The dinner.
The wine.
Wanda.
Nausea twists my stomach into a knot as a single panicked thought echoes through my mind—Where’s Ollie?
No longer caring about anything but getting to my mate, I scramble up onto my paws, my nails sliding against the cold steel beneath me as my back rams into the top of what I now clearly recognize as a cage. Shifting won’t be comfortable in this small of a space, but I have to do it.
I have to get out.
I have to get to Ollie.
Closing my eyes, I call up my human form, willing it to come forward. Nothing happens. I try again, but there’s a disconnect somewhere, like my human form is somewhere out of reach.
I sneeze again and my head jerks, something on my neck hitting the cage wall with a clang. There’s some sort of metal circle digging into the skin of my neck, and it’s giving off a current of… something I don’t understand.
But now that I’ve noticed it, I can tell it’s what’s keeping me in wolf form.
What…? How…?
I try to shift a few more times, but eventually I have to face the truth: I’m stuck.Like Ollie was stuck in the lab.
Smith’s voice plays through my head and a cold sense of dread creeps through my limbs.We have reason to believe the Rockcastle pack has ties to the human lab.
What if that’s where Wanda is sending me?
Worse, what if she’s planning to sendOllieback?
I can’t let that happen.
I have to get to Ollie.
He’s not safe.
Everything in me screams that my mate is in danger, and blind panic drowns out everything else. Including common sense.
My movements become frantic, and I slam my side into the cage door again and again and again, the pain of the repeated impacts barely registering. Still, I continue battering myself against the metal, willing the damn door to just give up and open already. With every jolting impact, my heart rate increases, my breath coming in quick, desperate pants as I spiral into a frenzy of anger and fear.
I don’t notice that the light outside the cage has clicked on for a good three seconds after it happens. And I don’t stop ramming my body into the cage door until someone walks over and stops, standing just on the other side of the grate.
“The only thing you’re going to achieve by doing that is injuring yourself,” says Wanda, her voice bland. “And that won’t do you any favors where you’re going. It wouldn’t matter as much if they wanted you for the lab, but they expect the alphas to fight.”
I growl at her, my lips pulling away from my teeth and the hair on my back rising. Letting out a guttural snarl, I snap at the cage door, but my snout is too large to fit through.
Wanda only tsks at me and shakes her head. “Save some of that fight for the ring. It’s not going to do you any good here.” She studies my face for a long moment. “This is your own fault, you know. You should have just stayed gone.”
Myfault? How was I to know what I was walking into here? I growl at her again, spittle dripping from my mouth in my rage.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says, her tone mild as if this is a completely normal situation. “I guess most of the blame actually falls on your father. He thought he’d fuck my sister and try to put aside my own son for his alpha bastard without any consequences.”
She stares at me for a beat. “I did try to do my best by you the first time around, selling you off to another pack where you’d be heir, but now you know too much,” she says, continuing the one-sided conversation. “I guess I can thank you for bringing Oliver home at least.”
The sound of my mate’s name on her lips, rips another growl from my chest and I snap at the grating again.
“I can’t say I expected you to have already mated him, but we’ll deal with it.” She gives me a cold smile. “Don’t you worry, I’ll make sure Clay takes real good care of him.”
Rage explodes in my chest and I throw myself at the cage door again, snarling and snapping until I’ve exhausted myself. I drop to my stomach, sides heaving, and continue growling.
