“I want to-”
“There are many ways to die,” Viggo interrupted. He walked over to the older guard. “Lucky for you, I’ll make it quick.”
He grabbed the man by the throat andtwisted, snapping his neck. He smiled at Elliott. “You’re doing good, kid. Keep talking.”
Elliott started to hyperventilate, yanking uselessly on his bound wrists. Viggo waited it out, Thomas standing implacable next to him.
“The cops, we have an in with the cops,” Elliott cried, panicking when Viggo took a small step toward him. “That’s how they found you. Brady Thompson went missing six months ago, and when you had your friends on the force run his print, we knew he’d probably pissed you off and gotten himself killed.”
“Why did he attack my pack?” Viggo asked, happy to have a name for the man who had started all this.
“I don’t know!” Elliott cried. “He was crazy, kept talking about how he would show the world what werewolves were really like. Henry fired him, but then he stole a bunch of guns and those weird rocks and ran off and we didn’t hear anything more about him until you ran his prints. Henry decided to snatch you in case Brady had blabbed.”
“Hm.” Viggo made a noise in the back of his throat, dissatisfied. He could see the outline of this Brady character’s plan – make a couple of werewolves go feral and point them at the city and hope they wreaked havoc – but the execution was amateurish.
It galled that someone so stupid had caused him so much trouble.
Viggo heard the sound of more cars outside, and a second later Jordan was poking his head through the door.
“We’ve got incoming!”
Viggo and Thomas rushed outside, repeating their move from earlier of spreading out, climbing the fence and coming at the humans from behind as they took up positions behind the gate.
The humans went down before they even knew what hit them. The only information they had to work from was the silent alarm and the knowledge that no one from the first group was responding to their calls. They were warier than the first group but still no match for three werewolves on the hunt.
Staring down at the bodies, Viggo recognized the man from the bar who had been used to bait him and Bjorn into their trap. He had to give them credit. Using their inability not to be suspicious to lure him and Bjorn into a trap was clever and a good lesson not to underestimate humans.
Scanning the rest of the bodies, Viggo was satisfied to see the men who had kidnapped Sebastian among them. He walked over to the bodies and stomped on them, making sure they really were dead.
Thomas shot him a darkly amused look.
Walking back through the gate toward the guardhouse, adrenaline high and the air thick with the scent of blood, Viggo saw the warehouse door open and ten people spill out with Bjorn at the helm.
“We’ve got nine unconscious and seven doing a sweep of the buildings in there.” Bjorn was all business. “Max is guarding the humans. How are things here?”
Clapping him on the back, Viggo explained their easy takeover of the guardhouse and the two waves of attacks and the subsequent slaughter. He took great pleasure in informing Bjorn that the men who had taken Sebastian were dead.
As he was talking, a van came roaring down the street, men hanging out the window and shooting at them.
Everyone ducked down and scattered, bullets flying everywhere. Viggo could see Jordan taking a hit and going down, only to push back with a roar and charge the oncoming van.
Viggo followed, Bjorn by his side, and together, with the rest of the enraged pack of wolves, they came at the van and knocked it off the road, sending it crashing into the fence surrounding the warehouse and coming to a stop.
The two shooters were ripped out of the windows and torn limb from limb, Viggo and Bjorn taking care of the driver by shattering the windshield and yanking him over the hood and crushing his skull.
“Any dead?” Viggo asked, climbing on top of the van and surveying his makeshift alliance.
“Just injured, but I’ll be fine,” Jordan said, claws digging into the wound in his stomach to remove the bullet. The hit would have killed a human, but Jordan would be fine. Generally, if a werewolf was still standing five minutes after receiving an injury, they would heal.
Jumping down from the van, Viggo started giving orders. They needed to go over every building in the warehouse with a fine-toothed comb to gather all the evidence they could find, and by the end, hopefully, they would have enough to track down anyone and everyone who had anything to do with the operation.
Sighing, Viggo realized that if he truly wanted to make sure the evidence was analyzed properly, he needed to contact his father.
Viggo, groomed to take over the sprawling west coast Blackwell pack, had pissed off a lot of people when he married Bjorn and went off to start his own pack, his father chief among them. They hardly ever spoke, and Viggo’s tarnishing of the Blackwell name with his violent behavior when he first claimed his territory hadn’t helped. Still, their relationship wasn’t so frayed that his father wouldn’t help him in a situation like this.
“What’s that look?” Bjorn asked, walking up to him. They were in the office above the arena, gathering books and papers into piles on the desk to take with them.
“I’m going to call my dad, ask him to take over, and make sure the Mercer pack doesn’t wriggle out of this – assuming the guard was telling the truth. Either way, this is more than we can investigate on our own. We need my dad’s resources and connections.”
