Page 1 of Rescued

Chapter 1

Switch Correra’s mother knew things.

When he was a cub, she always used to tell him stuff that was going to happen, before it did.

The mailman would be late. An appointment would be canceled. Someone in the neighborhood would get a job they were going for, or they wouldn’t get it.

A couple who’d just met would end up getting married.

She knew the night his father didn’t come home, that something had happened. Long before the police showed up at the door to tell her he was dead in a brawl, she came into Switch’s room and gathered him up in her arms and held him, tears running slowly down her face.

“Listen to the little voice inside you,” she always told him. “It knows. When to go, when to stay, when to take a chance, when to walk away. When to act, and when to wait.”

She wasn’t talking about his wolf. His wolf talked all the time in his head, and had fucking opinions on everything, but it wasn’t that voice. Call it intuition, call it magic, call it the gods whispering in his ear.

It had never steered him wrong. That little voice had saved his life more than once.

But she’d never told him what to do when the voice went silent. When he was stuck someplace, and he couldn’t seem to go and he didn’t want to stay.

Like now—when he’d ended up at the ass-end of nowhere, in the Adirondack mountains of upper New York state.

Waiting.

For what, he had no fucking clue.

He’d come here because his old friend Gunn had needed backup, when his crazy-ass wolf pack had turned against him, shoving him out of a helicopter to land face-down in the mud in fucking Illinois, with a bullet hole in his shoulder.

Switch had flown to the rescue. It was his thing; he could fly just about anything that had moving parts, and flying was one of the ways he earned his money. He also could fix pretty much any kind of machine, and rebuild most of them. Machines talked to him through his hands—he could feel what they needed. What they wanted.

And he could make his computers spit out damn near anything you ever wanted to know about anybody. Especially if they were on the dark side.

So he’d gone out that rainy night and flown Gunn all the way back to his fucked-up pack, where they’d all bonded and sniffed each other’s butts and whatever, and decided to be friends. Or frenemies, in the case of certain people named Sanchez.

It had all worked out for Gunn. Now alpha of the Outlaw Ridge pack, he was in the process of living happily ever in a cloud of sex hormones with his new mate Michelangela Connors, known as Mikey.

He was also the commander of the Ridge’s illegal black ops team, which was financed by some billionaire recluse who apparently lived in the basement of his mansion and called himself Thanatos, after the Greek death god or the Marvel Avengers character, whichever mythology you happened to prefer.

Switch didn’t prefer either of them. Thanatos was crazy, and Gunn was crazy, and the wolves of Outlaw Ridge were definitely crazy.

Since he was on the edge of crazy himself, it was the last fucking place he should probably be. And yet here he was, still in the damn Adirondacks over a month later, living in a guest cabin with a leaky roof, with three pairs of jeans and a couple sets of underwear, upgrading the communications network at the Ridge just for something to do.

And hanging out on a Saturday night in a country bar on the edge of the tiny town down the mountain, which was called Rockhaven. While Gunn played pool and moped around for Mikey, who was in Idaho packing up her stuff to move it here, and Gunn’s friends Rex and Dobe wrangled back and forth over whether they should invest their combined savings into buying the bar and fixing it up.

And Sanchez just sat silently at the other end of the table—drinking, glowering, and being the fucking wolf psycho that he was.

Switch sat as far away from Sanchez as possible, in the corner, trying to ignore them all while he fiddled with the inner workings of a pocket-sized robot he’d built for the fun of it. He wanted to see if he could make it dance, but the servos wouldn’t calibrate right.

He got antsy if he didn’t have anything to keep his hands busy.

And it kept him from having to talk to people.

“We could have live music,” Rex was saying. “There have to be some local bands we could get to play.”

As if they weren’t miles from fucking everywhere.

“Yeah, we could re-do the dance floor, with lights and shit,” Dobe said. “But we might have to upgrade the wiring system, especially if we’re going to be running amps and sound equipment.”

Switch set his robot on the tabletop and turned the little guy on. He swiveled his little metal hips and kicked up one leg—and froze. After a second he fell over.