Free The Wolf in Her Heart by Sydney Falk Page A

windows, illuminating the large oval table in the middle of the room. Chairs sat around it, the spires of crafted wood cutting through the pale light.
    Sam locked the door shut, but almost immediately there was pounding and clawing. For a moment, she wondered if she’d just boxed herself up like a lunch, but then it calmed, and there was a loud whine from the other side of the door.
    “Poor baby,” Sam muttered. He isn’t here to kill me. He’s here to turn me. Right?
    Lou had not given Samantha the impression that the wolf could be controlled, though. So maybe Rick had no idea what would happen. Maybe Rick was just hoping he’d end up turning Samantha, and that if the wolf killed her, he could cover it up.
    Warm metal fury rose in her, but another jostle at the door tempered it. Think.
    There was a phone in the meeting room, a throwback from Brentwood’s original construction. Landlines were hardly necessary in this day and age, but not every member of the club was exactly an early adopter. Sam picked it up.
    No dial tone.
    Shit . They’d thought of everything. Samantha headed over to the window and peered outside. The blue cast over the landscape lent a quiet, introspective nature to the grounds that Sam would absolutely have found charming, if she wasn’t scanning intently for murderous furry things.
    For a moment, she saw no sign of any presence—but then, a shape in the distance moved, and it had eyes. Not at ground level, but nearly the height of a human. Reflective eyes.
    “Worth a look.” Sam sighed and shook her head.
    A fresh, savage roar sounded outside the doors. No, not outside the doors—beside the doors. The wall shuddered, then bent towards Samantha. She caught her breath and scanned the room.
    No other exits. Bookshelves, table, chairs, little else. That wall wouldn’t hold forever, either. It was also original construction. Much of the club had been remodeled in one way or another, but the meeting room and a few others were untouched.
    No, that wasn’t right. Something nagged at her mind.
    Remodeling . The image she’d seen of this room, back when the renovations were being done, didn’t have a low ceiling.
    Samantha looked up, at the drop ceiling, and smiled. Awesome . She started pulling out enough of the books on the shelves to scramble up it like a ladder, then pulled herself into the couple feet of space between the top of the shelf and the drop ceiling tiles.
    A hard shove up left a spray of dust in the air, a freshly musty odor, and a new exit from the room.
    Sam reached up and pulled herself through the hole, into the dark crawlspace. She slid the tile back into place as chunks of the wall broke off and the roars became louder.
    Samantha moved, on hands and knees, over the wall. The new goal was to get as far away from the meeting room as possible.
    She had to get back to Louann.
    The far wall of the original construction was some distance away. Sam focused on the task at hand and tried not to think about what else was probably running around up here. Drop ceilings were all too often a home for rodents and other pests.
    When she got to the wall, she paused, and listened. Fans, somewhere in the building. No snarls, no thuds, no howls.
    It was waiting to find her, and now she had no idea where it was.
    Only one way to find out if I’ve picked badly, I guess. Sam lifted up the drop tile nearest the wall and peered down.
    It was a hallway. There was linoleum, and a set of metal doors at either end. It looked nothing like the rest of Brentwood, though. It had to be part of the service areas, but even with knowing it was at one side of the building, she’d never seen it.
    “Too many strange little passages in this damn place.” Sam awkwardly slid out of the hole she’d made and hung down, then let go. She was lucky enough not to twist her ankle or worse, but it didn’t feel great landing on bare feet.
    Once again, she cursed that this happened at a dinner party. If she’d had