The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(49)

“How much longer?” Smith asks Lenox, breaking the silence.

Lenox checks his watch. Earlier, I’d admired it. It has little dials inside the face for time zones and day of the week and date. I thought it looked steampunk, but it isn’t. It’s military grade.

How long before they figure out that Darragh isn’t coming?

“Can’t be much longer,” Lenox says.

“And you’re sure he’ll come alone?” Smith asks him, but he’s still staring at me with a speculative gleam in his eyes.

“He won’t come alone,” Lenox answers. “But he’ll get here first. That’s why this needs to go down fast. No room for error. Secure the subject, and then we’re out.”

Without taking his gaze off me, Smith presses a button on the radio that was clipped to his shoulder. “Williams, you’re in position?”

The radio crackles. “In position.”

“Johnson?”

“In position.”

Smith grunts and stalks toward me. I recognize his expression. The Byrnes and their crew looked at females like that before Killian Kelly killed them all. That’s how Lochlan Byrne would look when he tried to crowd me into a corner at the lodge, like a sly predator, like I’m nothing more than prey. My stomach knots.

Smith slips a utility knife from a sheath on his belt. He smirks.

“Hold still,” he says to me and grabs my dress. He tears it apart from the holes burned by the taser, knocking my body from side to side, straining my arms where they stretch, prickling with pins and needles, above my head. When he can’t tear it anymore, he slips the cold steel under the fabric and cuts the rest of it off me.

“Is that necessary?” Lenox asks without looking up from what he’s doing.

“Oh, I think this’ll make a nice little diversion for our mad wolf.” Smith scrapes the tip of his knife down my front, between my bared breasts, over the burns along my ribs. I swallow a whimper. He smiles. His teeth are too square. They can’t be real.

He backs up, re-sheathing his knife with deliberate slowness. A memory niggles in the back of my brain.

When I was little, before Declan Kelly choked on a chicken bone and Killian became alpha, there were lots of males in the pack like Smith, always smirking, lounging around with their legs sprawled and in the way, making the females scurry past them, threatening disgusting things, their teeth bared in fake smiles.

Those males are all gone now.

I try to turn the memory into bravery, but the human males are staring at me now, eyes raking from my breasts to the curls between my legs. Even the ones watching the woods cast leers at me over their shoulders.

I squeeze my thighs together, but I can’t hide my breasts, and my nipples have puckered in the cold breeze. The shame is instinctual. I blink tears out of my eyes. I need to be able to see. There’s a tension in the air. Something is about to happen, and I’m not going to die.

My wolf’s tail is still, and her head is high. She’s watching with wide eyes, too, as she waits. In the sky high above this wood, a bird of prey swoops, a black outline against the gold and denim blue above the hills where the sun is setting. The insects fall silent.

That’s how we know.

Someone is here.

“Steady,” Smith whispers into his radio.

When it happens, it happens in an instant. In a soundless blur, Darragh bursts into the clearing, past the men with rifles, claws extending from his ruptured knuckles, white fangs descended from his mouth like wicked blades, sprinting straight for me, bare-chested in jeans.

He came.

The instant that he sees me, his gaze locks onto mine, his flaming golden eyes speaking, reaching, but I don’t know the words, and I can’t reach back, and in that moment, a surge of strength cannons into my chest, and I fight, tearing at my restraints, jerking and flailing.

When Darragh reaches Miller and Jones, he roars, and his claws slice through the thick black vests, through the skin and muscle, their screams cut off abruptly as their throats are ripped from their necks. Their bodies crumple to the ground.

I bow my back, throwing my weight against the chains.

Darragh’s eyes find mine again. I feel them.

“Now,” Lenox says from a distance.

A quick succession of snicks erupts from the surrounding woods. Darragh throws his arms wide to block my body from whatever is coming. In slow motion, between one step and the next, he falters. The black of his pupils explode, obliterating all but the thinnest sliver of gold.

“Mari,” he mouths as he sways, and then with a terrible thud, he slams face first into the ground like a felled oak. Ten darts with red feathers stick out of his back. He lies there motionless except for the rise and fall of his breath.

Smith comes to loom over him, and with an air gun that came from nowhere, rapidly empties another several darts into his back. He grins up at me. “That should do the job,” he says. And then he levels the gun at me and shoots.

I glance down. A fluffy red feathered dart sticks out of my breast. Once again, the world goes black.





8





MARI





When I come to, I’m lying naked on cold steel in a metal box. It’s moving. I push to sit up, and my stomach lurches. Every bone in my body aches, especially my skull. My head throbs. My wolf is awake, but she’s confused and scared, too.