Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
He growls and jerks his head in the direction we were heading before he stopped her. She casts a despairing glance toward the dark thicket and whimpers.
He snaps his teeth. She blinks. He butts her flank with the flat of his head.
She topples over, her head dropping to lay listless on her front leg. She gazes up at him, and with the last of her energy, she yips at him, snapping her own teeth, cranky and tired and no longer the least bit afraid.
His jaw shuts.
With a last burst of energy, she lunges at his front legs and manages to nip his ankle, snagging a tuft of fur.
With slow care, he extricates the leg from her bite and takes a step back.
In the distance, motors roar to life and dogs begin to bay.
Give over our skin. They’re coming.
My wolf nuzzles her flank, buries his nose in her matted fur, and he whines. She’s laying on her side again, motionless except for her shallow breaths. She’s done. She’s not getting up.
He doesn’t so much surrender our skin as he passes it to me, like a king bestows a knighthood. I seize it, suddenly aware of the metal cuffs still circling my neck and wrists and ankles, and the trailing, broken chains.
We’ve left an unmistakable trail. Our only hope is beating them to a terrain they can’t navigate with ATVs. I scoop Mari’s wolf up, and carefully tuck her in the crook of my arm. Her eyes have drifted closed, but she wedges her cold nose into the crease between my bicep and my side.
I gather what chains I can in my free hand, and then I run full speed into the dark, thick forest, oblivious to the sticks and rocks tearing at my bare soles, the gunshot hole knitting itself together between my ribs, or the shards of bullets flecking from my abs as my skin mends itself.
All I can feel is the bristly warmth of Mari’s wolf, the flow of our bond—for once calm and clear and strong—and pure terror.
Chapter 12
12
Chapter 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.
Has his wolf changed? Or is it my human form that he hates?
Very distantly, I’m aware that it’s bullshit that I don’t know the answers, but I’m still too out of it for normal feelings to hit with any kind of impact.
And also—
Yeah, Darragh’s never talked to me about what happened, but I never talked to him, either, did I?
Because it was his fault.
Yeah—
And isn’t it more than possible that he never talked to me because of his crippling guilt and his fear that he’d hurt me again?
I can’t pretend not to know he doesn’t feel that anymore, not when the bond is there, pumping in my chest like a second heart.
But for the past four years, I’ve been angry. I was doing what I had to do to hold myself together. I was being strong. I was young, alone, powerless.
I squint up at his grim, ashen face, his clenched jaw, his tired eyes, the brown dull, the gold gone. He seems every year of his age.
He’s alone. More alone than I’ve ever been.
I squirm. He rests a heavy palm on my side. We run a few more miles when we come to a dark gas station. There aren’t any cars in the gravel lot. It’s very early, but they must be opening soon. Anxiety courses through my veins again, but I don’t perk up. I’m too wrung out.
Darragh lifts the sling from his neck and rests me behind an air machine.
“Stay here,” he says, already trotting toward the gas station’s front door. He bends, grabs the metal grate, and rips it from the frame, padlock and all. Then he drives his knee into the glass. It shatters.
He steps through, barefooted, and I wince in my fur. My wolf whines low in her throat. We don’t like him out of our sight.
Minutes later, he emerges. He’s wearing black sweatpants with a red maple leaf on the thigh. The pockets are bulging. He’s ripping a plastic package open with his teeth. It’s a prepaid phone.