“Nothing.” Dante moved toward him, a wide grin splitting his face. “Yet. Of course, things can change at any moment.”
The terror on the other end of the bond didn’t let up. It was pouring into him, and he couldn’t think through it, couldn’t reason, couldn’t do anything but feel it—her panic, her helplessness, raw and animal and real. His vision narrowed. His body wanted to shift and run and find her, every rational thought dissolving under the pull of it.
Members of the pack had started arriving, those close enough to sense the disturbance and the direction of it. They gathered at the edges of the field, and Rex knew, even in his state, what they were seeing: their Alpha on his knees. Unraveling. Dante, standing over him like a foregone conclusion.
He did the only thing he could think of.
He locked onto Owen—the tighter, older bond, the one that didn’t shake, and told him to go to her. Then he locked him out.
He closed the one with Zoe, too. Slammed it shut.
Then he shifted. And attacked.
THE WOLF HOLDING ZOEhadn’t touched her beyond zip-tieing her wrists behind her back, tight enough to hurt. That was the only thing keeping her breathing. He stood between her and the truck, arms crossed, expression bored, like he knew how this would all play out.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
He looked at her as if genuinely surprised by the question. “Why? Because you have no right to be our Omega. A human can never understand what wolves are, what the role means.” Something hardened in his face. “The Omega holds the heart’s pack together. You can’t cheapen it by handing it to someone who will never be one of us.”
It hurt, but she wasn’t going to show him how much. “So what?” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “You’re going to kill me?”
“No.” And he almost sounded offended, like that was crazy. “May hurt you a little, if needed. The point is that right now, your mate is feeling everything you feel, and that makes him weak. Weak enough that he’ll lose.”
So that’s what this was. Demonstrating to everyone that she was, after all, his weakness. That her very presence put the pack in danger because if the Omega couldn’t protect herself, then the Alpha would forget anything, even his safety, even the pack, to protect her. She was not the one in danger. Rex was. She reached for the bond, just brushed it the way she’d learned to, testing it like pressing a bruise, and found only her own fear reflectedback at her. Nothing from Rex. Not warmth, not steadiness, not even anger. Just a wall, smooth and impenetrable. He’d shut her out, she guessed. To protect himself; to protect her.
These bastards had dared come between them. They made Rex block her,her, out oftheirbond. Oh, that was so not going to fly, not if she had anything to say. Heat flushed through her body, her heart pounded like a hammer—but not for fear anymore. For fury, simmering just under her skin.
Zoe took a breath. Let it out slowly.Alright, you son of a bitch.
She could not outfight this wolf. She had approximately zero illusions about that. But she hadn’t survived thirty-one years, six years spent on the opposite freaking coast in freaking New York City, and becoming the freaking mate of a freaking Alpha wolf by being the kind of woman who would wait to be rescued.
She could outsmart him. She just had to figure out how.
Trees in every direction. No walls, no doors, no single chokepoint, which meant geometry was actually in her favor, if she could get him looking the wrong way for ten freaking seconds.
Think.
It wasn’t hard to let her breathing go ragged and bend her shoulders a little, making her voice as small as she could manage. “I need to use the bathroom.”
He looked at her.
“I’m serious.” She let her chin wobble, just slightly. She gestured vaguely, miserably, at the trees. “I just need a minute. I’ll go right there, I won’t—where would I even run to? You’d be on me before I got ten feet.”Maybe.
His stare was flat and unmoved, so she let her eyes fill—still not hard at all, as she really was deluding herself about not being terrified. But he would smell that, which played in her favor,so she didn’t hold back. “Please,” she said quietly and a little broken. “I just need a minute.”
His sigh was irritated more than anything else. He looked away from her, as if the very sight of her whiny form was enough to make him wish for death, and jerked his head toward the trees to her left. Right in line with the truck. Idiot. “Stay close. I can be on you before you can think, and I promise you, it will not be funny.”
She barely nodded, keeping her eyes down as he cut the plastic tie, then she walked until the trees swallowed her. Noted where Rex’s truck was, mapping the straightest line to it in her mind. This was, she was painfully aware, an extraordinarily stupid plan.Runwas barely a plan.Runwas what you did when you hadnoplan. He was a wolf, faster than her, stronger than her, almost certainly already suspicious, and her entire strategy amounted togo fast and hope for the best.
Maybe he would trip on a root and fall?Yeah, right.
Still, what was the other option? That’s right, she had nothing else.
Well, alright, then.
She took a long breath in; counted to three.
Then she ran.
