The feral had already marked her with his seed.
Balkazar shook his head, pausing only to wonder that a male like this feral Anhur would have bothered to resist a slit such as this. A breeding female, in season. That he’d clearly allowed her to run, toying with her when he should have been locked behind her pelvic bone. His knot surely just as overgrown as the rest of him.
Madness.
That sort of insanity was contagious. Rotted the mind of males born into greatness, and forwhat?Afemale, and this one not even Anhur? Who could give them disposable warriors, but not a noble bloodline?
No. He wouldn’t stand idle, wouldn’t bring her back to Sinadim and watch the prince lose himself to a sloppy sheath he be made to share.
Sinadim was of royal blood.
Balkazar his war chief. Sworn to protect the Karahmet line from dangers big and insignificantly small.
Teeth bared, mane bristling, Balkazar squeezed into that darkened tunnel. Hearing nothing from the battle of giants, but his own strained breaths echoing back from the tunnel walls.
8
At first, there was only broken branches and upturned detritus. Enough that Sinadim left the hunt to the hybrids who were trained for such things. To find only a few subtle clues the pack could follow, in hopes of bringing their feisty Omega back into the fold. Where she would be punished for her insolence. Made to atone for her daring that had been an aphrodisiac before it had become a chore.
There wasn’t a need to follow their noses, though that couldn’t be helped—Renegade’s scent waseverywhere.A thick, taunting blanket coating every surface the wily little bitch had touched as she fled the pack. Fled Sinadim and her duty to the Alpha who’d claimed her, and forwhat?A life skulking through the shadows cloaked in rancid fat?
Forfreedom?
Sinadim laughed.
She hadn’t an honest clue what the word truly meant.
But her attempts at stealth were quickly abandoned. Her footprints growing easy to track, she’d left a trail of destruction scattered through the forest.
And yet, the wood was absent any meager hint of infected roaming where they might. Only the day prior there’d been a ravenous hoard and countless lone infected, but now, in the wake of Renegade’s passing?
There was nothing but ominous silence.
A gentle breeze and the sounds of his pack searching the trail for hints of her passing. Followed by the occasional twitter of watching eyes and bottomless stomachs, but no hint of any predator. The woods lay vacant and subdued, heavy with the threat of great change, for something had gone so very wrong.
And then he saw them.
One set of footprints elegant, the other monstrous.
A hunt.
Rolling a smudge of earth between his fingers, Sinadim knelt in the spongy loam. Activating the scent captured in the dirt with heated friction.
Musk.
It saturated the ground, disguised beneath the flavor of breeding female, where moss and leaves had been crushed in a distinct impression of two bodies. Soaked into the tree bark where tiny female hands had tried to cling to some measure of safety, and failed. It permeated the wind, a scent both pungent and robust. A clear warning of a male in rut. AnAnhurmale willing to fight and die for breeding rights, as Sinadim had thought himself willing to do.
That scent promised death to any foolish enough to issue challenge.
Shocked, the prince’s hackles rose up, his right cheek pulling around that gruesome scar. Stinging where his ruined eye had begun to weep because there’d been no time to tend it. No moment to sit and allow Sickle to fuss over badly healed tissue, to apply his warm compress of willow bark and peppermint, or to chastise him for clawing at it when it itched and ached.
And now it was too late, their female caught up by another. A loner whose very passing was enough to leave a desert in his wake.
A snarl burst free, rattling over Sinadim’s lips. The prince seethed, his fists clenched, hackles bristling. Made a passive observer to events that had already come and gone, all but stripped of his dominance, Sinadim was held immobile by the shock of knowing what had transpired in this modest clearing.
How quickly they’d lost her.
“She did this,” he snarled. “But it’s cost useverything.”
