With a growl, he looked down and saw a heavy chain wrapped around his bare chest and arms, not only binding him, but also holding him off the floor so he was barely touching the metal decking beneath him. He glanced up to see the chain disappearing into the darkness above him, when he heard someone laugh.
“Looks like someone just figured out how fucked he really is.”
Quinn’s amused voice echoed in the ship’s cargo hold. Based on the familiar scent, it was the same vessel Remy and his pack mates had searched on that raid earlier in the week.
Remy looked over to see Quinn standing to one side in the near darkness of the ship’s hold. Aaron Lee was beside him, his arms crossed, a curious expression on his face. Behind him were two more of his goons that Remy vaguely remembered from the shoot-out at the front gate of Lee’s home.
He paid little attention to the men. The only person he cared about was Triana. She was sitting on a pallet of bags filled with grain half a dozen feet away. Remy’s heart almost stopped when he saw that she was alive. Then he smelled the blood, saw it streaked through her hair and staining the left shoulder of her rain jacket. He growled long and low. He was going to enjoy killing every single one of these men.
Remy searched her face, looking for any other signs of further injury, but all he saw was a mix of relief and concern in her beautiful blue-gray eyes.
“Amazing,” Lee said, moving closer to study his chest. Or more precisely, the two bullet wounds that should have been fatal but had instead closed over already. “I knew Rufus had taken a bullet in the chest before, but I never dreamed a werewolf could recover so quickly from such an injury.”
Letting out another growl, Remy lifted his legs and kicked out at Lee’s head. The older man quickly backpedaled. Not that it mattered. The angle had been all wrong anyway. If not, the son of a bitch would have been eating through a straw for a few months—if Remy didn’t kill him first.
Lee glared at him for a moment, then nodded at Quinn. Lee’s enforcer grabbed Triana by the arm and jerked her to her feet. Remy snarled, straining against the chains holding him, but the frigging things didn’t so much as creak.
Smirking, Quinn pulled out a hunting knife from the sheath at his belt and pressed the blade to Triana’s neck.
“Try something like that again, and I’ll have him slit her throat,” Lee warned.
Remy stilled. He had no idea what Lee had planned, but he was going to have to bide his time until he could figure out how to get out of these damn chains. He didn’t know how he was going to do that, but he swore he would. And when he did, the only issue would be which one of the men died first.
Lee stepped closer again, and this time Remy was forced to let him. The man examined the wounds on his chest before going around to do the same to the ones on his back. Remy didn’t point out that the healing wouldn’t be nearly as impressive if either of the bullets were still inside him. A werewolf’s body couldn’t heal itself properly if foreign material was still in the wound. The outer skin would still close over in an instinctive attempt to keep from bleeding out, but the soft tissue and bones would never reknit, resulting in a hell of a lot of pain.
“You’ve lived a very violent life, I see,” Lee said as he finished a complete circuit and came to stand in front of Remy again. “You’ve been shot, what? A dozen times?”
“Something like that,” Remy ground out, wondering once again where the hell this was going.
Lee leveled his gaze at him. “You’re going to turn me into a werewolf, or I will do things to your woman that you couldn’t imagine in your worst nightmare.”
Remy stared at him, stunned into silence. His heart dropped into his stomach. Lee would kill him and Triana the moment he figured out Remy couldn’t do what he wanted.
Shit.
He was trying to come up with something he could say to Lee to either delay what was about to happen or, better yet, turn the tables on the madman, when Triana interrupted him.
“It’s a curse,” she said quietly. “In his blood.”
Remy gave her a sharp look, wondering what Triana was doing. Quinn was still holding on to her, the knife dangerously close to her neck. But she didn’t look at Remy. Instead, her gaze was fixed on Lee.
“A curse?” Lee laughed. “Now I know you’re full of shit. I don’t believe in any of that crap.”
“You don’t believe in them, yet you’re okay with a man becoming a werewolf?” she said. “Why do you think he and my father came to the voodoo shop in the first place? They came because they wanted a way to break the curse.”
Lee regarded Triana suspiciously for a moment before pinning Remy with a look. “Is this true?”
Remy still wasn’t sure what Triana’s plan was, but at least she seemed to have one, so he went with it. “Yes. I didn’t know what was happening to me or even what I was. I thought Triana’s mother could help me.”
Lee turned to Triana again. “You said it’s in his blood. If I inject myself with it, will it turn me into a werewolf?”
“No,” she said. “The only way a werewolf can turn a person is to bite them.”
Lee paled, and for the first time, Remy heard the man’s heart beat a little faster. He shook his head. “There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t,” Triana insisted. “The curse has to be passed through a bite, just like in the movies.”
Lee considered that for a moment, then jabbed a finger at her. “You’d better not be lying to me, or you’re dead.”
