hurried down the driveway and off the pride’s land.

  “Son of a bitch!” he snarled.

  That female was stubborn as hell. She was willingly going into the belly of the beast they were trying to stop. At that point, Taze didn’t care she was the best tracker they had…he wanted her safe.

  The moment he walked into his home, he grabbed his laptop and pulled up the camera he’d left at her work. He spent the next few hours looking through the footage. Nothing out of the ordinary captured his eye, but one of the cameras needed to be recharged. That would give him an excuse to snoop around the building if he could get away from Tabor and the other Guardians for an hour later that night.

  The sun was bright in the sky, and no matter how much he’d done to black out his bedroom, sleeping wasn’t going to come easily. His panther wasn’t helping matters either. He was focused on Calla and her safety. Taze’s human side knew she could protect herself while she was at the human’s law offices during the day. Plus, no one would be that stupid to cause a scene in a public place.

  At least, he hoped they wouldn’t.

  It was close to sunset when Taze finally gave up, crawling out of bed to find something to eat. The leftovers were enough to give him a needed boost of energy. It’d been a while since he’d shifted, and with a few hours before he had to be back in Talon’s office, he stripped and headed out to the woods behind the alpha’s home.

  He forced his beast to keep from going to Calla’s home, because doing so could be dangerous. The last thing he wanted to do was cause her to be upset, and that always happened when her brother got involved. If the male scented Taze around her home, he knew Malaki would cause trouble.

  Things between Malaki and Taze had always been the way they were. Malaki’d had a lot to say when Calla had first showed interest in learning to fight. Hell, he’d tried to forbid her to step foot in the Guardian’s facility, but being the strong woman she was, Calla had done what she wanted to do.

  Taze had been a complete asshole to her in the beginning, too. He didn’t think females were strong enough to fight, and he had been just as agitated as her brother. It had taken Talon threatening his Guardianship to set his ass straight.

  Calla was a natural when it came to self-defense and tracking. He eventually started talking to the female and took her under his wing when it came to teaching her how to fight. They both knew things would change when she turned twenty and would no longer be able to touch an unmated male, but they pushed on until the last moment possible.

  On her birthday, she’d locked herself in the tiny cabin she had built and didn’t come out for a week. When she did, Calla looked different. Her short blonde hair was the same, and so were her beautiful features. Her big, icy blue depths held a mix between fear and determination. She wore more makeup now that she was working with the humans, and while he liked her natural look, he had to admit the bright red lipstick and smokey eye shadow make his cock hard.

  Her full lips had tightened to a thin line even though she held her head higher after getting accepted into the human’s college. Word had gotten around that she’d begun taking classes to get her law degree, and with the blessing of the alpha, she began a job as a secretary at a law firm in Memphis.

  He didn’t know why she refused to train in her time off, and he’d expressed his frustrations to her on the subject several times over the years. With Malaki’s temper, she chose the law degree and firm, because being away from training kept her brother at peace.

  With Malaki and Calla having been rescued by the pride, her brother had become almost obsessive in his concern for what she did or who she was with, and didn’t that just piss Taze off to no end? She’d once told him that Malaki had calmed after she’d stepped away from training, and with her not around Taze as much, her brother wasn’t a problem.

  Taze wanted to know why she didn’t choose herself and the pride. He wanted to know why she gave up on something she was extremely good at to pursue a law degree.

  And he wanted to know why, above all else, she chose to change her path in life. He understood her desire to become a lawyer, but there was something else, and he couldn’t quite p
ut his finger on it.

  Calla narrowed her eyes on her brother as he made a move to cross the room where Taze was standing, but Savage reached out to stop him by placing his large hand on Malaki’s chest. She, and every Guardian and Protector in the room, caught the same scent when Taze erupted.

  God, she was mortified. Heat built in her cheeks and with her ivory white skin, she probably looked like a damn tomato. How could he do that? In the alpha’s office of all places!

  “If you are done with me, alpha, I’d like to request leave,” she said under her breath. All of the shifters in the room heard her request and stepped aside on Talon’s nod.

  The moment she walked out the door, she took off for her tiny home, wanting to bury herself under it until everything blew over. Ever since she’d turned twenty, Taze had been scenting more and more like a mate. It’d been two years since she’d stopped training with him, and while he’d kept his distance for most of that time, he would occasionally insert his opinion into her life.

  It was hard enough seeing Taze from time to time at the pride, but when he got all protective, his scent would thicken. She’d been able to resist it, mostly. Tonight, in the alpha’s office, he finally let go, and now the whole pride would know they were mates.

  She wasn’t ready for a mate.

  She didn’t think she would ever be ready.

  Calla didn’t know how soon Talon would be releasing the Guardians and Protectors from his office, but she needed to get off the land before Taze or her brother came looking for her. She hated confrontation, and Malaki would be the first one to enter her home, raging because of the scent Taze was giving off in that office. So much for hiding the one thing she’d known for some time now.

  Of course, she knew Taze was possibly her mate. She’d lied to herself for the past few years about the fact, but now that she was older…it couldn’t be shadowed anymore.