Everything inside Shaya screamed at the sight of him lying there like that, unconscious and vulnerable. Her wolf froze in panic, howling. Drowning in emotions she couldn’t even understand right then, Shaya ignored reason and rationality as instinct took over; she climbed down and raced through the maze of trees. With only Nick’s safety on her mind, she hadn’t registered the presence of three unfamiliar scents until an arm looped around her waist, a hand was clamped over her mouth, and the gun was yanked from her hand. Shit!
She struggled like crazy, hitting and head-butting and scratching, but her attacker—a shifter, she sensed—didn’t release her. From the corner of her eye, she saw movement: Amber’s wolf was finishing off a fleeing human. She caught sight of Shaya and froze in what was most likely surprise. Shaya appealed to her with her eyes, hoping that for just once, Amber would do what was right instead of what suited her.
She didn’t.
The bitch loped away, leaving Shaya at the mercy of God-knew-who. Then the butt of her gun smacked into her head, and everything went dark.
“For God’s sake, shift! Now, Nick! I can’t heal you until you shift!”
It was not the voice of the Alpha female that woke the gray wolf. It was the feel of his mate’s fear, her anger, her determination to be free of the danger she was in. Danger. He had known the danger was coming for her, had felt it just before the blackness came.
There was the sound of the Alpha female’s voice again. But the gray wolf had no interest in her. His only concern was his mate. She needed him, and he would not, could not, ignore that. He tried jumping to his feet. His leg crumpled beneath him. He yelped with pain, unable to rise. He could feel Nick’s panic, knew that Nick wanted dominance right then. Accepting for his mate’s sake that Nick was the strongest at that moment, the wolf backed down.
The shift was agonizing; Nick clenched his teeth against the pain, worried he’d pass out again. His leg had not only taken a bullet, but it was broken in two places. He was bleeding badly in several places, had taken a hard blow to his head, and had knife wounds in his sides.
“Roll onto your back now!” ordered Taryn.
“Shaya,” he panted. “She’s—”
“Now, Nick! If you die, Shaya will kill me!”
Carefully positioning himself on his back, he again tried to speak, but Taryn’s mouth was locked on his and she was healing him. It was the oddest feeling; each time she breathed out some of what she called the “badness,” he felt lighter yet stronger, relaxed yet galvanized. The pain got worse before it got better as his leg snapped back into place. But then there was only calm and peace and power. Done, she sat up. Trey was instantly at her side, holding her.
Nick shot upright and turned to Derren. “Shaya’s been taken.”
“Taken?” growled Derren. “Taken by who?”
“I don’t know.” But whoever it was, they would soon be dead. “Where’s Logan?”
“We can’t find his body, but he was badly injured—there’s no way he could have kidnapped Shaya when he could barely walk. She’d have easily overpowered an injured human.”
Nick could agree with that. “What about the shifter? I haven’t scented an unfamiliar shifter.”
“Neither have I.”
That meant the shifter was most likely the kidnapper. His panic increased at the thought of it, at the thought of anyone hurting this female he’d come to love more than he believed he was capable of loving anyone. He didn’t fear the realization, didn’t fear the all-consuming feeling or view it as a weakness. All he feared was anything happening to her. “I need to shift again. I need to find her.” This would be the perfect time to have another one of his knowings, but oh no, fate had apparently decided that this was a situation he and his wolf would have to fight their way through alone.
“We can’t come with you, Nick,” Taryn told him, tears in her eyes. “I need to stay here. A lot of these people are injured.” Nick nodded in understanding. “You make sure you bring her back,” ordered Taryn. The tears were in her voice now too.
Oh, he’d bring her back. He’d never before let anyone keep him from Shaya, and he wouldn’t start now. “Count on it.” With that, he swiftly returned to his wolf form.
The gray wolf darted to the spot where his mate should have been waiting. He needed to follow her scent in order to find her. Near the tree, he picked up four scents: one belonged to his mate, two belonged to humans, and the last scent was that of a shifter. It was a scent that the wolf knew…a scent that belonged to a wolf who should be dead.
Shaya knew Nick would come for her. Knew it. But she truly didn’t want him to. Not when it was obvious that she was bait—a bait that was sitting on the floor with her wrists tied behind her back, held captive in the “hut” on the other side of pack territory by a trio of mentally unhinged males. Worse, one of said unhinged males was pointing her own rifle at her.
Pissing Shaya off even more, Amber was sitting opposite her in the exact same position. The only good thing about that was that the bitch had a broken leg. No, it wasn’t because she had tried to help Shaya after all. The trio had taken Amber so that she couldn’t alert anyone. They had even injected Amber with a drug that stopped her from shifting—the same drug they’d used in the game preserve. Had they known Shaya was a half-shifter, they would most likely have done the same to her.
Was Amber now on Shaya’s side? No, she was trying to bargain with the trio for her life, claiming she would heal their wounds if they agreed to free her. The bargaining didn’t appear to be working. Shaya wouldn’t have cared if it worked; the only thing she could think about was getting to Nick. But there were three of these shitheads and one of her. She had to wait for the right moment, or they would most likely put her unconscious again. She couldn’t escape if she was unconscious. And she would escape. It went in her favor that none of them knew she was a half-shifter. They didn’t know she was much stronger and faster than she looked, nor that the knot tying her wrists might not be as effective as they’d hoped.
Her dad had taught her the trick of freeing herself from knots a long time ago, but it was a little different trying to do it when it was a life-or-death situation. Just thinking about Nick unconscious had the adrenaline pumping more rapidly around Shaya’s body and her heart pounding even louder.
Stay calm, her father would have told her. Be observant. Okay. Well, two of the three males were human, they had all been visited by the Ugly Fairy—one was so ugly it was almost fascinating—and the one in the center was clearly the shifter behind the creation of the game preserve.
The trio hadn’t come into pack territory at the same entrance as the other humans, so Shaya could only guess that they had taken advantage of the pack being preoccupied during the attack to force their way through the gap Tao hadn’t yet had the chance to fully secure. Humans wouldn’t have stood a chance against it, but another shifter could.
“So, I was just wondering,” she began in a flat tone, “what’s the plan?”
Eyes the color of a dark storm landed on her, twinkling with malice. “Logan wants Nick to find you. He wants him to watch you die. After what Nick did to me, I like that plan.”
“What did Nick do to you?” He didn’t answer. She cocked her head at him, noticing he had a very chimp-like face. “Why do you hate shifters so much?”
“You wouldn’t understand. You wouldn’t understand what it’s like for me.”
God, he sounded like her mother. “Then tell me.” And keep your mind away from Nick.
His upper lip curled. “Imagine how it feels to have to share your own soul. Share it with an animal, no less—an animal that selfishly pushes its wants and instincts on you. You have to live in a pack with an Alpha for a dad—someone everyone looks up to, while they look down on you for not being as good as he is. Imagine how it feels to find that fate has dumped you with a true mate who is nothing but a slut. Yeah, that’s right, she imprinted on someone else, even had pups with him.
“The only
good thing about this life is the power and strength. I told my father to step down and give me his position, but would he? No. He said I didn’t have what it took to be an Alpha. So I did what had to be done—I killed him in his sleep. Did the pack accept me as their Alpha? No. They threw me out. As I had no place to go and no money, it was no wonder that I soon found myself in juvie. That was a hell like no other.”
“And that’s where you met Nick,” she surmised. She couldn’t recall Nick speaking of anyone he’d severely pissed off in juvie, though. Or anyone who resembled a chimp, for that matter.
“Speaking of Nick, he should be here soon. He’ll definitely come for you. I know that much.” He turned to the humans. “Where the hell is Logan?” They merely shrugged. “I’m going to take a look outside, see what’s going on.” To Shaya’s frustration, he disappeared out of the hut, closing the door behind him.
“What’s his problem with Nick?” she asked the two humans.
“That’s his business,” said the chubby compulsive spitter who would look right at home on a porch swing with a banjo.
Shaya released a sigh of frustration and turned to the gangly guy beside Chubby. “What did Nick do to him?”
Without moving his eyes from her breasts, Gangly absentmindedly replied, “Merrick just wants to make Nick suffer—it’s like a tit-for-tat thing.”
Merrick? That name certainly rang a bell. “But…Merrick’s dead. Nick challenged him in juvie; he killed him.” And he’d spent most of his life feeling bad about it.
“Obviously, he didn’t. I’m pretty sure Merrick would have left Nick alone if the game preserve hadn’t been found and Logan hadn’t been goading him.” Gangly shrugged carelessly. “In any case, he intends to make your mate suffer.”
“If you want Nick to suffer,” began Amber, “all you have to do is kill her. Let me go, and I’ll heal you.”
“You hadn’t really healed Nick at all, had you?” Shaya somehow knew. Amber’s shocked expression told her it was true. “I have to admit, it didn’t occur to me at first. You looked so genuinely devastated when he told his mom and Roni about the memory lapse. You even asked for the chance to heal him again. But you wouldn’t have truly healed him. No. Keeping him sick meant that you could keep him coming back to you, didn’t it?”
Amber’s expression turned somber. “It was the only time he’d really let me touch him. The only way to make him—the guy I love—need me.”
“That’s not exactly an excuse, sweetie. You kept my mate ill to the point that he thought he couldn’t claim me. But that was the whole idea, wasn’t it?” Before Amber could answer, Logan came bursting into the cabin, hobbling and bleeding, with Merrick close behind him.
“Nick’s unconscious,” Logan told them all. “I managed to get away while the shifters were concentrating on helping and healing each other. But it won’t be long before he wakes up. We need to be ready.”
Merrick retrieved a can of kerosene—kerosene?—from the floor.
“Remember,” said Logan, “don’t splash the hut. We don’t want the place to blow up or burn too quickly. Just dribble it around the perimeter of the hut. It’ll spread to the hut quick enough, but not so fast that Nick doesn’t get to hear, feel, and smell her burning to death.” With that, Logan followed Merrick outside, closing the door behind him.
Motherfuckers. Logan would know a lot about Nick’s past through his juvie records; he would know about the accident that killed his father and forced Nick’s wolf to surface prematurely. Yeah, if there was anything that would make Nick suffer, it was this. Fuck. That. It really was time to go. One half-shifter against two humans was much better odds than if Merrick and Logan had been standing there too.
“I’ll give you only one warning,” she told the two humans in her gravest voice. “Release me, or I will kill you.” Instead of heeding her warning, they both laughed. In fact, so did Amber. How dumb. Seeing that Gangly was still ogling her breasts, Shaya sneered at him. “Must you be a perv?”
He gave her another of his creepy smiles. “I’m just wondering what color your nipples are.”
She raised a brow tauntingly. “Why don’t you come over here and find out for yourself?”
“You know what, I think I will.”
If she had been calling his bluff, Shaya would have been panicking right about then. But she hadn’t been calling his bluff. She in fact wanted him to come to her, because what he didn’t know was that her wrists were no longer bound.
Fueled by her rage at what had happened to her mate, Shaya waited until he was close before supporting her weight on one hand as she sharply whipped up one of her legs and kicked the rifle out of his hands. Before he could react, she whipped up her leg again and booted him in the balls; he made a strange choking sound and fell to his knees. Abruptly, she snatched the knife her father had long ago given her that was tucked into her boot and speared it into his chest.
When a stunned-looking Chubby came charging at her, she rolled to the side and sliced both his Achilles tendons as he stumbled past. Like a sack of spuds, he fell to the ground, crying out. Rolling once again, she seized the rifle and twisted to see that Chubby was trying to crawl away. He froze when she cocked it and gave her a pitiful look. She shrugged. “I told you I’d kill you.” The bullet hit him dead-center in his forehead.
It was then that Merrick swung the door open. But she had already cocked the gun again, ready to shoot, and was aiming it as his head. “You should have run, Monkey Boy.” But the awkward bastard dove to the side, making the bullet skim his ear. “Fuck.” Then a wall of flames suddenly formed around the hut, and Merrick slammed the door closed. “Double fuck.” Before she could even think of acting, a hand shackled her ankle.
“You can’t leave me here,” growled Amber.
Shaya found she didn’t have an ounce of mercy for this person who had deliberately kept Nick ill, who had made her almost lose her mate. “Of course I can.”
“You bitch!”
“Personally, I think I’m more evil than that, but whatever. Give me one good reason why I should help you.”
Instead of answering, she yanked hard on Shaya’s ankle, making her lose her balance and crash to the floor. She lost her grip on the rifle, which went skidding away from her. “If I’m gonna die, so are you,” snarled Amber.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t her own life that Shaya was so frantic about saving. It was Nick’s. Knowing he was unconscious and hurt was making both her and her wolf panic like crazy. Shaya knew that if the bond had been fully developed, she could have used her own strength to bolster his, to help him wake up. Trey had done the same thing for Taryn during the battle with his uncle: He had surrendered to the bond while she was unconscious, and when the bond clicked into place, Taryn had quickly come around.
Since waking up in the hut, Shaya had been trying to do the same as Trey had, trying to surrender to the bond, but she had no idea how. Over and over she’d tried with no success. She knew what stood in the way—her trust issues, her need to feel indispensable to him, her worry that he would come to resent her submissive status. But, she suddenly wondered, were those things really that important to her? Or had she just been finding excuses all along to keep a distance between them?
Over the past few months, he had given her all the assurances she could have needed, hadn’t he? You’re stronger than anyone I know, he’d told her right before he claimed her, echoing every act that communicated he considered her as his equal. Repeatedly he had assured her, I don’t want anyone but you. and, thus, soothing her worry that her submissive status made her less desirable to him. She’d never forget when he said, My life’s worth shit without you in it. And then there was the, You’re indispensable to me—essential to me on every level.
He’d kept every promise, he’d gone at her pace, and he’d been as patient with her as she had needed him to be. Yes, he’d earned her trust with everything he said, with everything he did, with every promise he kept. She did trust him. And yet…the
bond wouldn’t snap into place.
Well of course it wouldn’t, she thought with a snicker. It had never really been her difficulty to trust at all, had it? Sure that had played a factor, but that hadn’t been the barrier between them. What had held her back all along had been fear—the fear of him leaving her, the fear of being alone, the fear of just what it would do to her to have to live her life without him being a part of it. And, most importantly, the fear of the power it gave him to admit to herself that she loved him. But clinging to that fear in order to protect herself wasn’t fair to either of them, nor was keeping those words from him.
Ironically, it had been fear that had held Nick back from claiming her at the very beginning, but he had let go of his fear, determined to not let her suffer for that fear. Now, she needed to let go of hers. And she found that she could.
It was not the scent of fire, smoke, and wood burning that made the gray wolf skid to a halt. It was the sudden bang in his chest and impact to his head. He did not fear either. There was no pain. Only the feel of his mate inside him: the feel of her heartbeat, the rate of her pulse. Neither was as strong as it should be. He took no time to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing their bond was now unbreakable. He needed to get to his mate.
With a number of wolves following, the gray wolf allowed the bond to lead him to her. Seeing the small building alight, his mind immediately flashed back to a distant, painful memory—one that brought with it fear, panic, desperation, and the feeling of being trapped. Those same feelings taunted the wolf now, making him hesitate, making him howl. But then he heard his mate’s voice, felt her sadness. She sensed his fear and wanted him to stay back. The wolf could not do that. She was his. She belonged to him. She needed to be safe. The sight of her in danger caused a different kind of fear—not the kind that made him hesitate, the kind that acted as fuel and made him act.