“Run,” I growled at her, my voice deep, furious, a little powerful. All the hairs on my arm stood on end as I came close enough to the bald motherfucker to smell his scent. Alpha, dominant, and every bit as toxic as his partner in crime’s. Dread turned the ice to shards within my chest, but I still rammed the knife into his side, relief making my arms shake as the blade actually punctured his body. “Run, Jessia!”
She stumbled to her feet but froze, staring as the bald alpha grabbed my arm in his meaty fist and knocked the knife from my hand. Oh, god. Warning crawled up the back of my neck. I threw my hands up in a messy manoeuvre, knocking away his first attempt to grab me but not the second.
His fist cracked across my cheek, and the explosion of pain was violent. Blood trickled down my skin, pain radiating from my cheek to my whole face, dazing me for a few seconds. It was long enough for him to grab my arms and wrangle me against his body.
“Let her go,” Jessia hissed, grabbing a top that had been knocked to the floor and tearing the hanger out, brandishing it like a weapon. I would have smiled at that if a solid thud hadn’t sounded behind us, and I twisted frantically to see if they’d found ChaCha.
“Oh god,” I choked out. It wasn’t ChaCha. Dreamer. They’d slit his throat. Blood spread across the floor, his eyes open, unseeing.
Jessia’s cry came out strangled. She threw herself towards him, but the beta grabbed her around the waist and slung her over his shoulder.
“Let go of her,” I snarled, attacking the alpha who restrained me with everything I had—my fists, my elbows, throwing my head back, kicking out with my boots. “Let her fucking go.”
If they killed Jessia, too…
“Take her to the van, then get the other one,” the alpha ordered his henchman, grunting when my elbow collided with his side. I tried it again, but he shook me, rattling my brain inside my skull, and before I could hit him again, he slammed his fist into my head and everything went dark.
24
Cobra
My demons were screaming, accusing, sinking their knives into my mind and I couldn’t escape them. In my waking nightmares, it was no longer Hanna dead in the hovel with me. It was Lynn’s crystal brown eyes staring at nothing, her face slack and grey, her body stiff with death. The scent of brimstone and decay was so easy to recall from the first week we met. I dragged my hands over my skull, dug furrows into my skin, and released a scream that had been building for hours.
Two days.
Two entire, harrowing days when the love of my goddamn life was being violated and abused and—was she alive? Had she survived this time, or had the sick cunts who took her snuffed out the bright, violent flame that had burned in her for so long?
Another rage-filled scream tore from me, tangling with a growl that promised endless suffering and pain of the mostsevere degree. Two days, fifty hours, and twenty-nine minutes since Sweetie got the call from ChaCha to alert him they were in trouble. My breathing raced out of control, my hands shaking as I tore them from my head, balled one hand into a fist, and drove it into the side of the garage.
“What’s taking so fucking long?” I roared at anyone, no one.
I’d been an Alpha Knight for years, and Iknewhow long it took to get ready and roll out for a raid, but this wasn’t just a raid. This was Lynn’s life at stake. If she was even still alive. What would I do if she wasn’t?
I’d been awake for three days, scouring every CCTV camera I could find, hacking traffic cams, ripping through firewalls and defences in a fit of rage and panic, and we’dfinallytracked down the van that abducted Lynn, Jessia, and ChaCha thirty minutes ago. Yet we werestill fucking here.There were no cameras with a view inside the pub, nothing to indicate how those pieces of shit were treating our loved ones, but the pub was called The Alpha’s Bark. A true bark was… horrific. A twist of nature. Omegas could be barked into obeying any command, turned into a mindless slave. Even betas could be barked into submission if the alpha was dominant enough. I knew that first hand.
Wasn’t it enough? Hadn’t Lynn gone through enough? Hadn’t all of them?
I paced the small path outside the garage, my breathing chaotic, my hands shaking. I needed to hear from my dad, needed Em to talk me down from this edge or I was going to go apeshit on the entire city. But my calls had all gone to voicemail. So I’d thrown myself into tracking the women, driven myself to exhaustion and then beyond it. I was awake on a mix of caffeine, taurine, and adrenaline. And fear. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t rest, couldn’t stay still because I was terrified we were already too late.
How many cases had we dealt with where victims had been assaulted and discarded, unbreathing? Five? Eight? A scream built behind my teeth but I choked it down. I could smell it again—brimstone and decay. Lynn and death.
I needed to get my shit together, needed to control this fear instead of it controlling me. I turned towards the wall and rushed it. If I slammed my head into the concrete, maybe I could knock some calm loose. Lynn was my calm, my centre in the middle of a storm controlled by demons, the only thing that could cleanse the scent of bitter chocolate and cherry. Was that who took her? Did the man who cuffed me to a bed and pimped me out to anyone and everyone have my Lynn?
Firm hands caught me before I could ram my skull into the wall. “Okay, we’re not doing that.”
I whipped around to face Warning, a voice in the back of my head telling me not to start shit with my VP because he could beat me down to size in minutes. He squeezed my shoulders and wisely stepped back, releasing me.
“You can fight me, but that will slow us down,” he said, crossing his arms over his broad chest and levelling me with a stare I couldn’t quite read. Hard but not harsh, composed but worried.
My entire body rattled, my knees jellified. “What if she’s dead?” I blurted, gasping for air.
Warning straightened, slowly letting out a sigh. “What if she’s not, and she needs you to keep your head on straight when we find her?”
I shook my head fast, a stabbing sensation in my eyes. “The people who took her—”
“I know.” Warning caught my frantic gaze and held it, as if he could infuse me with calm just by looking at me. “I realise what sort of men they are, Cobra. I know what they’ve done. But we’re working on the assumption that she’s alive. They all are.”
“We don’tknowthat!” I argued, a twist in my stomach that told me I was going to throw up again. The last time, there was only bile as my gut ripped itself apart. I didn’t know when I last ate.
