Table of Contents

Part 4: Bound

Chapter 1 ~ Reeve

Chapter 2 ~ Bettina

Chapter 3 ~ Conlan

Chapter 4 ~ Bettina

Chapter 5 ~ Reeve

Chapter 6 ~ Bettina

About the Author

Sneak Peek at Part 5

~ Getting closer, and yet further apart than ever before ~

Reeve ~ For years, I wanted only to keep my small pack of alpha males secret and safe. Then I found a curvy, smart-mouthed woman bitten by a rogue werewolf. I couldn’t leave her to die--and now I’m paying the price at the hands of a monster: half madman, half rabid animal. But I’ll do anything to protect my pack, even if it costs me my life. Or my wolf.

Bettina ~ I owe Reeve my life. More than my life--he was the first to show me the strength still hidden inside me. All I have to do now is let it out. But first, I have to get him back, and it’ll take all the power of the pack coming together as one...

HEART OF THE PACK is a paranormal shapeshifter BBW romance serial in seven parts. The stories contain adult language and graphic sexual situations. Rated M for mature and W for wild readers only.

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Copyright © 2015 by Elsa Jade

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as factual. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be scanned, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

Chapter 1 ~ Reeve

Everything hurt.

Watching Bettina peel out of the forest clearing in my Z4, one chrome rim bending in the slashed tire, had hurt like hell. Seeing three rogue werewolves give chase had wrung a ferocious scream from my throat, ripping past Lysander’s fingers clamped around my neck. The cry turned to a strangled laugh when she dropped my once-pristine coupe into gear and rabbited out of reach.

Out of my reach too.

But on her way to safety with my small, guarded pack. Whatever happened to me, they would take her in, protect her, treat her as one of us, even though the bond hadn’t locked.

A tentative connection had started to form between us when I followed her out to the alley behind the bar and hijacked the spread of the lupoviridae virus in her curvy, werewolf-bitten body. I had laid my scent on her—not to mention my saliva and semen. But her wolf hadn’t risen yet, and until it did, until it answered my claim, she was vulnerable.

As the Z4 slalomed out of sight, one of the pursuing wolves howled, a rising crescendo that shivered through the pine needles, promising the hunt was far from over. Though he did not answer the call, Lysander’s fingers bit into my carotid until my vision tunneled to black.

In my arrogance I’d forgotten my lush little German baker girl wasn’t the only one who was vulnerable…

~~~

When I came to, I had half a second to contemplate with some disbelief and not a little dismay that I wasn’t dead before a booted foot slammed into my side. A rib cracked like a rifle shot going off inside me, and agony exploded outward.

I curled inward and rolled away from a second blow. The werewolf swore, a guttural sound, as his boot whooshed over my head. He was half shifted, a dangerously unstable phase for a shapechanger; although it gave him more brute strength than his human skin alone, he’d sacrificed some bipedal balance. I would’ve laughed at him, but judging from the grating in my ribs when I moved, he’d landed a few solid kicks before I woke up.

My mind wallowed in a sea of red blood and black pain. Was Bettina here, seeing my humiliation? My whole naked body heaved in disgust at the thought. But no, she’d gotten away. I knew she must have, because if Lysander had her in hand, I’d be dead already.

Still, the memory of her anguished glance back was another vicious stab in my chest. Between the weakness of relief that she was gone and the hollow ache that I’d lost her, I didn’t move fast enough from the third strike. The werewolf’s boot smashed into my skull.

I might’ve blacked out, but only for a second before I heard a low, easy voice say, “Scratch. Enough.”

I sucked in a ragged breath, tasting copper and pine needles. Fuck, it was worse than a scratch. When I rolled to my back, the werewolf retreated with a glower made uglier by the puckered scar across the bridge of his nose, and I figured Scratch was his name.

Stepping around his henchwolf, Lysander peered down at me, hands in his pockets. His blond hair curled over a quizzical frown, as if he’d just found something strange and unpleasant at the tiptoes of his fancy shoes.

“Where did she go?”

“To my pack,” I told him, my voice still hoarse from his crushing grip. “Where you’ll never touch her again.”

“She is mine.” Lysander spoke slowly, as if I were a toddler who’d rudely taken his toy. “I made her.”

“You bit her,” I corrected. “The bond was not complete.”

“Because you interrupted.” His voice dropped a full octave, so low the reverberations grated in my broken bones. He huffed in a deep, animalistic breath that swelled his chest. “You came here and thought you could finish what I started, you and that little dog cowering inside you?”

Here? It was only then I realized his pack had dragged me back to the log cabin where Bettina and I had spent the night. While the virus burned through her body, scorching her inhibitions, I’d taken her on almost every piece of furniture in the place, hoping to erase the mark Lysander had left on her with my own.

I couldn’t smell anything past the taste of blood in my throat, but a sensitive nose might’ve caught the lingering scent of sex.

Very slowly, I lifted my gaze to his.

I smiled. “We both came, several times.”

His eyes gleamed stop-light red, and my heartbeat thudded hard, a warning from my deeper self. Not that I needed it. The bloodthirsty hue meant Lysander’s beast was lurking just below his skin. And fuck, he was powerful, wielding his alpha dominance like the moon mastering the tides. Unlike the hulk Scratch who held his wolf-man shape awkwardly, Lysander had balanced his two forms. He’d be able to call on wolf or man without a thought, shifting easily, each half of himself enhancing the other.

It also meant whatever human morals might have leashed him in this shape were annihilated by the beast’s atavistic drive to take what it needed. Or wanted.

My own wolf paced warily, whining for me to call it forward. But this wasn’t a fight for fangs and claws. I needed to keep Lysander talking, distracted, while my pack took Bettina out of harm’s way. Where that might be, I had no idea.

“Tell me where she is.” His alpha power blazed through his human skin and pulsed in his voice, mesmerizing, irresistible.

“Eh, no.”

Red eyes narrowed to slits. “I found this place. There is nowhere your pack can hide her from me.” He glanced past me. “Scratch. Hang him.”

My already damaged throat tightened, but ol’ Scratch leaned over me to reach for my wrists.

I let him grab hold. Using the leverage of my spine against the earth—and ignoring the shrieked protest from my ribs—I yanked him forward, flipping him over my knees.

He went down with a yowl until a faceful of loam shut him up.

It was a stupid move on his part. More so on mine. Four werewolves leapt to take his place, one to each extremity. I kicked one in the nose with my bare heel, to which he replied with a punch in my ribs. Within another handful of seconds, they had me spread-eagled in front of the very irate Scratch. He unspooled a length of old barbed wire that we normally kept tucked up under the porch for emergency repairs. The scar on his nose wrinkled around his snarl.

Knowing these vicious vagabonds had poked through every inch of our retreat, where my pack and I hunted in peace, where Bettina and I had come together, sent a flood of fury boiling through my veins. A crushed windpipe and broken ribs meant nothing compared to that invasion.

I heaved upward, my spine bowing off the dirt. My vehemence threw off two assailants, but three more piled on, and I knew a dozen more waited their turn. How could my small, cautious pack stand against these reckless monsters? The number of disaffected rogues Lysander commanded was swollen well past what could be kept secret; not that they cared as they left death and destruction in their wake. And now their weight, hot and raunchy with their bloodlust, pinned me to the forest floor. I lost sight of the cabin. The last little outpost of civilization on this part of Rogue Mountain might as well never have existed as we scrabbled like the animals we were.

Scratch got the wire looped around my wrist and pulled it taut. I hissed as the barbs sank into my flesh. One werewolf grabbed my other wrist while a second kicked my shoulder out of its socket.

Scratch grinned down at me as he laced my arms from elbow to wrist in barbed wire. “Not so tough now, huh?”

“Bring your face closer to my teeth and ask me again.” But my bravado meant even less than the fading memory of the pleasures I’d had here.

Lysander’s wolves hauled me to the deer hanging frame my pack almost never used. They ran a big hook between the wires that bound me and tossed the chain over the upper bar a dozen feet above the ground. Hoisting me high until my bare toes barely brushed the dirt, they left me dangling.

The wire cut into my forearms, threatening to shred muscle from bone. A werewolf could heal from almost anything, given enough time, but I couldn’t regenerate a lost limb. Not that I thought Lysander would give me time to heal even a hangnail. To take my weight off the wire, I held onto the chain, though the links bit into my fingers and my dislocated arm had no strength.

A hand on my straining shoulder brought me swinging gently around.

Lysander had a bone-handled pocket knife in his grasp. The blade glittered, silent testimony to its razor edge.

“Finally ready to get close?” I sneered. “Now that all the hard work is done.” Baiting him was even more stupid than wrestling with Scratch. If they left me alone—even for a minute, even with my broken ribs and dislocated shoulder—I was sure I could swing myself up to the hanging station crossbar and unhook myself. Shifting to wolf would let me slip out of the barbed wire, and I’d vanish into these forests I knew so well…

But every moment Lysander focused on me meant Bettina was farther from his reach.

“I don’t mind getting dirty,” he said. “Still, an alpha prime knows his place isn’t always at the front”—he set the point of the knife in the meat of my tensed pectoral over my heart—“but at the head.” He traced the blade lightly up my chest, pausing at the pulse point under my jaw.

Lifting my chin away from the knife, I couldn’t see down, though the scent of fresh blood sang a dirge in my head.

Warmth trickled down my chest. The cutting edge was so sharp I hadn’t felt the sting.

Despite the pain I knew was coming, a thrill of fatalistic victory surged through me, hot and bitter as burned coffee. Lysander had gone too far. The downside of letting the wolf ascend: it was all but impossible to turn aside from the kill. Alpha primes went out of their way to not cross paths, even in neighborly circumstances, since the urge to dominate too often ended lethally. I hadn’t been in the presence of another alpha prime since I inherited the empty mountain after my mother’s death and gathered my pack of lost and wounded males.

Who I might never see again, never touch again.

That unavoidable fact drained my momentary triumph. Unable to crane my neck any higher, I let the knife nick my jaw. Far less pressure than those rare occasions when I felt the need to shave before playing CEO of Rogue Mountain Industries, but steel grated on bone as the blade slid into my skin.

I kept my gaze fixed on Lysander’s, knowing the challenge of eye contact would snare him as tightly as the barbed wire held me. “I was taught”—as I spoke, each word cut me and sent a new streamlet of blood down my throat—“that an alpha prime is not at the front or the head of the pack, but at the center.” When the knife at my throat wavered, I flicked a glance from his wingtips to his blond hair. “I suspect you were taught nothing. There was no one to teach you. Am I right? I think you learned only to take, and that has left you with rogues and the dregs of broken packs. You tell yourself you lead an army, but I’m betting you spend less time looking forward than watching your back. That’s why you’re afraid to stop moving and truly make something. You just bite and run.”

The air around me shifted with the shocked, indrawn breaths of the half dozen wolves who’d brought me down, and I was sure the rest of Lysander’s pack was close enough to hear my criticism. I was mildly surprised he hadn’t slit my throat yet.

Maybe there was some humanity left in him still.

Then he lifted the knife higher, and eye to eye with his glaring red wolf, I realized he simply wasn’t done toying with me.

“I know what you are hoping.” The rumble of his voice held the wolf’s chest-deep growl, and his alpha dominance weighed against mine, seeking to crush body, will, and hope alike. “You think you will distract me while my prey escapes.”

Despite the pounding of my pulse that quickened the flow of blood from my wounds, I smirked. “Pretty sure she already did.”

“What makes you think force shifting the bitch is my only aim?” He lifted his blond head, nostrils flaring. “Maybe you’re right, and we should stop hunting. Maybe we’ve run it to ground and I’ve found what we want. We’ll stop…here. In this empty territory.”

“It’s not empty.” But a cold wash of memory seemed to turn my blood to ice. Because I remembered when it was deserted, after my mother died and I’d been too young and weak to hold the pack. To keep them alive, sane, and together.

I wasn’t young and weak anymore, but in some ways, I had even more to lose. This was my pack, my territory. Protecting it was my responsibility.

Failing again would mean my death, regardless of whether or not Lysander’s hands held the blade.

“I won’t let you hurt them.” At the conviction ringing in my voice, Scratch stepped up behind his master, hearing the threat.

“Maybe I won’t,” Lysander said. “Maybe they’ll join me. Or maybe I’ll rip them apart. Either way, the choice is not yours. No more than she is yours.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. Despite all we’d done, Bettina’s wolf had not risen to meet mine. “She won’t bond with a murdering rogue.”

He lifted one shoulder in a haphazard shrug. “She will. To save you.”

“Never—”

Before I could finish my oath, he plunged at me with the knife. The blade sliced down my arm from wrist to elbow, opening the vein. Blood sheeted down my strained biceps and over my ribs. I tried to swing away, but he slashed at my other arm. The gashes would have been fatal to a human and were nearly so for me. Only the barbed wire offered protection, forcing the knife to skip as it cut, leaving a dashed line of gaping wound and untouched skin quickly drenched in gore.

Just as Lysander had intended. Not to kill but to weaken. Drained of half my blood, I wouldn’t have the energy to shift and my pack link thinned to a rotted cobweb drifting in a far corner, nearly unreachable.

This time, Lysander pushed me away. Though I swung in a slow arc, my vision reeled, a narrowing kaleidoscope of towering trees and sky as my head fell back.

As if from a distance, Lysander’s voice followed me. “You were right, though, that I had no one to show me the alpha’s way. Until you. And now I will take your way and make it mine. All of it.”

I clamped down on the remnants of my lifelong link to my wolf, choking off the bond. Something squealed. Maybe the chain. Maybe the wolf.

Brutal, but necessary. I couldn’t let myself reach for my pack. If I did, I knew they would come—Mather and Conlan, Domingo and Lowe…and Bettina—and I wouldn’t let that happen. This was on me. Only me.

I closed my eyes and clenched my fists, sending a rush of blood from my arms. Then I twisted the link, severing it.

A desolate howl, a lonely descant of anguish a thousand times crueler than Lysander’s knife, cut off mid-note.

I was alone.

Chapter 2 ~ Bettina

For I didn’t know how long, I sat on the couch in Reeve’s beautiful but empty chalet with my head in my hands. From the kitchen, I could hear the murmur of masculine voices, punctuated by the occasional thump.

I wanted to thump myself. If I was going to be sacrificed for no reason, why hadn’t I just stayed with Reeve? Maybe he could’ve gotten away, if not with me than at least with his life.

Of course, if I’d stayed, I would never had met Mather and Conlan and let them…my mind hazed over the lusty details…while Lowe and Domingo had apparently enjoyed it all through their psychic link or whatever.

The backs of my knuckles, facing the fireplace, were warm, but nothing like the blazing heat of my hidden face. Reeve had said I was becoming a wolf. I wondered if he’d known I’d be a slutty beast.

“Bettina?”

I scraped my palms down my cheeks, trying to squish the mortification out of me as I looked up at Mather.

He stood between me and the fire, eclipsing the light, but I knew his vision was still keen. I hoped I managed a bland expression when I asked, “Are you going to try to talk me out of it?”

He crossed his arms over his chest, the leather vest creaking a protest. “No. It’s your choice, and a brave one.”

Great. Now I had a choice? Not with the bite, not with becoming a werewolf. No choice there. But with possibly risking my life? Sure, why not.

I really was throwing myself to the wolves.

I just wondered which ones would catch me.

“But we have a problem,” he said.

I twisted up one corner of my lips in an attempt at levity even though the rest of me wanted to run screaming into the night. Although that hadn’t worked so great last time either. “Only one?”

He didn’t even try to return the smile. “Conlan is afraid that Reeve might be…that Lysander may have done something already.”

A force much darker and colder than Mather’s shadow loomed over me. I clamped my hands together to stop them from shaking. “You think Reeve is dead?”

“No.” He took a long stride toward me and dropped to one knee in front of me. He enclosed both my hands in one of his, the subtle scrape of his scars over my skin a reminder of the harsh lives these males led. “No, I don’t think that. Conlan was the first to come here after the collapse of Reeve’s natal pack, so the two of them have a particularly close connection. But I think all of us would know if the link had been permanently shattered.”

I looked down at our threaded fingers, his long and artistic, mine peasant-stubby. We were so different, but the timbre of his voice when he said the link—almost worshipful—drew me in with a longing to belong.

“The pack bond,” I murmured. I still didn’t understand how it worked. Sort of mental but sort of physical too. I imagined it was like kneading dough, feeling for the union of flour, water, and salt, the sturdy strands forming. “Can you…can you figure out what’s wrong with him? If he’s hurt, or maybe where he is?”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Mather said. “The spirit of the wolf is very intuitive and sensitized, so the bond can seem almost psychic.” I jolted a little at his use of the word I’d thought earlier, even as he continued, “But it’s not exact or accurate every time, even when the bond is strong and centered. And now that Conlan has lost touch with Reeve…”

His grip on my hand tightened painfully, but I sensed he wasn’t aware of his telltale loss of control in that moment.

I matched his grasp, pound for pound, to bring him back. “What can we do?”

“Us, nothing, or so it seems.” Dark lashes lowered to half cover his gray eyes. “I’m hoping you might be the key.”

My stomach churned with a dull panic, and I swore I could hear the grinding sound of my stand mixer when the gears slipped. “But I’m not part of… I don’t feel it. The bond, I mean.”

“Not yet, I know. Until your wolf rises, you won’t. At least not in a way you can control. But Reeve’s wolf would’ve been reaching out to yours, and the link on his side was wide open, waiting. If you’d been able to shift, Lysander’s pack would’ve faced a force to be reckoned with. But it was too soon. Now the link on Reeve’s end is exposed, vulnerable, and we need your wolf to answer.”

There was a shrewd gleam in his gaze, and I was suddenly aware that he was older than the rest of this pack. Not so much in years—I guessed he had not quite a decade on Reeve—but in life experience.

I’d been through shit too, though, and I wasn’t going to be suckered into anything. I stared him down hard as I interpreted his unsaid request. “You want to force shift me.”

His expression twisted, and his grip abruptly loosened, so I knew he was aware of what he was doing now: what Lysander had wanted to do to me.

Except Mather was using human guilt and lots of words instead of simple werewolf violence. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

I yanked my hands loose from his. Away from his, my skin felt cold. I crossed my arms over my chest, my fingers curling inward. “So once again, not really a choice.”

“You could leave Reeve to die.” Mather’s deep baritone gave the pronouncement a horrible finality, like a bad movie trailer voiceover.

“You know I won’t do that.” I let the bitterness leach out in my words. “Why would I have come here at all if I wasn’t willing to try to get him away from Lysander?”

“Then let the wolf out,” Mather snapped, his vehemence driving me farther into the couch cushions. “I feel you holding back. When my mouth was on your breast, I felt your heart pounding and your soul yearning to soar, and yet you did not let her out.”

Despite his big body blocking the fire and the fear of Reeve’s imprisonment prickling like ice in my mind, my cheeks burned.

Almost as hot as other parts of me.

The conflicting storm of desire and panic that I’d stumble toward another bad choice shot forked lightning through my muscles and made me snarl back, “If it’s such a good idea to let the wolf out, how’d you get so many scars?”

He lunged to his feet. But that was as far as he went. He stared down at me with narrowed silver eyes.

Slowly he unzipped the front of his vest.

My uneven breaths caught in my throat, and I wanted to look anywhere but at him because I felt in some awful way that he was skinning himself in front of me.

The leather crumpled to the slate, the metal rivets clinking like tiny teeth.

He had a magnificent chest, broad pecs with flat male nipples over washboard abs wide enough I could lather a throw rug on him.

Certainly my carpet was getting a little damp.

But my gaze was locked on the half circle carved into his left breast.

A moon scar. It was no delicate tracing like mine. It was—or had been—a ragged gash, as if someone had tried to cut down all the way to his heart.

I realized my hand was over my lips, holding back a sympathetic cry. Unable to stop myself, I rose and reached out shakily to touch my fingertips to the nasty work. Though the wound was long healed, the edges were still harsh, a raised Braille map of pain and hatred. Whoever had marked him had wanted him never to forget and never to find peace.

I steadied myself to be sure my voice wouldn’t crack before asking, “Who—?”

“Doesn’t matter, not anymore.”

I dropped my hand but didn’t step back. “Showing me this doesn’t exactly reassure me about letting the wolf off its leash.”

“Wasn’t a werewolf who did this to me.” The glitter in his eyes was sharp as shards of silver bullets. “What matters is that Reeve took me in. He saved me, same as he meant to save you. We need more like him…more people like him. I won’t let Lysander take him from us.”

At the rock-solid resolve in his tone, I shivered. That sort of commitment was worth paying any price.

My shoulders sagged under the weight of what he was asking, much heavier than a bag of flour. And way messier if I carelessly dropped it.

Mather must have seen the wavering in my stance, because now his eyes glittered with triumph. “So if you want to get him out, then let the wolf out.”

I knew he was manipulating me, the son of a bitch—literally, apparently. He was playing on what I’d promised, but that didn’t change a damn thing.

Of course, it didn’t change me either.

“I don’t know how,” I whispered.

He reached for my hand and lifted it to his bare chest, flattening my fingers over the scar. I felt the thunderous boom of his heart under my palm.

“We’ll find her, little one,” he said. “She’s in there. She always was.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him. How could I when I thought of all the mistakes I’d made and conflicts I’d slunk away from, watching Mom take hits from a man who said he loved her, letting Tommy convince me I was nothing. Hell, the only reason I was here at all was because I’d run away from Reeve.

Something had to change.

All I could say was, “Show me.”

Leaving the vest on the floor, he led me through the chalet to a pair of closed double doors and swung them both open to reveal a vaulted master suite. He touched the light switch, and rope lights set into the step-back ceiling came on, the mellow glow of the many little bulbs softening but not eliminating the shadows. Like the great room, floor-to-ceiling windows dominated the room, though the view was only night-black forest. Trees pressed close enough that the light falling through the glass touched the wet pine needles with gold.

But my gaze was drawn to the big bed angled past the window. Part of me softened like the shadows and part of me prickled like the pine needles.

I glanced at Mather. “What are we doing here?”

“This is Reeve’s space. I’m hoping you might feel more of the connection with him here.”

That seemed suspicious to me. But I couldn’t find a reason to argue either. I stalked forward, admittedly curious.

Like everything else about these males, the room was spartan, stripped to wood and glass except for the bed which was wider than a California king.

And except for a picture frame on the bedside table. It was wood and glass too, but framed in the center…

Oh, here was the tenderness missing elsewhere.

It was Reeve and his mother. He was young, probably seven or eight, but his shaggy dark hair and the wry grin were unmistakable. The tall, broad-shouldered woman with her hand on his head had the same grin angled down at him. It was a candid shot, neither of them looking at the camera. Ranged on either side of them were a half dozen men with another half dozen more distant in the composition. One of the men, presumably, was his father, although it wasn’t clear from position or body language which it might be. They were all his pack.

I was supposed to be thinking about Reeve, but instead I focused on his mother. A wolf-born female, like me. I wondered if she was scarred. She wore a flower-print dress—like something I might’ve picked out, actually, in a size or two bigger—with a scoop neck, but she was too far away to make out such a small detail.

Well, small detail except that it marked her as werewolf.

I wished there was another picture of her as her wolf.

Not that I really needed it. I could imagine well enough: she’d be strong and decisive and capable. Like I was with my bakery, except she had that confidence with werewolves and I only had it with Spritzkuchen donuts.

In the rest of my life, I was running scared. No wonder the wolf was running faster yet, beyond my grasp.

Carefully, I put the picture back. “Maybe I can’t do this after all.”

“After all what, lovie?”

I glanced over my shoulder to see Conlan leaning in the doorframe opposite Mather.

“After what?” he repeated. “After you thought about how hard and dangerous it would be? After you teased us with breakfast at midnight? After we got our hopes up just enough that it’d hurt more when we come crashing down?”

I flinched as his voice rose.

Mather reached across the space between them to put his hand on Conlan’s shoulder. “That’s enough of that—”

“Not even close to enough,” Conlan snarled as he wrenched away. “Remember, she’s the one who came looking for us.” He turned the fury on me. “Well, now that you’ve had a little look-see, you’ve decided it’s too much? You think you can just run away?”

“Actually, she can,” Mather said. “And I wouldn’t blame her if she did, the way you’re going on.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t blame her at all, if it was us she was running from—big, bad wolves that we are. But it’s not, I think, is it, lovie? It’s not us you’re running from at all.”

“Shut up,” I whispered savagely. “You don’t get to judge me. You don’t even know me.”

“Maybe I don’t, but neither do you. And that’s exactly what you’re running from.”

“Easy for you to say.” I stalked toward him. “A strong, sexy male with money”—I swept one hand out behind me to indicate the beautiful chalet—“not to mention a posse plus a wolf to back him up.” I ended by poking my finger into his chest.

He grabbed my wrist. “And I didn’t start with any of that.” He grinned down at me, green eyes narrowed. “Except for the sexy part.” He reeled me a step closer. “But I went after what I wanted.”

“I have what I wanted,” I said. “A place that’s all mine doing what I’m made to do, and plenty of people willing to pay for what I can give them to make them happy.”

“And are you happy?” He curled one arm behind my back, pressing me up against his chest. “Those people pay for what you give them, but do they want who you are? You were alone, lovie. And wolves aren’t meant to be alone. It makes us crazy and mean.”

Well, I was definitely crazy, because my pulse was racing. Not from fright, but excitement. I knew the power in those muscles, the way he’d yanked me out of the truck so roughly, and then in the great room, he’d held me so gently from behind. But when he was standing next to Mather, he’d seemed young in a way that made me underestimate him. I couldn’t anymore, not with my fingers spread across his wide chest, his knee wedged between my thighs. There was an edge to him both dangerous and tempting, as if challenging me to step to the verge of a mountain to see what lay beyond.

Dizzy with vertigo, I fisted my hands on the well-worn cotton of his Rancid T-shirt, the album title scrawled out across his belly.

“And Out Come the Wolves,” I read aloud.

He tangled his fingers in my hair and tilted my head back to stare down at me. His pale green eyes glowed with fey inner flames. “They were never really that far away.”

He lowered his platinum head.

Good thing I had a tight hold of his shirt, or my buckling knees would have sent me to the floor. He kissed me like the music he had on his shirt, like wolves must hunt: raw and fast and take-no-prisoners. He angled his insistent mouth across mine, his lips soft and hard at the same time, a confusing contradiction that made my senses spin. The urgency in his hands roaming down the curve of my waist to my hips reminded me of Reeve when he was about to climax, and for a heartbeat, my shame surged back in an ugly mudslide of doubt and self-recrimination. What was I doing with all these other men—werewolves?

I opened my mouth to ask the plaintive question—as if they had an answer for me—and Conlan’s tongue was in my mouth and his breath halfway down my throat before I could form the first syllable. One wicked stroke wiped the objection from my lips.

His arms around me were hard and unyielding, holding me together despite the tremors still wracking my knees. I wanted his bravado—his cockiness, not just his cock. I wanted it for my own.

Had I been happy? I couldn’t have answered him, because I just didn’t know. I had cups and pounds and profit margins, but I’d long ago stopped using happiness as a measure of my days.

That realization put the madness of the last two days into stark relief.

Was I happy to get bitten by a werewolf? No. But what might come out of it…

At least I would be coming.

With a moan, I pushed up on my toes and kissed him back with all my might and all my longing.

My enthusiasm jolted him back a half step before he steadied himself.

No, it was Mather who held us both. Mather, who had taken the refinement I caught glimpses of in Reeve and honed it to a poetic, deadly brink. The glitter in his gray eyes as he loomed behind Conlan was starlight and steel. And a desire that went deeper than all of space or death itself. He had the insights I needed to survive.

More than to survive. To live.

For the first time since Reeve had told me about his werewolves, I almost got what it meant to be pack: each of them different but reflecting the others, balancing the entirety in a flowing dance to which I, so often alone and always lonely, had never learned the steps.

And they could give me what I’d been missing.

With Conlan’s shoulder in his grip and his other hand half lifting me off the floor, Mather steered us toward the bed. He ripped back the covers as Conlan swept me up in his arms.

“Focus on Reeve,” Mather urged. “He tried to reach out to you but couldn’t find your wolf. Now you need to reach out to him, let him feel us, let him know we are coming.”

Conlan laid me down on the bed, the covers heaped around me in snowy-white mounds and the crisp sheets cool under my clenched fists. But when the two males stared down at me, my body was hot, so hot.

I wondered how their imprisoned and probably wounded alpha prime was going to feel about this sort of coming.

But I was too far gone for human morals to intervene. The part of me that had thought this was shameful seemed far away and fading fast, like when the scorching sun was eclipsed by the full moon. The sensation was too rare and beautiful for me to deny. Reeve had said the effects of the virus would wax and wane, and this time I knew it was hitting me hard. I felt as if I was too big for my body, not a sensation I’d ever felt before, as if I had too much blood racing through my veins, my heart and pussy swelling with need, my throat aching with the urge to cry out. Not in words, but in some wild song.

That was why Reeve and Conlan had band T-shirts, I surmised hazily; not because of silly plays on wolfy words, but because it gave them pleasure to sing together, voices blending in one song. The thought of Reeve out there, silenced and alone, enraged me.

“Shh,” Conlan murmured. “Let us do the dirty work. You give him the desire to live, no matter what, to come back to you, to us.”

And they both fell on me like…well, like a pack of wolves. A pack of two, but I thought I could almost sense Domingo and Lowe in their touch. Domingo with his suspicion and simmering rage, and Lowe, wordlessly tender. I suddenly understood how they represented other facets of Reeve, of the pack. Of me. Only together did we become whole.

Certainly it seemed like more than two pairs of hands that stripped me bare in seconds.

My naked skin blazed with sensitized nerve endings, every scrape of calloused male fingertips making me twist with wanting. The virus multiplying? Or maybe just Conlan’s taunt about loneliness. For this moment, I was not alone.

Mather had already been bare-chested, and I thought I was over the shock of his brawny physique with the heartbreaking scars. But when he skimmed out of his jeans, I caught my breath again. The muscled cut of his groin arrowed down to frame the jutting magnificence of his cock, wreathed in thick veins down to the nest of black curls.

For his sake, I was relieved to see no scars along his rod. I held my hand out to him, my gaze locked on his, and he sheathed himself in my grip with a wrenching groan. A slippery bead of pre-ejaculate smoothed over my fingers, and I pumped him again, breathing the musky perfume of his desire.

I’d already seen Conlan’s penis, but as he prowled naked on all fours across the mattress toward me, I admired him again, lean and long where Mather was massive, blond against black.

I gripped the taut globes of his ass, and he rubbed his erection over the soft skin of my belly. I half turned to deemphasize the overly generous mound, but he pinned me.

“Trying to get away?” he growled, his fingers sinking into the flesh of my hip.

“Just…” The sting of shame made me bite my lip. “I’m too…much.”

“Of course you’re a big girl, lovie.” He leaned down to nuzzle my navel. “Where else would you keep all the energy to shift?”

I stared at him suspiciously. “I’ve been fat all my life, and I’ve never shapeshifted.”

“You will,” Mather said.

I managed to spread my disbelief between them equally. “So where are your love handles?”

“Wherever you hold us.” Conlan grinned at me, and the look was decidedly wolfish.

I almost laughed, but at that moment Mather lifted my chin to stare down at me. “Your wolf doesn’t care about what she looks like. She only cares for what she feels, what she can do with her body. Now it’s time for you to feel. And let us all feel it with you. With you at our center, we can reach out and find Reeve.”

He kissed me with the finesse Conlan hadn’t bothered with, sucking my lower lip gently between his, tracing his tongue across the seam of my mouth until I opened for him. I tasted the powdered sugar and the ripe pear and something nowhere near as civilized underneath. I tilted my head back to give him better access, thrusting my bare breasts higher.

His big hand cupped under the heavy flesh, lifting me higher yet. When his thumb played over the sensitive areola, I squirmed, feeling the moisture welling out of my pussy.

I almost came right then when a hot, wet tongue engulfed my stiffening nipple. Conlan licked us both, my peaked flesh and Mather’s toying fingers. I let out a sobbing breath, wracked by too much sensation. How could I focus on Reeve when they were making me feel too much?

But they were just getting started.

Their hands hopscotched down my body: Mather petting with my hair and hefting my tit, Conlan tweaking my other nipple and teasing his fingers through my pubic hair. Every little tug in the vicinity had my clit thrusting outward for attention. My slit wept with wanting more. Had I always been this greedy? I closed my eyes at the sensory overload, and for a fevered moment, I imagined Reeve with us, his icy-blue eyes blazing with hunger.

Someone finally slid one long finger into my pussy, then another, the base of both knuckles bumping up against the engorged little nub of my clit. I clamped my thighs around the hand, trying to drive him deeper.

“So eager,” Mather said, his smooth voice roughened as if he felt me closing around his cock. “Do you feel the orgasm tightening inside you, wanting to come roaring out?”

I nodded jerkily, then found my voice. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, make me come.”

“That is what the wolf will feel like when she rises,” he continued, ignoring my plea and stroking me again. “The rush, the pleasure…”

“But a thousand times more,” Conlan said. “Because it doesn’t have to stop.”

“Don’t stop,” I begged.

Mather thrust his fingers upward, rubbing on the sweet spot. “Is this what Reeve did to you?”

“He…he came inside me.”

“Is that what you want again? Do you want him to come inside you?”

I thrashed against his hand, caught between abject pleasure and abrupt denial at the reminder of what I’d done—what I was doing—but Mather fisted his fingers in my hair, bending my head back so I was staring up into his glittering gray eyes.

“He’s not here,” I hissed. “Reeve isn’t here because I was too afraid to stay and save him. I’ll never be a wolf because I’m a chicken.”

Mather smiled, his full lips softening with such compassion I wanted to cry. “Reeve’s not right here,” he conceded, “but he was in you, and a thread of him is wound through us. That’s the thread we’re going to follow to find him and bring him home.”

Home. The bakery was my home. And I loved it. But…I wanted more. And now I had a chance for so much more, in my hands, right now.

I just had to take a chance and believe, in what they held out to me and what I might be.

I arched my neck, lifting my lips to Mather’s kiss, and splayed my knees in wanton submission. Conlan’s heat and bulk settled between my thighs. He feathered me open with his fingers, and the touch of cool air on my wet, swollen folds made me buck.

Mather trailed his lips down my carotid, stopping to nip at the bang of my pulse above my collarbone. He followed the heave of my breasts to the moon tattoo and tongued the old scar. I flattened my palm over his breast where the ragged half circle had been carved down to bone. He shuddered, and his teeth closed on my nipple, hard enough that I cried out.

Just as Conlan thrust into my core. The hot brand of his cock stretched me, my body eagerly welcoming the intrusion. I set my heels against the mattress and bowed up into him. With a breathy grunt, he anchored his hands around my hips and impaled me again. The lush stroking and the almost-pain of the bite swirled in my head. I was gasping, clutching at Mather’s dreads and Conlan’s ass. I needed them so bad. If only…

They whipped me higher yet, and every muscle in my body yearned for release, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, not when Reeve wasn’t here, because I’d left him behind. I didn’t deserve this overwhelming pleasure, when he was alone. I yearned to have him here, with us, right now, to make everything perfect, all of us one…

My fists clenched to push them away. I dragged open my dazed eyes to explain we had to stop. But then everything stopped as I gazed down at our wicked tableau.

In that frozen heartbeat, it was Reeve with me, his body leaner than Mather’s but bulkier than Conlan’s, his dark hair and icy-blue eyes achingly familiar though we’d only had hours together. Over the unknown distance, our pulses synced, the waves of our blood and breath in harmony. I knew he was watching us, not with accusation or hatred, but with a wicked grin.

“Save some for me,” he murmured in my ear. And I swear I felt ghostly lips brush my temple.

The heartbeat finished with a boom, and I spasmed in the most powerful orgasm of my life. It ripped through me from pussy to throat and out along every limb, gutting me. But the words lingered in my head. Save…me.

I might have howled.

When my vision cleared—or maybe I should say when the vision passed—I realized it was Mather arched over me, his huge scarred arms framed to either side of me, shaking with his own orgasm.

I had no idea when that had happened. I just blinked up at him. Conlan leaned over from behind me to kiss me upside down. Just a brush of his warm lips; it was a sweet kiss.

“I felt him,” he said. “The link wasn’t strong, definitely no way to track him, but Reeve is alive.”

Mather eased out of my flesh with a slick, wet sound, and I couldn’t hold back a whimper of loss. He cupped my cheek and brushed his lips over my forehead. “Thank you, little one.”

This time, I didn’t object to the endearment. Because that was what it felt like; not a diminishment or a lie. At least for that moment of finding his alpha prime, I was dear to him.

The three of us sprawled across the bed, still too warm and sweaty to make use of the covers. So when Domingo poked his head through the door, he got an eyeful.

He didn’t even blink. “Lysander just called on Reeve’s cell.” His gaze flicked to me. “He offered to make a trade: our prime for one bitten female.”

I swallowed. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him to go fuck himself.”

“You what?” I half shrieked. All three of us sat bolt upright. I hardly even noticed how my boobs bounced everywhere with three bodies scrambling in the bed. “You said you agreed with rescuing Reeve!”

“Relax.” Domingo gave me a little leer before tossing the phone to Mather. “This is where you call him back and tell him I was out of line and will be disciplined but you’re in charge. Con, maybe you could make some yelping noises in the background. You’re good at that.”

Conlan flipped him a middle finger.

Slowly, my brain clicked back on, gears coming together. The brazenness of the wolf receded, and I grabbed a sheet. Already, I missed that sense of visceral power, but I needed my human capacity for planning. “You want Lysander to think Reeve’s pack is coming apart,” I said. “Clever. You know, my grandmother taught me to play chess.”

Domingo tilted his head. “Is that a challenge?”

“Unless you’re afraid of getting your chess kicked by a girl.”

He sketched a short bow. “The first move is yours.” He withdrew from the room.

Mather had gotten up and was pulling on his jeans, but I curled against Conlan for another moment, reluctant to flaunt my body in front of them without the moon madness on me. “What’s his deal?” I murmured.

“Dom?” Conlan rubbed his cheek on my hair. “Not my story to tell. But he was hurt. Bad. Down to the wolf. It’s not you he’s mad at. It’s…everything else, so it’s hard for him to trust anymore. That’s why the first move will have to be yours. In all ways.”

I pulled back from him, putting space between us. “Actually, I don’t usually sleep with every guy I meet.”

His green eyes narrowed into a possessive glare. “Good thing for those other guys.”

Mather stood at the window, the phone to his ear. “Lysander.”

Chapter 3 ~ Conlan

Bettina and I both stiffened.

Well, I was still partially stiff anyway. Watching Mather bang her had left me spurting into my own hand a second time, and I was still wanting more.

Because it was kind of hot watching the big man put on his alpha wolf.

“We have something you want,” he told the psycho on the other end of the line. Even my acute hearing couldn’t make out Lysander’s answer, just the deep rumble of his voice. “That asshole don’t speak for me, and now I’m telling you the way it’s gonna be.”

He’d shifted his voice to the hard slur of the streets. Ooh, bad news for Lysander when Mather channeled his thug side. He didn’t talk about his past, but I knew his old-school street cred went all the way to the bone.

No wannabe walked away with scars like that.

“Meet us at the abandoned road maintenance shed off 199 at Rogue Creek,” Mather growled. “You bring him, and we’ll bring the bitch.” He cast an apologetic glance at Bettina.

She blinked at the contrast between his vicious tone and puppy-dog eyes. Well, a two-hundred-pound-plus puppy dog.

“The shed is deep in our territory,” I told Bettina quietly. “Psychological advantage. Not that Lysander’s pack cares much for respecting boundaries. More importantly, it’s a ways off the main road, so whatever goes down…”

“You still keep your secrets.” Her voice was low, like mine. “I wish we could call in the National Guard.”

“You got us, luv,” I boasted.

“Lysander has a dozen more.”

Yeah. There was that. “The tighter quarters will help balance the difference in numbers. And we have some other surprises.”

She just shook her head, watching Mather who let the phone fall to his side. The call was clearly over.

“At dawn,” he said. “Two hours. Lysander obviously wants the time to scope it out and get his people in place. Hopefully that’ll distract him and give Reeve a chance to heal somewhat.”

Bettina paled. “Heal? From what?”

“Whatever nasty things Lysander did to him.” I looped my arm around her waist while Mather explained gently, “Lysander would’ve done his best to put Reeve out of commission. Can’t have a powerful, unlinked alpha prime in the middle of his pack without everyone getting restless.”

Bettina leaned into my side, though I didn’t think she was aware of it. “But he’s alive. We felt it.”

“He’s alive.” Remembering the flash of connection we’d all experienced, I gave her a comforting squeeze. “And whatever Lysander might’ve done, werewolves heal fast.”

Mather gave a decisive nod. “He’ll be waiting for us.”

“Reeve or Lysander?” I asked.

“Both,” Mather said.

Bettina hunched her shoulders, her gaze fixed on her bare arm where the mark of werewolf teeth still scored her tender skin. “Do we trust Lysander to play by the rules?”

“Of course not,” I told her. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, we play dirty too.”

~~~

After bashing out the worst of the dents in the door of Reeve’s Z4, I helped Domingo and Lowe load our arsenal into both vehicles. Werewolves were big, tough, and mean, but still mortal. So the weapons we packed were made to take down big, tough, and mean. And crazy.

“Lysander is definitely crazy to try this,” I muttered. “Or maybe we are. He has to know we’ll fight to the death to keep what’s ours.”

Lowe grumbled under his breath in agreement.

Domingo lashed the long duffel bag to the bed of the truck, zipper facing up for quick access. “Us fighting to our deaths is just fine with him. He can lose half his people and still outnumber us. And once he has a wolf-born female—and our territory—he’ll have no trouble luring followers to his side.”

I shook my head. “Who would stay with him? He is worse than…” Well, I didn’t want to get into how I rated worse than. “He’s like one of those monsters of old.”

Domingo paused, his hands resting on the weapons. “I’ve known werewolves like Lysander. He might be a monster, but he’s a powerful one. He’s made a place for his wolves to belong. A place they needed, desperately.” He raised his bitter dark eyes to me. “You can’t know what that’s like, to need a place to be, even if it’s a bad place. To be wanted, even though the person wanting you has bad intentions.”

I looked away from him, focusing on the cold, dark silence of the woods.

Because of course I knew what that was like. Didn’t everybody?

We returned to the house that felt eerily empty even though not much had changed. I knew there’d been a lot of damage done when Reeve’s mother died and the pack disintegrated. And I knew he’d burned most of what was left. Even when he’d brought the rest of us in, we’d never gotten around to doing much with the place, because, well, bachelor werewolves.

Now there was the soft blanket on the couch and the smell of brown sugar in the kitchen. But without her there…

A flicker through the great room window caught my eye, and I walked around to the back patio. The stamped concrete pad was a big stepping stone out to the small meadow frequented by hawks hunting voles and sometimes by deer and elk. Hunted by us. But right now, only Mather and Bettina stood out here.

She turned, and my tongue might’ve flopped out of my mouth.

Good thing my zipper was up, or my dick’d be poking out too.

Her jeans, which I’d laundered so carefully this afternoon, were ripped to pieces. The white length of her thigh showed through the rent in the front, and her ass cheek peeked out the tear in the back. Despite the bite of the winter night, she had on only a wife-beater, shredded short in front to expose the tidy dip of her waist and the lush curve of her hip. And she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her hardened nipples poked through the thin white cotton, the darker whorls of her areola clearly visible.

It took me a good five seconds to actually notice the gun in her hand.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m dead. That must be why I’m seeing an angel.”

“A dirty angel.” She showed off the smudges of charcoal across her white skin.

I leered at her. “My favorite kind.”

“Lysander expects to make her a slave,” Mather said. “So that’s what he’ll get. Except this one’s a rebel.”

The mere thought of Lysander laying eyes—much less hands—upon Bettina made my jaw harden to concrete. I had to break it out to ask, “You ever fired one of those, lovie?”

“I’ve lived in Rogue Pass my whole life.” She sighted the gun toward the trees, her stance square and steady. “My grandmother taught me on a .22.”

“Not the same as a pistol,” I said. “And target practice isn’t the same as shooting a man.”

“Lysander is not a man.” Her jaw was almost as hard as mine as she checked the safety. She thrust the gun into the waistband at the small of her back and flipped the drape of the ripped shirt over it. Streaks of charcoal marred the white and disguised the outline of the grip. “He’s a rabid beast, and he needs to be put down.”

I inclined my head. She wasn’t getting any argument from me.

Since I doubted I’d win.

Bettina grabbed her hoodie from one of the Adirondack chairs facing out toward the meadow and the forest beyond. Not that any of us sat in them much, but they gave the impression of contented relaxation that I could almost picture. It had been that idyllic for Reeve when his mother was the center of the Rogue Mountain pack. He’d admitted to me once—after too many beers, which was saying a lot for a werewolf—he wasn’t sure he could live like that again, because losing it again would be too hard. I’d been so happy to have anyplace at all that I hadn’t questioned his decision.

And now I wondered if we’d ever again enjoy the peace of our mountain with our alpha prime. I didn’t realize I’d made a low sound of distress under my breath until Bettina turned to stare at me.

Her brown eyes flickered with restless sparks of gold deep inside as she slung her sweater around her shoulders. “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

She marched off without waiting for us.

I side-eyed Mather. “Damn, she’s amazing.”

He was staring after her. “She is. And Lysander can’t have her.”

“Well, fuck no. Duh.”

He turned to look at me, his expression even more vicious than when he’d been talking to Lysander, although his voice was as cultured as always. “I mean to say, under no circumstances can she fall into his clutches.”

I stiffened. A helpless fury tightened my gut, like hundreds of rubber bands around a watermelon, waiting to burst; it was a sensation I’d long ago told myself I’d never feel again. “If you think we’re going to let that happen—”

“We might not have a choice.”

“Then we run,” I snapped. I couldn’t take even one more rubber band. “Reeve would be the first to tell us to go.”

“Go where?” For the first time, something like desperation tinged the big man’s voice. “Have you been here so long you’ve forgotten what it’s like out there for a lone wolf?”

If the stakes were lower, I might have tried to tease him out his funk, maybe nipped at his ass until he chased me down. For reasons he preferred to keep to himself despite my nosy questions, he didn’t shift often. I thought it made him forget the live-in-the-moment power of his wolf. “We wouldn’t be alone,” I reminded him. “We’d have each other. And her.”

“She’d hate us if we took her from everything she knows, if Reeve died when she’d been given a second chance to do something, anything. There’s no way she’d fulfill the bond with us under those conditions. We’d be no better than Lysander and his rogue pack.”

“At least she’d be alive,” I snarled. “At least you wouldn’t be telling me we might have to kill her rather than let her fall into the wrong hands.”

“Do you think she’d want to live under him?”

The rumors of Lysander’s rogue pack swept through my head in a filthy tide. A tide I knew too well as it had washed me out of the last place I tried to call home. “No.”

“No. We have nowhere to run. We can only fight. She knows that.” His fierce expression softened. “When her wolf rises, she will be mighty indeed.”

Or we’d all be dead.

Chapter 4 ~ Bettina

The gun poked into my spine like an accusing finger as we cruised down 199 toward the rendezvous. I wished I’d kept it in my hoodie pocket until we got there, but it was impossible to know what would happen, and the moment the trucks stopped, I needed to be ready to play my part.

“Damsel in undress,” Mather had said as he ripped my jeans. “This is a pack of moon-mad wolves who’ve probably not touched a woman in a very long time. You will slay them with your beauty alone.”

Was that supposed to be better than slaying them with bullets? I wasn’t feeling beautiful at all. I was feeling half naked and exposed, and even with the truck heater running high, I was cold, so cold.

Was the werewolf virus on the wane as the sun was coming up? I had felt almost invincible with Mather and Conlan draped around me, their powerful bodies moving with mine. And when I’d touched Reeve’s awareness, wherever he was… In that moment, everything had seemed destined to work out. Wasn’t I too old to believe in fairy tales? And anyway, as Oma would have reminded me, where we came from, all the old fairy tales ended with the adorable children being eaten.

I tried to tell myself I was only feeling lost because the thick trees still kept the road in shadow, and the trucks were traveling with headlights off. Mather and Lowe were in Reeve’s sports car ahead of the truck with me, Conlan, and Domingo. I supposed their wolfy eyes could see well enough even though the sky was still that deep blue hue of dawn.

“Oh damn.” I fumbled in my pocket. “I forgot…”

From the front seat, Domingo asked, “Hot date?”

“More a semi-warm date.” I pulled out my phone and dialed.

“Bettina,” Conlan started in a warning voice. “You can’t—”

I waved him off. “Hey, Nickie. I’m so sorry I didn’t call you earlier, but I’m not going to be in to work today. Yay, right? Cat’s away and the mice can play. All the ordering is done, but if you and Sheba would please feed the mother and start tomorrow’s dough. Don’t leave the loaves by the oven when it’s hot, okay? You know this, sorry, sorry.” I bit my lip, thinking. “Also, please call Carmen and tell her I’m still getting checked out; she’ll explain what’s up. I’ll call you all…later, and make sure everything’s going okay.”

A hysterical giggle welled up in my throat, choking me. Right, everything was going great. I was off to a werewolf battle, but at least the town of Rogue Pass would have its cupcakes.

“Okay,” I said again. “I think that’s everything for now. Love you guys.” Damn, I wished I hadn’t said that. I mean, I said it to them when I gave them their end-of-the-year bonuses, but they’d be worried that I was saying it now. “And don’t lick the beaters,” I added hastily. “At least not when they’re running.”

I hung up before I said something really worrisome. Something like save me. Not from the wolves, exactly, but from myself.

Too late, too late. The words spun around my head with every rotation of the tires, as we got closer to Rogue Creek.

Conlan slung his arm over the seat to look back at me. “You’re gonna have to let me try some of your sweets. I’ve always loved sticky buns.”

I gave him an arch glance. “I don’t let just anyone frost my muffins.”

Domingo choked on something.

Before Conlan could try to distract me again, the truck tires hit gravel as Domingo turned off 199 onto the service road. Though the truck had to slow, my heart sped up a hundred times as fast.

Conlan reached for my hand and wrapped his fingers around my wrist, giving me a light but no-nonsense tug. “We’ve been over the plan,” he said. “But just remind me, what are you going to do if shit goes bad?”

“Bad?” I said with a squeak. “Worse, you mean. I’m supposed to run for the shed.”

He frowned. “Supposed to?”

“Do you really think I’m going to believe a shed will be better than the Little Pigs’ houses of straw and sticks?”

He raised my hand to his lips and nipped my knuckles. “It’ll give you a few seconds. And that might be all we need.”

I nodded, my gaze fixed on his white teeth against my skin, wondering where else he could put that mouth… Apparently, I was so scared I couldn’t even be scared anymore.

Domingo glanced in the rearview mirror. “We’ll be right there with you.”

Alive or dead? I didn’t want to know.

Maybe I did still have enough sense to be scared.

What little pre-dawn light had brightened 199 was lost as we cruised down the gravel service road. There were trees on only one side, though. The other side was clear cut with a sprinkling of bare, spindly bushes taller than the replanted saplings. It looked—and felt—desolate.

Mather pulled the first truck off the road between two low hillocks, one of smashed-up asphalt and rubble, the other of gravel. Tufts of grass gave the hills a prickly outline. Kind of like the hair on the back of my neck was doing.

Domingo followed the Z4, but when Mather’s brake lights came on, he spun our truck in a tight circle, pointing part way back the way we’d come. He hit the high beams, flooding the area with light. I thought I saw lean shapes dissolve back into the shadows—my hair wasn’t so much prickling as stabbing me in the back of the neck now—but I couldn’t be sure.

As per the plan, Conlan jumped out of the truck, a rifle in his hands. He took up a guard post at my door. Mather was already out of the other car, Lowe at his side in wolf form.

I desperately wished I could have seen him change, just to have that little reminder that my guys were as tough as the bad guys. He was a lovely thing, long legged and sleek, his golden eyes flashing like miniature suns.

And he was going into battle because of me.

My heart was smashing against my ribs so hard I thought I might throw it up. I reached for the door handle.

“Stick with the plan,” Domingo said in a growl. “If they don’t produce Reeve, we’re out of here.”

“How many do you see?” I strained my eyes out to the darkness beyond the circle our light had cleared.

“Three wolves on the piles, plus three in skin, probably armed. I’m guessing a couple extra I can’t see because it only makes sense to take the high ground. Which leaves a few to a handful unaccounted for, depending on how true the rumors about the pack size are.”

“Plus Lysander,” I muttered.

“Plus him,” Domingo agreed.

Mather stood in the middle of the ring of light, Lowe next to him. He had his hands spread out appeasingly at his sides. At least, I thought a gesture of harmlessness was his intent. Mostly he looked like he wanted to gather them all in his embrace. And crush them to dust, just another pile in this empty lot.

“Where is our pack mate?” Mather’s voice was so clear and ringing, it cut through the glass of the closed-up cab. But I surreptitiously cracked the window to hear the response.

Out of the darkness walked a blond male. What was gorgeous on the wolf form was even more stunning on the man. Lysander was Old Hollywood-idol handsome, the blond waves of his hair falling lazily across his high forehead. He had his hands thrust into the pockets of his creased chinos—creases in Rogue Pass, really?—and despite the early-morning chill, the upper buttons of his oxford shirt were open. He sauntered forward a few more steps, looking almost bored.

He was easily as big as Mather.

He lifted his face to the breeze, the same cold I felt snaking through the crack in the window and coiling down into my bones. The firm line of his jaw shifted as his full lips parted as if he was tasting the wind—and then he snapped his head around to stare toward our truck. His eyes flickered red in the headlights.

I cringed back, wishing I’d left the window rolled high. Wishing I was dreaming all this. Wishing I’d never been born.

Or at least not wolf-born.

“Bring out the bitch.” His words rumbled across the lot like a steamroller: low, heavy, and crushing, powered by a dangerously compressed heat.

“You’re up,” Domingo said quietly. “Remember, wait for a clear shot. If you can’t do it—”

“I’ll do what I have to.” I wished my voice hadn’t sounded downtrodden.

Conlan opened my door and reached in for me. “Feel free to shriek a little,” he whispered. “Not one of your good screams though. Save that for me.”

I didn’t have to feign a terrified gasp as he yanked me out into the light. I felt a dozen piercing gazes eating me alive. And the smell. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it before last night in the alley, but the musky bite of aroused predator set off a deep and primitive warning in my brain.

I was being hunted.

No, worse—I was already caught.

I let out a stuttering sob as Conlan pulled me sideways, though he stayed well clear of my right hand so I could draw the gun if necessary.

My fingers spasmed with the urgent desire to shoot everything in sight. But we didn’t have Reeve yet.

This was much worse than the alley. At least there I’d still had the illusion that I could protect myself. Now I knew too much.

From about the same distance as last night in the alley before, when he charged and attacked, Lysander looked at me. Not at my heaving breasts or my bared belly. He looked me in the eye. In any other situation I would’ve blushed to have a man like him seeing me, even though I’d have instantly done the social math and known he was out of my price range.

Now I wanted to be anywhere but within his range.

The red flicker was gone now that he was facing me head-on, and the hazel of his gaze was so beautifully crystalline clear, I could almost forget what he was.

Almost.

“I made you,” he rumbled.

For half a heartbeat, as the muscle constricted, I wanted to cry at the certainty in his tone. Yes, his bite had started all this.

But as the beat completed, my heart opening, I saw it for the lie it was.

Oh, if only I had a bag of salt for every male who had twisted me up in my life, as if I were the pretzel: my father who left before I even knew him, my stepfather who took my mother away from me, Tommy who excavated every doubt I’d ever had about myself into a yawning pit. And now this asshole.

Made me? Nobody could make me do anything, not anymore.

“The bond is not locked,” Mather said, as if he was reading my mind. “She might still be your creature, if you can seal the deal. But not until you give us back ours.”

Lysander flicked a finger over his shoulder. From behind him, two of his pack in human form emerged from the shadows. I could almost hear Domingo counting them off. If he was right about the count on the hills, this had to be all of the ones I’d seen attacking us near the cabin. They dragged a third between them.

Not one of theirs: Reeve.

Again, I didn’t have to fake a horrified sob when I saw what they’d done to him. His shaggy dark hair was matted. Fresh crimson streaked his naked body over darker smears of dried gore. His legs trailed out behind him, knees scraping in the gravel, and when the two guards stopped, they dropped him onto his face where he lay unmoving while his blood seeped over the pale stone.

I swallowed back another awful sound. Part of our plan depended on Reeve being able to make it to one of our vehicles under his own power. But he was destroyed.

Someone would have to get to him, bring him back.

Someone Lysander would let get closer.

“Come here, creature mine,” Lysander crooned. “Let us take a closer look at you.”

Conlan gave me a convincing shove, and I stumbled forward a few steps, my hand going back as if to steady myself.

I didn’t feel much better even with my hand on the butt of the gun.

I slanted a quick glance from under my lashes at Mather as I passed him, cringing a little as if I was afraid of him. At the same time, I inclined my head toward Reeve.

Mather blinked once; an acknowledgment, I hoped.

He gestured expansively at Reeve and then at me, drawing attention to himself. “Hardly a fair trade,” he groused.

As the two werewolves that had guarded Reeve stepped forward to flank me, Lysander curled his upper lip in a soundless snarl. “I don’t have to trade at all,” he said. “In fact, now that I think about it—” He lifted one hand.

“Imma stop you right there,” Mather said.

The two hillocks on either side of us exploded, banishing what was left of the night.

Chapter 5 ~ Reeve

The dawn caught fire.

My one eye was swollen shut thanks to me saying something untoward about Lysander’s mother, and the other one clamped shut involuntarily to block out the startling brilliance. I’d known it was coming, and still I was shocked momentarily senseless.

Or maybe that was the blunt force trauma Lysander’s guards had inflicted while they left me hanging on the meat hook outside the log cabin.

But as the deafening boom hit, I was already scrambling forward. I’d managed to reset my dislocated shoulder when they moved me from the cabin to this rendezvous. It wasn’t healed, but at least I could move.

Blind, deaf, crippled, bled half to death, none of it mattered, because every instinct forced me toward her.

Though I couldn’t see Bettina through my dazzled eye, under the nose-scorching stink of burning phosphorus I breathed in her cinnamon scent.

Damn it, what had my pack been thinking, bringing her here, putting her at such risk?

I wanted to rip someone’s head off, and not in a figurative sense.

Screams from the werewolves on the hills made my jaws ache with the urge to howl, half in sympathy, half in victory. There were dangers in having a permanent pack home, risks of complacency and laziness, but there were advantages too. And this was one. We’d rigged the abandoned road maintenance yard years ago, in case we might need a distraction someday. Not from our kind, or so we’d been thinking at the time, but in case humans ever got too close. Domingo had strategized an unexplained explosion would be a good way to split the attention of law enforcement. Now, using the oversized flares on Lysander’s pack would attract interest we didn’t want and was definitely a last-ditch effort.

Especially since they weren’t going down easy.

Already on my hands and knees, I reached for my wolf. But blood loss was still making my head spin. Struggling to focus, I caught only a distant sense of the beast’s wordless ferocity, even weaker than the earlier fleeting link to Bettina that had warned me they were coming. The connection slipped out of my mental fingers like a dandelion seed caught on the fiery wind of the explosion.

Giving up on the wolf, I tried to push myself to my bare feet, but a boot between my shoulder blades shoved me into the gravel.

I twisted my head to stare down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun, the ferociously twisted face of one of Lysander’s guards behind it.

No healing from that at this close range.

I snarled at him.

Another explosion—much closer this time—made my ears ring. But instead of a fatal flash leaping from the guard’s shotgun barrel into my head, a chunk of his bicep blew off in a spray of scarlet.

The sheer force knocked his aim askew, and the buckshot sprayed past my hip, stinging across my bare ass.

As he struggled to take aim again, I rolled into his shins, knocking him over me.

I had a glimpse of Bettina—her freckles like specks of blood on her blanched skin—swinging her compact SIG toward the second guard beside her. My heart kicked over in shock seeing her so disheveled. Her clothing was dirty and torn, revealing more of her than I wanted anyone else to see. The ugly possessiveness only added to the boiling miasma of my temper.

I kept rolling, a bloody bowling ball, and shoved the first guard into the second. Bettina’s shot grazed him across the temple, knocking him backward, though I suspected not permanently.

Grabbing for the fallen guard’s shotgun with one hand and Bettina with the other, I finally jolted to my feet. But I managed only one step toward my Z4 before she dug her heels in.

“To the shed,” she gasped. “That’s the plan.”

“I have to get you out of here,” I argued.

“Trust us.”

Her plea echoed in me, but strangely distorted, as if reflected by a broken mirror. I did trust them. I trusted them to follow me. I trusted that they believed I’d do everything in my power to give them a place to be. But when I’d fallen short, they’d taken the lead.

My chest burned with my disgrace more than the beatings that had broken my ribs. I’d failed them as their alpha prime.

And she’d set her heels in the gravel, angling her weight away from me, straining my damaged shoulder.

My doubt crept like a killing frost through the still-tenuous link of the pack bond. Lysander had said things while I’d hung there as his prey, things that still echoed in my head. He had a lot to answer for.

I cast one more longing look at the Z4 and Mather’s truck—noting the werewolves fighting in the space between. The explosives had distracted them, but I only saw two bodies down. Werewolves are tough motherfuckers. For which I supposed I should be glad. I spun around to head for the maintenance shed. I’d get Bettina to safety and then jump back into the fray, where the only decision was a simple one: kill or be killed.

A dark gray shape—like a burning phosphorus shadow come to life—loomed up before us. Bettina screamed as she was torn away from my hand. The SIG flew out of her fingers.

I brought the shotgun around, but with only one eye and Bettina clutched to the other male’s chest, I couldn’t risk firing.

He was caught in mid-change, an unsafe and not exactly aesthetically pleasing shift. Fur covered half of him, and his human hands were tipped with blunt, powerful claws that could disembowel an enemy in one swipe. But his yellow-brown eyes behind his half-extended muzzle were human.

And beseeching.

“Please,” he whined through his fangs. His lips drew back in an appeasing grimace. “You have to save her.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” I snarled back. “So let her go.”

“No… I mean, I will, but you have to take Annalee with you.”

I racked the shotgun with extra menace, sensing in his stutter his weakness within the pack hierarchy. Not that I was much better off than him today. “Let her the fuck go.” I pitched my voice to an alpha’s command, though in my own ear the tone sounded false, an unnatural auto-tune barely more legit than lip syncing.

His eyes rolled wildly, exposing the whites all around, but he fought off the compulsion and tightened his grip on Bettina. He bent her head to expose her vulnerable neck, which forced her unbound breasts upward. “I can’t,” he hissed. “I won’t. Not until you promise to take Annalee too.”

The growls and shouts of the battle behind me were maddening, tearing me in two because I couldn’t go to them and I couldn’t leave Bettina. “I will end you,” I said, “if you don’t take your hands off her.”

His chin went up. “Fine, but just take Annalee.”

Bettina twisted her head to look up at him. “Who’s Annalee?” Her voice was so calm she might’ve been back in her bakery discussing how he’d like his coffee.

“Lysander’s mate.”

I stiffened. “He already has a female?”

“She’s not strong, not wolf-born,” the other werewolf said. He averted his gaze from the torn neckline of Bettina’s shirt. “She doesn’t want to be with us, never wanted to be wolf. And he’s killing her.”

Well, shit. “I haven’t sensed another female.” But then, my senses had been filled already, with cinnamon and hot sugar. Anything else was ruined for me.

“Lysander would never let her get close to another alpha prime.” The werewolf’s half-human, half-lupine lips twisted in a snarl, not appeasing at all this time. “He won’t let any of the rest of us close.”

That was interesting—and potentially useful. A pack with a female who wasn’t strong enough to balance the conflicting dominating energies would be more chaotic than even the most unstable bachelor pack. And if she disappeared suddenly, her loss could rip the pack apart. “Where is she?”

“Close,” the werewolf said. “Confined. Can I trust you?”

What a ridiculous question. “No.”

“Yes,” Bettina said. “Take us to her.”

Chapter 6 ~ Bettina

Even though he was wearing half a shaggy grey wolf hide along with his sagging jeans, I recognized the guy from my bakery. I’d known the first night he came in something was off about him.

Who knew my intuition was so spot-on. Not that I could have guessed this, of course.

We sped around the back of the maintenance shed, Reeve limping at my side. My giddy breathlessness that we’d found him turned leaden at how badly he was hurt. I couldn’t even imagine how he kept moving. I’d retrieved my fallen gun and had a death grip on it now, but I clenched my other fist to stop myself from reaching out to him. There was no patch of his bare skin not painted in blood, and my heart clamped as fiercely as my fingernails into my palm to think I’d cause him more pain.

Plus, he hadn’t touched me since grabbing me to run. I’d slept with his packmates to help reach him, but now that we’d found him, what if he hated what I’d done? Since we were finally together, shouldn’t the pack bond be stronger? But I didn’t sense anything, not even that whisper of psychic connection when he’d seemed to be in the chalet bedroom with Mather, Conlan, and me.

With the sun getting closer to the horizon, I imagined the virus in my body falling silent, and the howling desire that had compelled me seemed so far away. Exhausted tears prickled in my eyes. I dashed them away impatiently. Despite the dewy, silver-gold light of morning, the shadows where the clearcut ended and the forest began remained deep as midnight, reminding me there were worse monsters yet to face.

I focused on our more immediate problems. Something still seemed off about our guide, although he was looking more human by the minute. “What’s your name?” I asked.

He dipped his head as he glanced back at me without meeting my eyes. “Floyd.”

“Why are you doing this, Floyd?”

“I told you. Annalee will die if you don’t take her.”

“You were with Lysander when he bit me,” I reminded him. “Hard for me to believe you care.”

He winced. “She’s different,” he said in a husky undertone. “She’s not like you, not wolf-born, not powerful.”

Me? Powerful? Hardly. My knees were wobbling, my gut quivering with fear. And if being strong meant getting shanghaied into a werewolf pack, no thanks.

Although here I was.

Floyd held up one hand to stop us. “She has only one guard, but”—he glanced at Reeve—“it’s Scratch.”

“Scratch?” I followed his gaze to Reeve. “That sounds…unfortunate.”

“It is.” Reeve’s eye, the one not swollen shut, narrowed to an icy shard of blue. “For him.”

“Scratch is almost as big as Lysander, and his wolf is always near the surface,” Floyd told me before turning back to Reeve. “He’ll be suspicious, so give me the gun and I’ll tell him we have Bettina—”

Reeve stuck the barrel of the shotgun under Floyd’s chin. “Not a fucking chance.”

I pushed the gun away. I couldn’t believe I was so casual about the threat of violence, but maybe one acquired immunity to such things. “If there’s a prisoner here, we have to get her out,” I told Reeve.

I stared into his turbulent gaze. I didn’t say it aloud, but I knew he must understand what was going through my head.

It could have been me.

He glared at Floyd. “No gun. Just distract him.” Then he reached out to finger a tangled curl of my hair hanging beside my jaw. “I’ll be right behind you.”

His touch was so light I didn’t even feel it. Half closing my eyes at the rush of remembered longing, I nodded. Plus, if I squinted, I could pretend I couldn’t see the blood on him.

“Scratch won’t give you more than one shot,” Floyd warned. “Don’t fuck it up.”

Reeve snarled.

Floyd looked away but held his ground. “You got caught once, didn’t you?”

I winced at the flash of brutal emotion across Reeve’s face: humiliation and horror mixed in a toxic sludge.

Even though I wasn’t sure what he felt for me now, I stepped up to him. Flattening my palm on his bare chest, I brought his gaze back to me. “I won’t run again,” I promised him. “You won’t be alone.”

If I thought that would help, I was sorely mistaken. His expression blanked to absolute nothingness. And I realized I’d basically told him he needed me.

Well, hell. Who knew alpha male egos were more fragile than soufflés?

But we didn’t have time for his confusion any more than we did for mine.

“Take me there,” I told Floyd.

We slipped between the spindly bushes that grew where the sun could reach them, but once in the protection of the second-growth pines, the understory mostly disappeared. My footsteps fell deadened on the soft loam.

I wished I hadn’t thought about dead things…

Somewhere behind us, Reeve was utterly silent.

We came around the upended bole of a felled tree. Tilted on its side, the behemoth disk of its root system was taller than I was. But even taller than that was the werewolf on the other side.

Like Floyd, Scratch was half shifted, his spine curved under the weight of heavy furred shoulders. Ripped, ragged chinos clung to his strangely jointed legs. He was facing us, the fangs in his elongated jaws exposed in a menacing sneer. A handgun was leveled in our direction.

But his eyes went right to my tits.

I should’ve shot the bastard just for the way he drooled. Actually drooled.

“What’s this, rabbit?” he slurred.

I wasn’t quite sure if he was wondering if I was a rabbit or if he was calling Floyd rabbit. Regardless, the insult probably didn’t bode well for either of us.

“We got her,” Floyd said, gesturing at me. “Lysander said you need to watch her while we run the rest to ground.”

Scratch leered at me. “I watch.”

I let my gaze slip away from his as if I was terrified—which I was—or disgusted—which I also was—and took the opportunity to glance around for the other female.

At first I didn’t see her, then a hesitant movement from the pit where the tree roots had pulled up caught my eye.

Oh god, they’d shoved her down in that dirty hole, naked and—judging from the dull metallic gleam around her neck—chained. Even knowing she was there, I didn’t blame myself for missing her. Her bare skin was just a little darker than the rich red-brown of the fallen wood, and she was thin to the point of emaciation.

But her stunning citrine eyes glittered with gemstone beauty through the streaks of dried mud. “Run,” she whispered.

Her warning—an echo of Lucy’s words all the way from Seattle what seemed like a lifetime ago—made me shiver.

“Run,” Scratch echoed eagerly, the gun falling to his side. “I chase.”

I stepped closer to her, trying to see where the chain was attached. It was padlocked around one of the interwoven roots almost as thick around as my wrist.

I glared at Scratch. “You fucking beast.”

He blinked his piss-yellow eyes at me and tilted his head as if he didn’t see the problem with that.

At another hint of movement, this time over the big werewolf’s shoulder, I aimed my next step toward Scratch. I gestured wide, knowing my breasts would bounce. “You are just a big, dumb monster,” I raged.

He laughed. “You see how big I am.” He reached for the fly of his pants.

“Oh yeah, please do,” I said. “The harder they fall.”

From out of the darkness behind him, Reeve leaped. The shotgun was raised over his head in both hands, and he brought the stock down like a stave on the side of Scratch’s head.

“Shoot him!” Floyd gasped.

But of course we didn’t want to attract more unwanted attention and bring all of Lysander’s wolfmen down on us. I sprang to Annalee’s side, reaching for the chain.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t leave me.”

Apparently one warning to run was all she could muster for us, and I didn’t blame her. “That’s why we’re here,” I told her. “Where’s the key?”

“Lysander.” The word broke on a sob.

Of course. Well, next option. I glanced back at Reeve. He had driven Scratch to the ground, but the huge werewolf staggered up, his head gushing blood. Reeve reversed his grip and swung the shotgun like a softball bat. He smashed it under Scratch’s jaw. The stock cracked, but the werewolf went over like the tree must have.

I looked at the roots where the chain was looped. “Help me,” I urged her. “Pull.”

“I can’t—”

“You want to stay here?” I snapped. “Pull!”

She scrambled up out of the hole, drawing the chain taut. I clambered in where she’d been and thrust my arm between the woven roots. Setting my heels in the dirt, I drove my shoulder up into the root. The moldering bark bit through my torn tank top into my shoulder.

Clawed hands grasped the chain beside Annalee’s. Floyd put his werewolf strength beside ours.

The wood groaned.

So did Scratch.

The three of us twisted in terror to see the seemingly unstoppable werewolf rise again.

But Reeve was standing over him, the shattered shotgun in his hands. “Instead of my ribs, you should’ve broken my spine.”

Scratch sneered up at him. “Wanted to watch you squirm.”

I turned my face away the instant before the shotgun blasted.

Annalee and Floyd never even flinched.

“Come on,” I hissed. “They’ll have heard that and know something’s wrong. Pull!”

Energized by our crazed fear, we threw everything we had. Under the twist of the chain, the root began to fray.

More hands on the chain. Reeve. “On three,” he said. “One. Two. Thr—”

Yeah, we weren’t waiting. The root snapped, sending Annalee and Floyd tumbling over. I stumbled forward, almost impaling myself on the broken root.

Reeve grabbed my upper arm and yanked me back. “Get moving. They’re coming.”

I didn’t know if he heard something or just suspected, as I did. But I wasn’t going to argue.

Annalee took a few staggering steps toward me, whimpering over the sound of her chains.

When I looked down, I saw why. “Oh no,” I whispered.

They’d chained her ankles too. But not around the outside. No, they’d pierced her heels behind the Achilles tendon, hobbling her. Maybe permanently.

Reeve’s expression was stark. Despite Annalee’s starved weight, I knew he had to be near the end of even his great strength.

He looked at me. “Go.” His tone was irrefutably dire, all the music drained to that one flat word.

But I refuted. “Not without you.”

His jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his pecs twitched, but he swung Annalee into his arms, the chains trailing over his bloody shoulders.

“Now let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said.

Reeve leveled one long finger at Floyd. “Not you.”

“I know,” he answered.

“What?” I almost shrieked. Annalee made a softer noise of distress.

“He’s of Lysander’s pack,” Reeve said. “They could track us, easily, through that bond. It’ll be hard enough to hide the omega.” He turned his attention back to the other werewolf. “They’ll know you were here. They’ll smell you, know you helped us.”

Floyd lowered his head. “I know.”

“They’ll kill you,” I said.

“I kn—”

“No,” I bit out the word between my clenched teeth. “There has to be another way.”

Floyd reached for the shotgun. Reeve and I stiffened, but he held it out to me by the barrel.

“Make it look good,” he urged. “They already know I’ve gotten my ass kicked by a girl before.” He glanced at Annalee, the squinted corners of his amber eyes softening.

“Bettina,” Reeve said. “You don’t have to—”

I handed him the SIG, which would be easier for him to handle while carrying Annalee. Then I took the shotgun and chambered a shell, hearing the grind. Floyd took a step back. For the first time since he walked into my bakery, his eyes finally met mine just as the first rays of sunlight beamed through the pines.

I fired into his chest.

Annalee screamed, but the sound was barely more than a squeak.

I’d meant the shot to be left of center, convincing but not deadly. But everything was skewed off true. The buckshot sprayed him squarely. Blood spattered.

Floyd flew backward and crumpled to the ground, his outflung hand landing in Scratch’s gory remains.

I spun and headed back the way we’d come. This time, instead of silence, I heard Reeve’s labored steps, each footfall punctuated by Annalee’s sobs.

The ruined shotgun was almost worse than being unarmed. I felt like that inside too: something even more dangerous than I had the right to be. Something twisted and shattered.

I was supposed to be butter and sugar, not wood and steel. And blood.

If this was what it meant to be strong, I didn’t want it. None of it.

We plunged back toward the battle just as the sun broke the horizon.

Keep reading for a sneak peek at Part 5

Wolf Born: Heart of the Pack Part 5: Broken

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About the Author

Elsa Jade, author of sexy shapeshifting romances, also writes paranormal romance, urban fantasy romance, and science fiction romance as Jessa Slade and sexy contemporary romance as Jenna Dales. In all her incarnations, she believes in the transformational power of love and is thrilled to share her stories with like-minded readers.

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Part 5: Broken

Chapter 1 ~ Reeve

The brittle November sunlight brightened the streaks of bloody gore on my skin even as it bleached the last dregs of strength from my bones. I stumbled and almost dropped the featherweight female we’d rescued. Her chains, which I’d draped over my shoulders, slipped forward to strangle me.

But a steadying hand slipped under my elbow.

Bettina.

Instead of energizing me, her touch was a stark reminder that she shouldn’t be there at all. Her cinnamon-sugar scent, soured with fear, almost choked me, tighter than the chains. I’d promised her once I would never drop her, and now? Only a frozen numbness kept my grip clenched on the scrawny girl in my arms.

I wanted to kill my pack for putting Bettina in danger.

But before I could do that, we had to not die.

By the time we stumbled out of the forest, the explosives buried in the leftover road construction debris had guttered out. The booby trap had served its purpose.

At what cost?

When we emerged, Lowe was at my side in an instant, whining under his breath, his furry ears flattened. His nose touched Annalee, and she let out a muffled shriek, yanking her legs out of his reach.

The links of chain wrapped around her bare ankles jammed into my broken ribs, and white-hot streamers of agony blazed along my nerves, as if she’d thrust one last road flare into my chest. The vision in my good eye fritzed out.

I dropped her. God, I dropped her.

But Mather was right there—in his two-legged form, as he preferred—and she fell into his muscled grasp. His bicep was so big she looked like a baby, cradled in his arm. He shoved his other hand under my armpit, dragging me upright.

It was only because Bettina was on my other side that I didn’t go to my knees.

“Nice to see ya, mate.” Conlan’s brisk accent razored across my still jangled nerve endings.

“Can’t hardly see shit,” I muttered.

His grip replaced Mather’s under my arm, not much gentler in his haste. “Lysander pulled back. He must think we have more explosives ready to go.”

As I drew an aching breath to respond, Bettina’s fingers tightened on me. “Do we?”

“Nope,” Con said, almost cheerfully. “Blew the wad.”

“We got what we came for,” Mather interrupted. “Plus a little something extra. We’re out.”

He was right. We had to get out. There were too few of us, with two vulnerable females, and me useless. But my blood—what was left of it—turned to icy sludge at his words.

Was the Rogue Mountain pack out?

My whole life, I’d tried to remind myself that what happened to my pack after my mother’s death was not my fault. I’d been too young then to hold the dominant males together, my wolf untried.

This time, I didn’t have that excuse.

If Lysander took Rogue Mountain…

The ghosts would be right to haunt my last breaths.

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The trouble continues in Wolf Born: Heart of the Pack Part 5: Broken

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