He swallowed roughly, face pale as blood seeped out from behind his hand. “I-I don’t know what you’re ta-talking about.”
I took one step forward, and he choked before backing away. “Wait! She didn’t tell me anything. I was paid to look the other way and not sound an alarm. They took off east. It was an old piece-of-shit car. I don’t know the make.”
He was dead before he hit the ground, and I fought the urge to tear into his body until nothing but blood and entrails remained. Weak-willed shifters had no place in Golden Claw, especially not when they got my pack hurt.
The other guard stood trembling nearby, clutching his Taser which would do very little against me. I’d been preparing myself to withstand the voltage of our technology for years, determined that nothing would ever render me weak or incapacitated again. “Alert the council and the rest of Reeves Pack. Tell them Omega Chelsea of Thenguard Pack has stolen Omega Emmeline of Reeves Pack. I’m going after them in bear form and won’t have a phone.”
I waited for his shaky nod, and when he reached for his radio I knew he’d do as I asked. Not that it would hurt to add a little extra incentive. I closed in on him: “And if I find out youhad anything to do with this, or you didn’t pass on the correct message, I will make his death look like a pleasure cruise.”
The other guard shook his head so violently that it had to hurt. “I only started my shift a few minutes ago. Owens and Carter were on before that, but Carter is still patrolling. There’s usually only one of us here at the gate.”
That lined up with what I knew of patrols, so I shifted back into my bear form and left him to pass on my message, hand trembling as he held the radio.
My bear was bigger and far more brutal than most shifters of my kind. I’d learned to be meaner and grouchier, which would hopefully be to my advantage when I caught up to Chelsea and Emme.
Bonded or not, Emmeline Anders was my scent match, and no fucker was stealing her out from under me. Not while I was alive.
CHAPTER 2
EMME
There were too many unfinished parts of my life for it all to end now.
Too many unknowns.
Too many questions.
They kept running over and over in my mind, holding me in a near catatonic state.
Like, I’d never asked Kellan why he read romances, or when he figured out he loved being surrounded by plants. I had no idea who taught Finley to tinker with cars, or if he played hockey when he was younger, and if so, how he managed to get his horrible family to support a relatively expensive sport. I didn’t have a clue what Hunter’s first invention was, or how he’d created a billion-dollar company under the control of his cruel, ruthless father. Slade was as much a mystery to me today as he ever had been, and I had so many questions for the dragon: When did he learn to hack? How did it feel to fly? Was there fire burning in his dragon’s gut moments before it spewed from his mouth? What were his dragon’s thoughts like?
For many years I’d had no one in my life. No one to be curious about or ask questions, and then for a brief moment I’dhad what felt likeeverything, before it was cruelly taken from me.
I’d been stolen from my pack and forced into the arms of my mother’s murderers.
Bonded against my will.
Since then, my mind remained locked down in a state of shock with the world moving around me, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t deal with what had happened in any way other than to retreat into myself completely. I felt the presence of the dragon in the new bite, a ragged, unstable connection. Whatever he’d tried to do, it hadn’t worked as well as they hoped.
But it was there.It was a bond. We were joined forever through this tenuous connection.
In my broken state, no one touched me, and I was left with the tingling bite and the reminder that life would never be the same again. A true quintet couldn’t form when one of the parties was bonded outside the pack. A quintet was five, and I’d brought in a sixth.
A scary, evil dragon who looked like Slade, but even at his coldest, cruelest moments, Slade would never haveforced meinto this bond.
“She needs to eat and drink fluids. We need her at full strength and health, or she’ll be less than useless to us.”
The slivers of my brain not locked down recognized the voice—Hunter’s father. No doubt the alpha had a name, but I had no idea what it was. He’d forever be the devil in my eyes, the evilest shifter in existence, who’d been influencing my life,in the most negative ways, since before I was born.
I might not know everything, but I knew of his omega experiments, which included pushing my mother all the way to her suicidal death. This alpha was the reason I’d had to wade through darkness and pain for most of my life. I was sure of it.
“The bitch won’t starve herself. She has other mates to worry about.”
BlainefuckingRogers. The entitled alpha of my mom’s former pack, and Hunter’s alleged brother. Apparently, he was still here as well, which had me cringing, seething, and mentally screaming.
“It’s been a fucking week?—”
Hunter’s sperm donor was cut off by a low rumbling growl. The first sound the dragon shifter had made ina week?I caught another hint of his maple sweet scent, and I refused to comprehend what that meant.
