Shark bait, p.1
Shark Bait, page 1
Shark Bait
THE AQUATERRESTRIAL TASK FORCE
BOOK TWO
MANDY ROSKO
Copyright © 2023 by Mandy Rosko
Cover by Dar Albert of Wicked Smart Designs
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Shark Bait
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
About the Author
Also by Mandy Rosko
Shark Bait
This honey badger is no one’s bait. Not even if the shark is cute as hell.
Delilah Lovett is considered a little…odd. She’s used to it. Not everyone is comfortable around someone who takes care of the dead. Her skills are often in high demand, and she’s just been recruited to consult on a job for the Aquaterrestrial Task Force. There’s a possible traitor in their midst, and they need her genius to make sure the evidence hasn’t been tampered with.
Aiden Reyes doesn’t back down from a challenge, which is why he is given a special mission: be a bodyguard to a badass badger who insists she doesn’t need one. He figures the difficulties he faces with her will be nothing compared to the threat coming from within his own ranks, the killer who could potentially know the exact locations and missions of every AILE agent.
Meeting Delilah and discovering she’s his mate is all the more reason for Aiden to want to find the murderer quickly and take them down. Not only does he need to protect Delilah, but he also needs the case to be solved so he can be with his overly serious, beautiful mate.
Chapter
One
Poor bastard. Nasty way to go.
Delilah Lovett shook her head, unable to keep out the thoughts. She tried to keep them out before, during, and after finishing her job, but sometimes it was just too much.
She had everything she needed for the Aquaterrestrial Task Force’s Scottish investigation and had pieced the victim back together. Whatever happened to him next was up to whichever funeral director the family hired to make him appear almost alive again, to give them a sense of closure.
Though Delilah knew it was going to be a hell of a challenge, with all the teeth marks, not to mention all the permanent discoloration from those suction cup spots.
This wasn’t the only body recovered in this state. A number of others had been found, with the unknown killer picking off tourists and locals alike. Men and women, but mostly shifters.
Since the non-shifters were fewer, the working theory was that the non-shifter victims had only been picked off accidentally. Like the young man on her table. He was no shifter. Just a teenager, less than a month away from his twentieth birthday, barely old enough to drink in this country.
His cause of death was logged to be accidental drowning with an overly high blood alcohol level. The story was that he’d become a little too drunk and had fallen into the water and drowned. The bad state of his body was explained away by saying that his body had encountered sea creatures after the fact.
It was all half true. He’d been drunk, but he hadn’t fallen in. He was dragged in. The marks on his hands and fingers indicated a struggle, a weak one, but they were all the same.
And there were plenty of actual animal marks that had occurred post-mortem. The octopus marks were real enough. But that was only because the killer apparently kept his trophies, where some animals could feast on them.
Originally, AILE speculated that a kraken shifter might have been responsible for the killings, in light of the markings on the victims. Then, the undercover team was attacked by a bunyip. A creature with tentacles, and even suction cups on the ends of its limbs, so they believed the case was closed. The trio who took down the creature was off on well-deserved decompression leave, having thought they solved the case.
They were wrong.
Bodies started showing up again, and based on the setup of the bunyip attack, AILE knew what they were really dealing with.
This was an inside job.
Someone within AILE was the real killer. They’d sent the bunyip to try to kill the undercover team and throw AILE off their scent.
Which was why AILE flew Delilah all the way to Scotland for a second opinion.
Delilah carefully removed her lab coat and surgical gown, to prepare to give her report to AILE team members who were less than patiently waiting for her just outside the viewing room.
They would have their questions, but Delilah was approaching them with caution, keeping a set number of steps back. As far as she was concerned, any one of them could be the killer, and if she got close to exposing them, she could become the next target.
She was out of her element, sent to assist the Aquaterrestrial Task Force, ATTF for short, because they could no longer trust the local agency’s coroner. Delilah would have preferred to have one of her Honey Badger Squad members there with her—no one had your back better than a badass badger—but she was the only one Chip wanted to send.
A few agents stood down the hall, waiting for updates but allowing Delilah to brief the director first. Jack Williams, in charge of the specialized water shifter unit, had only one other agent next to him.
The rest of AILE’s Scotland counterparts would be at their desks or in the field, doing anything and everything they could to find the killer.
Jack looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. Even Delilah had been able to take a catnap on the flight over.
“What do you think?” Jack asked, rubbing his chin, his free hand resting on his hip.
“He was definitely murdered by the same person who got to the others. It’s not a random mugging gone wrong or an accident.”
Jack nodded. “Are you able to pinpoint anything new, anything the other coroner may not have noticed?”
She had that answer ready. “He has defensive wounds on his fingers, what was left of them, anyway. The killer either kept him alive longer than the rest, maybe playing with him, or the victim managed to hold him off. Either way, the kill wasn’t quick.”
“How could you tell?”
Delilah had tried to ignore the blond male standing behind Jack. Her body was reacting to him in an overly large way. She registered his high level of hotness but tried to focus on the task at hand. She assumed he was a low-tier badge, like the other agents guarding the hall. The fact that Jack was allowing him to speak indicated that he was more important than she’d first guessed.
But all the same, Delilah didn’t appreciate being interrupted.
He’s our mate. Her badger tried to distract her, but she shoved it out of her mind.
“Because there is a difference in the appearance of injuries pre- and post-mortem. While most of the injuries on the other victims occurred post-mortem, this victim had more evidence of hemorrhage and clotting, which means they occurred before death.”
Even saying it out loud brought a shiver to her, but if it needed to be spelled out, then so be it. “There was nothing to swab from what he had left of his fingernails. The young man nearly shredded them all in what I have to assume was an attempt to cling to rocks and get away from the attacker.”
“But it also could be that he landed some blows, scratches, whatever, on the killer,” the blond man mused.
“Exactly.”
They all knew that meant that any agent with unusual injuries would rise up the suspect list. However, shifters healed quickly, so it was unlikely any of the damage done by the young man would stick around very long.
“Were there any issues you found otherwise?”
Delilah shrugged. “There are always issues with a second autopsy. Organs have already been examined. Certain fluids aren’t available anymore. It’s good you sent for me as soon as you did.”
“Yeah, the body might’ve been a little more tender if we’d waited any longer,” said blondy, glancing behind her toward the door, as though he expected the body to stand up and shuffle out that door like some sort of zombie.
That annoyed her. “You work as an agent, and the idea of a dead body makes you squeamish?”
The blond man kept on grimacing and looking a little green around the gills, as though he wanted to be anywhere else.
“No, not really. I’ve seen bodies, but this is different.”
“How so?” Not that she cared.
“Because...you know, you cut them up on purpose.”
“Yes?” Delilah was pretty sure she knew where this was going, but it was...kind of fun making a Surfer Dude Bro uncomfortable.
Deciding better against what he was about to say, he shook his head. “Never mind. Nothing.”
“Uh-huh.”
What a shame. He was cute, and her mate alarm was screaming, but even Delilah, who wasn’t very particular in getting itches scratched when she needed it done, had no interest in men who couldn’t keep their stomachs in a professional setting or who thought she was weird because of what she did.
Mate or not, she wouldn’t give him the time of day if he couldn’t handle all of her.
She’d spent enough time with fools like that in the past. It wasn’t something she tolerated anymore. There were plent
The boss looked between her and blondy a few too many times with a smile before he finally introduced them.
“Now that I can see how well everything is going here, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to one of our top agents. We flew him in, same as you. This is Agent Aiden Reyes.”
Aiden held out his hand. “Guess we were on different flights. I would have remembered your face if I’d seen it before.”
Delilah didn’t shake his hand.
Aiden’s smile faltered before he closed his fingers and backed off. “Right, sorry. I guess because of what you do, you don’t like shaking hands. Germs?”
Delilah shook her head. “No, not at all.”
The knowledge that she simply wouldn’t shake his hand because he’d annoyed her flashed across his face. “Right,” he said, still grinning, oddly enough, before he laughed a little. “I guess I deserve that.”
At least he didn’t look like he was about to be sick all over the floor. If he looked like he was about to puke, Delilah was resolved to immediately grab him by the ear and yank him to the nearest toilet.
“Will you forgive me?” The tone to his voice had her thinking the question was about more than just a bad first impression.
Like he might follow up the question with an ask for her phone number. If that were the case, he was going to be sorely disappointed.
It didn’t matter how attractive they were, how much she might want them, or even how much of a good time they’d shown her… or if her badger was trying to claim him for her mate. For Delilah, her number was never on the menu.
But… just in case things got desperate while she was in ATTF territory, she might as well play a little nice.
“We’ll see.”
Chapter
Two
“You must be good at what you do if they flew you in so fast.”
Delilah fought to not roll her eyes.
Jack had taken her report and was long gone, insisting that he had an important meeting to attend to, but Aiden had stuck around, tailing her to the vending machine and trying to make small talk as she was getting some coffee.
“I’m good at what I do. I’m sure others were higher on the priority list but just couldn’t be spared from their work.”
Aiden, leaning against the vending machine now, looked perplexed as her coffee finally began to pour from the machine, filling the Styrofoam cup with a dark sludgelike liquid.
“That’s not exactly boastful. I thought all you honey badgers were overly full of yourselves.”
Delilah was already beginning to regret being nice to him. “I wasn’t disparaging myself. I’m proud, but I’m also smart. And I know I’m not the tip-top best of AILE—yet, anyway. There aren’t many better than me, but they’re there.” She shrugged. It was what it was. She was good enough to be one of the best, but not a high enough rank to be able to turn down assignments in lieu of projects she wanted to prioritize.
Aiden smiled at her, flashing white teeth that nearly blinded her. Why did it make her knees just a little bit weak?
Damn. Her weakness was strong jaws and killer smiles.
“Glad to hear it. We need someone in here with confidence, who can’t be shaken, and I was starting to worry that we’d gotten a defective honey badger.”
Defective, pfft. If only he knew how badass she really was. She just made it a practice to rein it in when she was around non-badgers. She didn’t want to add any to the rumor that the badgers didn’t work well with others.
Delilah turned away from the machine, bringing the Styrofoam cup to her lips and sipping on her terrible coffee. The bitter taste was horribly disappointing. What she wouldn’t give for a sweet, comforting cup of the good stuff after the job she just finished.
“I don’t know what your clearances are. We shouldn’t be talking.“ She was still hyper-aware that anyone in this unit might have a hand in the killings, and Aiden might just be trying to pump her for information.
But then again, Jack had said that they’d flown Aiden in. Which meant he wasn’t on the list of regular agents, nor was he a potential suspect. The suspect pool was made up of agents who had regular access to the cases.
Delilah avoided the small table in the break room, opting instead to drink her swamp-water coffee standing. She didn’t want to give the impression that she was open to company or socialization.
Not that Aiden got the message.
“I’m cleared for all the information on this case, anything you have to report on that dead body, or any other body that happens to show up on your table for that matter.“
“I’ll need to see proof of that.“
Aiden actually whistled. “You’re a tough cookie to crack, aren’t you?“
Delilah pressed her lips together, forcing herself to not point out that he was thinking of a tough nut and not a cookie.
Back on the badger squad, they often told her that she was too literal and a bit on the perfectionist side. The term “pedantic” had started to become a bit of a trigger word for her, which her teammate Teddy had found out the hard way. Whatever. He’d needed a good wallop for a while.
In any case, she would let the cookie remark go. Accuracy and precision in speech wasn’t important when the only thing she might want from Aiden was an ability to get her off when she wanted him to.
She changed the subject to something different instead. “You seemed quite bothered by the thought of me cutting into the body back there.”
Shit. That probably wasn’t exactly how she should have said that. She wanted to make him uncomfortable, not insult him.
“If it’s for the job, then I can suck it up and handle it. I can be professional and not like something.”
That was what she liked to hear.
Then he had to go ahead and ruin it by speaking up again. “You, uh, are done with that man, though, right?”
Unbelievable.
She sighed. “Yeah. I’m about to head back to my desk and finish up a bit of paperwork before I’m done for the day. Should I expect you’ll keep following me there?”
Aiden stopped and looked at her as though she had lost her mind. Then he smiled, as though figuring out a funny little secret. “You weren’t paying attention.”
A rush of heat immediately filled her chest, and Delilah found herself stiffening, her shoulders bunching up. “What’s that supposed to mean? Of course I paid attention. I pay attention to everything.”
Why did he have to look so fucking pleased with himself? “Now that I think about it, the boss man didn’t properly introduce us back there, but I know they said they were going to send you an email about it. Which means you weren’t paying attention somewhere.“
He said it as though he knew perfectly well how much something like that would annoy her, how much Delilah had to keep on top of things. Emails didn’t sit unread; paperwork wasn’t turned in late.
To the other badgers, she seemed stuffy. She preferred to think that she was just savagely efficient.
So being told that she might have missed something as simple as a briefing over email annoyed the hell out of her.
“All right, fine. So what was it? What did I miss?”
Again with that stupid, bright, handsome smile. “I’m your bodyguard.”
Chapter
Three
Since bursting in on the boss was out of the question, she had to resort to calling him and hoping he would pick up.
Meanwhile, Aiden kept acting as though things were as calm and cool as they could possibly be. Since she had strictly forbidden him to enter her cubicle, he leaned in the entryway, arms crossed, watching her with interest as she dialed Jack, intending to yell at his stupid ass.
Now she knew why Jack had been so quick to run away from her when he finished with his briefing.
