Fighting for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

after watching the kid work for a few days, Pete had approached him.
    “You’re a good worker,” Pete had said. “You look like you’re a good fighter, too.”
    Isaac had just shrugged.
    “A hundred bucks for a fight,” Pete had told the kid. “One-fifty if you win.”
    At seventeen and bordering on homeless, Isaac hadn’t needed Pete to ask twice. He’d have taken the fight for a third of that money, probably. That night, Pete had led him to the ring in the sub-basement of the liquor store, the place smelling of blood and fur, and Isaac had done his first bout in the wolf fighting ring.
    He’d lost.
    But he’d lost well and he’d gotten hooked. Isaac loved the sheer savagery of the wolf fights, of getting to openly fight someone else in the ring, letting his animal take over completely and being rewarded for it for once. It wasn’t long before he started winning some of his matches, then more of his matches, then almost all of his matches. He met Dane when he beat him in a fight.
    In the meantime, he wised up to Pete and started making more money. When he was twenty-four, he’d taken a bite on the shoulder so bad that he was out for six months, and he couldn’t even work on a ranch, so Isaac had taken a good, hard look around at everyone he knew, all the wolf fighters who were older than him, and realized that not one was in a very good place.
    So he asked Pete for a loan and took classes at Rustvale Community College. He went back to working and fighting, doing his homework late at night in tiny, drafty rooms, and transferred to Cascadia State. He got an accounting degree and a junior-level job with an accounting firm, and now he spent most of his time doing peoples’ taxes, fighting less and less.
    For a while, he stopped fighting. Somewhere in there, he and Dane had moved in together and become proper mates. Dane had joined the police force and moved up the ranks. Isaac had a real job.
    He’d missed the ring, though, and he’d started coming back from time to time, just to watch and cheer on the new kids on nights when Dane was working late. Then he’d joined in, just once, when someone had to cancel at the last minute. It turned out that he still loved doing it for all the same reasons as before, only now he was twelve years older than he’d been, a little slower and a little easier to hurt. When he woke up the day after a fight, he felt it in a way he hadn’t at seventeen.
    Besides, he had Dane to think about. Dane, who still didn’t know he’d been fighting again. But Isaac needed one last fight, and a few thousand dollars wouldn’t hurt.
    In the poorly-lit basement, the poker dealer murmured to the two remaining players. Pete fiddled with his pencil, and then finally looked up at Isaac, the hint of a smile on his face.
    “I could go 50/50,” he said at last.
    Isaac sighed and tapped his fingers on the table. That was all he’d wanted in the first place, but he couldn’t let Pete know that. Even though this was his last wolf fight, he’d dealt with Pete for far too long. He knew it wasn’t a good idea to ever give Pete a sliver of satisfaction, any idea about what Isaac had really wanted all along.
    “I see documentation for all the expenses,” he said. “The pit fee, the numbers of tickets you sell, even the number of hours the crew spends cleaning up.”
    Pete inclined his head once.
    “I can do that,” he said. “You’re a stickler for receipts these days, I hear.”
    Isaac ignored that. He wasn’t sure if it was a jab at him for being an accountant — not the most badass of professions, but one that paid good money and wasn’t likely to get him injured — or if Pete was just making a comment.
    He never could tell with Pete.
    “Yup,” Isaac said. “Let me know if you ever need your taxes done. I’ll even give you the old friend discount.”
    He had a surprising number of clients from the wolf fighting pits. After all, some of the guys made good money and didn’t want the