Page 1 of Hunted

Chapter 1

KABOOM!

An explosion rattled the windows of the mission command center at Outlaw Ridge, in the Adirondack mountains of New York State.

Gunnar Jorgenson, alpha of the Outlaw Ridge wolf pack and commander of their illegal black ops team, looked up wearily from his computer terminal and blew out a sigh.

It had been going on like that since five-thirty in the damn morning. Massive, brain-rattling explosions from the ordinance testing field up the mountain, and this had been the biggest one yet.

His head was throbbing, and he had enough to deal with today without that shit. He was done.

Gunn reached over to the bank of screens and electronic equipment that lined the wall next to him, and slapped the switch that turned on the mic to their outdoor PA system.

“Boomer!” he yelled, his voice echoing back faintly from outside the building, out of the speakers mounted around the compound and up at the testing field. “Will you fucking stop that?”

For a moment there was blessed silence, and then Gunn’s phone vibrated with a text alert from their explosives expert.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I have no idea what you’re talking about

Seconds later there was a screaming sound overhead, and a mortar shell exploded high in the air above the command center. Bits of shrapnel rattled down on the metal roof.

Gunn hit the mic switch again. “That’s it, you fucking psycho. I don’t care what project you’re working on. If you blow up one more thing today, I’m going to come up there, rip your arms out of the sockets, and watch your arterial blood spurt from your shoulders until you die.”

Ten seconds went by. Twenty. Thirty. Gunn was about to go back to work when he heard maniacal laughter coming from the PA speakers, echoing through the compound.

Moments later there was a small, far-off explosion.

Gunn growled low in his throat, and started out of his chair.

Rex, their communications officer and one of his best friends, shook his head. “Don’t bother. He’ll stop. He just had to get the last word.”

Gunn dropped back down in his chair. “You’re right. But I’d really love to beat the crap out of him anyway.”

Rex gave a half-smile, half-grimace. “Wouldn’t we all.”

That got a huff of ironic laughter out of him. Boomer was incredibly annoying—he worked at it—but luckily for his survival, he was also incredibly good at what he did. Like most of the wolves in this godsforsaken pack.

It was the only reason Gunn hadn’t killed them all one by one in the last year. Well, that and the fact that as their alpha, he was responsible for their well-being.

Gods help him.

And to be fair, it wasn’t Boomer that had him wound up like a drum today. He turned to Rex. “Still nothing from Dobe?”

He knew the answer before he asked. They’d lost touch with Dobe Harrelson three days ago, after his latest mission had gone south. They’d all been on edge, waiting for word, hoping he was still alive. If anything had come in, from any source, Rex would have told him instantly.

Rex shook his head, then said, “And I can’t find anything about who the hell might have made him, or how. I’m still left with just what he gave us in the last message before he went dark—that it was a woman who trashed the mission, and she was still on his trail.”

Gunn ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “I know. We still don’t know if she’s an operative, an assassin, a shifter Enforcer, a human cop—or what the hell she was after. We don’t even know why she wrecked the mission—if she was trying to kidnap the target herself, or stop Dobe from getting to the kid, or if she was after Dobe specifically and our mission wasn’t even on her radar.”

Rex said, “I’m starting to think we should have sent the Hounds out to his last known location so they could try to track him back.”

Gunn rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease some of the tension there. He’d been second-guessing himself over that for two days. The Hounds were three cousins out of New Mexico, now part of his pack. They were the best trackers in the country, partly because their wolves were practically feral.

And they were crazy as fuck, every last one of them.

“We were shorthanded, and I can’t send them out unsupervised,” he said. “Their wolves haven’t recovered from all the shit that went down last year when I had to take over the pack. They’re still pissed off about me bonding them.”

“You had no choice.”