He bit back a growl, forcing his claws back in when they tried to slip out. “I never said my pack mates were monsters.”
Rachel glared at him. “Well, then stop throwing that word around when you’re referring to yourself. If you can’t accept what you are, how the hell will Alyssa ever be able to do it?”
Zane suppressed another growl, this one out of anguish. How could any woman accept him for what he was, especially someone as perfect as Alyssa?
He was still wallowing in that when Diego and Jake ran into the room. Diego had a mobile phone in his hand and his face was pale. Jake didn’t look much better. Which was scary as hell, since that didn’t usually happen to werewolves unless half their blood had been spilled.
Zane stood, his inner wolf on high alert. Beside him, Rachel did the same.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Before either could say anything, a terrified female voice shouted unintelligible words over the mobile. Diego held it out to him.
“You need to hear this,” his pack mate said.
Frowning, Zane took it and held it to his ear. His gut clenched all over again as he picked up Alyssa’s scent on the phone. “Who is this?”
“Zane?” Christine said urgently. “Is that you? It has to be you. Nobody has an accent like that. Where the hell is Alyssa? I heard her drop the phone, but when I called back someone named Diego answered. He wouldn’t tell me a damn thing and I’m starting to freak out.”
Alyssa is in trouble.Bloody hell, he knew he shouldn’t have let her leave.
“After Rachel came up here, Jake and I went outside to grab something out of the car when we found Alyssa’s phone in the alley,” Diego said. “Dario’s scent was all over the area. I think he grabbed her.”
Zane’s heart seized in his chest. “Christine,” he said into the mobile phone. “I’m going to have to call you back.”
* * *
The first thing Alyssa noticed was the splitting headache. Then she felt a throbbing in her neck that made her think it had been crushed to the diameter of a drinking straw. On the bright side, since she could feel pain, that meant she wasn’t dead.
Memories of that asshole vampire choking her came back in a rush, and she instinctively gasped for air, hoping to assure herself that breathing was still possible. Her throat spasmed at the sudden intake of oxygen, closing off her airway and making unconsciousness seem like a much better way to spend the time.
Alyssa had no idea how long she lay there, gasping for air like a carp out of water, but it was long enough for her to figure out that whatever was underneath her was harder than a box of rocks and cold as hell. Despite her jeans and light jacket, her body was numb. Was she outside?
Praying Dario had left her in the alley behind the club, she took a shallow breath and pushed herself up on her elbow. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in the alley. The dimly lit space she was in didn’t look like she was inside a building either. Maybe the vampire had dumped her in a cave and left her for dead. It took half a second for her to realize that was a stupid thought. There probably weren’t a lot of caves in the city of LA.
Taking another breath—deeper this time—she sat up and looked around. As her eyes adjusted to the near darkness, she took in the bare concrete walls and matching floor and realized she was in a basement. Then, Alyssa saw the steel bars surrounding her and her stomach plummeted. Crap, she was in a prison of some kind. She didn’t need a PhD in vampire lore to know this was probably where the monsters held their victims until they got around to draining them dry.
She scrambled around for her cell phone but couldn’t find it. Not that she thought she would, but still… A quick glance at her watch told her it was nearly eight o’clock in the morning. At least she hoped it was still morning. If so, then it had been about four hours since Dario had kidnapped her. Four hours for Christine to have figured out someone had grabbed her. Four hours for her friend to do something about it. But what? Christine didn’t know about vampires and she didn’t have Zane’s cell phone number.
Zane.
He knew she’d gone out to get some air and clear her head because she’d needed to process. When she hadn’t come back, there was a good chance he’d thought she walked away from him. How would he know Dario had come back for her? Even if they realized she was missing, how would they know where to look?
Oh hell. This was bad.
“Alyssa, are you okay?” a soft, familiar voice asked from somewhere to her right.
Alyssa turned her head slowly to keep from getting dizzy and found Zoe leaning up against the bars separating their cells, concern clear on the girl’s face even in the darkness. Her twin, Chloe—still the more timid of the two—hung back a few feet.
“I’m a little roughed up,” Alyssa admitted, afraid to talk too loud with her bruised throat. Carefully getting to her feet, she walked over to them. “How about you guys?”
Zoe shrugged even as Chloe moved closer to blink at her through the darkness with those big, expressive eyes of hers. “The same. We got a few bruises when those things manhandled us out of the club and into a car, but nothing too bad.”
Alyssa breathed a sigh of relief. That was something at least. After the horror story Davina had told them, she’d been worried the vampires had already killed the twins—or worse.
“What’s his name?” Chloe asked suddenly, her voice a barely audible whisper. “The other werewolf who tried to help us at the club?”
Alyssa glanced at Zoe before turning back to the quieter of the two girls. “His name is Jake Huang. He’s a cop from Santa Fe. He told us he’d picked up your scents in a diner there and somehow knew the two of you were in trouble. He got a look at you on the diner’s surveillance camera and followed you out here. He couldn’t explain why he did it, but his gut told him he had to. He freaked out after the vampires grabbed you. We had to almost physically restrain him from taking off and scouring the city, hoping to come across your scents.”
