The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(68)

12





MARI





Even the terror can’t keep me awake. The pounding of Darragh’s feet and his ragged yet even breaths lull me into a fugue state where I can’t move my limbs, can’t make my brain work, but I can’t fully surrender to unconsciousness either. I lie frozen as he dashes through streams and scrabbles up rocky inclines, zigzagging, as the motors and dogs sound in the distance.

I huddle inside the wolf, cold and scared and helpless, while she trembles in Darragh’s arms.

At some point, he shakes her awake and growls, “Stay here. Don’t make a sound.”

He sets her in the crook of a tree, high off the ground. I watch with slitted eyes as a dirt bike slides to a stop mere feet from Darragh, and I’m so deep in shock that my adrenaline doesn’t even spike as Darragh uses the chain still dangling from a manacle to rip the gun from the man’s hand. When he’s jerked off the bike, his helmet falls. It’s Lenox.

He doesn’t look like a newsie now. His face is hard and mean, his expression blank like a doll with its eyes popped out.

Darragh bares his teeth, a self-satisfied rumble rising in his chest as the males square off.

“I was thinking I’d have to come back for you,” Darragh says. “But here you are.”

They circle each other, Lenox’s hand twitching at his side. From my vantage point, I can see a bulge in the back of his waistband, but Darragh’s too close. If Lenox goes for it, Darragh will have his arm ripped off before he can touch it.

This is only ending one way. It’s like watching a lion stalk a housecat, but the cat is from that movie where they bury it in a pet cemetery and it comes back wrong.

Darragh spits at Lenox’s feet. “You’d betray your own kind for money?”

A light flares in Lenox’s dead eyes. “My own kind? No. I don’t claim kinship with you, living off the crumbs the humans leave you, fighting each other for their amusement.”

Darragh doesn’t seem to give a shit about what Lenox is saying. Darragh’s sizing up the distance between them. He’s going to strike.

“Men with wolves inside them, paying humans for our own territory,” Lenox sneers. “As if we shouldn’t by right rule them.”

So he works for them? It makes no sense, but I’ve known mad wolves before. They do what they want and justify it with whatever bullshit they can come up with.

Darragh’s not paying attention to what Lenox’s spouting. He’s priming himself.

“Where is that weak female you were so keen to mount?” His voice drips with scorn. “The Mercenary. The Haunt of the Hill.” He snorts. “It was too fucking easy. Just dangle some pussy.” He glances into the surrounding trees. It’s his last mistake.

Darragh leaps for him, slamming him to the ground, pinning him down with his weight, an arm across Lenox’s chest. And then my mate rips off Lenox’s jaw and tosses it. It hits a tree trunk with a thunk.

Wet, choking screams fill the air.

“Look away, Mari,” Darragh calls. I can’t.

Darragh’s claws snick from his fingers, and in one smooth downward motion, he slices off Lenox’s tongue. It thuds in the dirt. Darragh reaches over, stabs it, and while blood and screams spurt from Lenox’s mouth, Darragh shoves the tongue down his throat. Darragh clamps his hand over the place where his jaw used to be until Lenox is quiet and still.

A vague look of satisfaction crosses Darragh’s face, and then he’s all business. He quickly strips Lenox of his jacket and pants, but the pants won’t come up past Darragh’s thighs, and he doesn’t even try with the top. Instead, he ties it into a sling, drapes it around his neck, and with gentle hands, takes my wolf down and tucks her in.

My mind is horror bleached from what I just saw, but my wolf isn’t thrown in the least. She growls her approval, and Darragh’s wolf replies with a preening rumble, comforting her in her nest against Darragh’s chest.

We ride the dirt bike until we pop a tire, and by then, the engines and baying of dogs are fading. Darragh keeps running, though, faster now that his legs have gotten a rest.

I want to help—to run—but I can’t even keep my eyes open. All my strength is sapped.

A little before daybreak, when the horizon turns rosy in the east and the sky lightens to gray, we come to a back road, single lane, tar patched, no painted lines. We track it, picking our way through the foliage alongside it, until it ends at a larger two-laned road. We don’t see or hear any cars, but we follow the new road, staying in the woods parallel to the shoulder.

I don’t recognize anything. There’s no Salt Mountain in the distance, no foothills. Even the trees are different, taller, a different kind of evergreen. I have no idea where we are, but I know I’ve never been this far from pack territory. It doesn’t feel right. Every bird’s shriek and bullfrog honk jars me, and I jerk. Each time, Darragh reaches down and pats my flank through the sling, and for a few seconds, his chest will rumble.

The rumble is his wolf’s. I know how he sounds now.

His wolf didn’t kill mine. He killed everyone else, though.

I don’t understand.

I remember the mindless rage in his wolf’s eyes that night when he came after me. He wasn’t warning me off. If Kennedy hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have escaped with my life.