Raphael was the alpha of Clan Bouda. He was too handsome for his own good, mated to my best friend, Andrea Nash, and a complete shark when it came to all things business. If Raphael wrote the contract, it was a good deal for the Pack and a bad deal for us.

We weren’t desperate for money, but a large chunk of our ready cash had gone into buying and furnishing this house. I never asked Curran how much money he had, because even though he referred to it as our money, he had earned the bulk of it before he ever met me. But I got the impression that we weren’t too far from the bottom of our reserve.

Now that we both had time to devote to Cutting Edge, the business was picking up and it would start putting food on our table within a year. Trouble was, we faced a lot of stiff competition. In the hierarchy of clearing paranormal hazmat, Cutting Edge scraped the bottom of the barrel, with the Guild being our major competition. We had to underbid the mercs, and while the Guild was having serious issues, competing with them was difficult. It didn’t help that the Pack had bankrolled Cutting Edge’s startup costs and both Curran and I wanted to get that loan taken care of.

“What are you offering?” I asked.

“The Mercenary Guild,” Jim said.

“What?” I must’ve misheard.

“The Mercenary Guild,” Jim repeated.

“That’s stupid,” I told him. “I have the business sense of a walnut and even I know it’s stupid.”

Ever since its founder died, the Mercenary Guild had been run by an assembly consisting of veteran mercs, admin staff, and the Pack representative. The rule by committee wasn’t working. I knew this, because I was that Pack representative. I’d worked for the Guild since I was eighteen. Mercs didn’t have a long life expectancy, but I was hard to kill and I had passed the eight-year mark, which made me a veteran. I had street cred, but even with my reputation, my veteran status, and the power of the Pack behind me, I got through to the Guild only half of the time. As long as I was there, keeping the peace, some stuff got done, but when I hadn’t been there, from what I’d heard, the infighting got so bad, the Guild was on the brink of bankruptcy. Jim knew all this. He used to be a merc, too, and he had spies all over the city.

“First, the mercs and admins are too busy being at each other’s throats,” I said. “Second, the Pack doesn’t own enough of the Guild to make it worthwhile for us.”

“We do,” Jim said. “The mercs have been selling off their shares and I’ve been using the shapeshifter mercs to buy them.”