before him.
What the hell had happened?
The last time he saw Drew he’d been sitting down stairs, sipping a glass of whiskey and watching the clock, counting down the minutes until he was finally free of this bitch and now…
Ryan was truly at a loss for words even as Kara’s threatening growl had him slowly backing up towards the door. Tilting his head in submission, because it really never hurt to remind an Alpha that he wasn’t going to do anything seriously fucking stupid to risk his own ass, he stepped back again only to look up once the growling had stopped and felt his brows arch towards his hairline.
“Well, I’ll be fucking damned,” he muttered as he stopped his retreat so that he could gawk at the large female as she laid down behind Drew’s naked form and placed her large head on his back, keeping him warm and letting Ryan know that she was protecting what was hers.
When she bared her teeth as a silent reminder that he’d overstayed his welcome, he nodded dumbly and moved his ass, putting as much space between him and his new female Alpha as fast as humanly possible and when that wasn’t fast enough, he tapped into his power and moved a hell of a lot faster.
Chapter 8
“Stop staring at me,” Drew bit out as he stared down at his untouched coffee.
“I can’t help it,” Ryan said with an over exaggerated dreamy expression on his face, because apparently the little bastard wanted Drew to force-feed him his balls.
“Try,” he bit out, sitting there, feeling like shit and wondering what the fuck was wrong with him.
He should have just let her die.
Why the hell hadn’t he just let her die?
He could have saved himself an eternity of pain and suffering and right now be consoling himself between the legs of a willing female or two, but no…
For some seriously fucked up reason, he’d not only saved her, which still shocked him that it worked, but he’d risked his own life to do it. Oh, and of course let’s not forget that he’d fucking marked her!
Basically, he’d just declared himself the most pussy-whipped werewolf on the east coast. Marking a woman, especially your mate was the ultimate sign of commitment. It meant that you were more than happy with what the fates had given you and that he would kill anyone and anything that touched her.
It meant that he loved her, cherished her and put her above all others.
It also meant that he’d just put a big fucking target on her head, which he should be fine with, but-
She was his fucking mate and when it came down to it, he couldn’t let her die. She was the mother of his future children and without her, he would just…
He just couldn’t stand by while she was suffering like that. There were only a few ways to kill them, less since they were both Alphas and could summon their abilities at any time unlike regular Pack to heal themselves, but silver was probably the most painful way for them to go. Whoever had done this had been a sick fucking bastard. Not only had they targeted her, because of him, but they’d also made sure that she’d died painfully. They’d injected her three times with silver nitrate, making sure that she died slowly and painfully. Silver nitrate in their system was equivalent to having acid injected straight into a human’s artery.
It would kill you from the inside out, but unlike humans, who would probably die within minutes after being injected with acid, a shifter would heal continuously as the poison raced through their system only to be eaten away seconds later as the silver nitrate made another pass until the shifter couldn’t keep up and the silver nitrate slowly ate away at their system until it reached the heart and brain, leaving the shifter fully aware as they died, unable to move or make a sound as they died.
It wasn’t something that he would wish upon his worst enemy, and someone had done it Kara, his mate, who’d he’d fucked up everything with and marked her to make things even worse.
“You marked her,” Ryan said with a big shit-eating grin, making him want to bitch slap him, but he didn’t need to, not with the large female shifter lying by his feet, baring her beautiful fangs at his Beta in warning.
Sighing in annoyance, Ryan shifted his head to the side in submission even as he gestured impatiently towards Kara, the seriously pissed off woman who refused to shift back to human. “You marked her several times,” Ryan pointed out with glee.
Another growl, which of course pleased him so he grabbed a piece of the lukewarm bacon that he was too depressed to eat off his plate and tossed it to her. With a glare that he would recognize anywhere, she followed the bacon as it flew through the air and landed on the floor in front of her large claws before she threw him a, “Really?” look.
Shaking his head, because there really was no pleasing a woman, he returned his attention to his Beta and waited for more bullshit. His Beta didn’t make him wait long before he gestured towards Drew and happily said, “But she didn’t mark you!”
“I didn’t have fucking silver to draw out of my blood!” he snapped, wondering why his Beta loved to push his buttons so much, especially this early in the morning before he’d had time to finish his coffee.
“Still!” Ryan said, practically jumping in his seat with excitement as he pointed out the obvious.
They both knew that he hadn’t meant to mark her, but he’d been forced to bite her in order to draw out the silver as it raced through her system. He didn’t have a choice, but no one else would know that or really care, because it looked like he’d lost his fucking mind and marked her and since he didn’t bare her mark, he looked like a fucking desperate psycho.
It was just what he needed his Pack to believe, that he’d lost his mind over the fucking pain in the ass, which of course meant that he was unstable and something for his Pack to fear, which wasn’t exactly going to help make his life easier.
This was just fucking perfect, he thought as he watched his Beta finally lose control and start laughing his ass off. He considered going for the little bastard’s face and leaving him with a nasty scar, but apparently that was one of the bonuses of having an unwanted mate. With Kara around, he didn’t need to worry over the small stuff.
“Not the face!”
*-*-*-*
She felt like hell.
“My poor face!” the little annoying bastard whined from the bathroom where he was probably still staring in the mirror, crying over the little cut she’d given him.
She snorted as she licked her muzzle and shifted her head to the side so that she was using her large paws as a pillow as she sighed, ignoring the cries of pain coming from the bathroom and focused her attention on the man sitting on the large leather chair, glaring at her.
God, what she wouldn’t give to be able to flip him off, but if she wanted to do that then she would have to shift back to human and she really just didn’t feel like doing that right now. Besides, the moment that she shifted back she’d most likely get sick and that really wasn’t enough of an incentive to make her want to shift. Then of course, was the fact that if she shifted back to human, the asshole who’d saved her life and marked her would expect her to talk, thank him for saving her life, but then again, she really wasn’t in the mood to grovel to the bastard so in werewolf form, she stayed.
“Shift back,” the bossy bastard demanded with a bored sigh as he continued to scowl at her, but she just wasn’t in the mood to deal with this right now. So, instead she simply sighed again, closed her eyes and settled in for a nap.
“This isn’t part of our deal, Kara,” Drew said, interrupting what promised to be a very nice nap.
“Oh, God! My face!” came another pathetic cry for attention that they both simply ignored.
“Kara, I’m not fucking kidding. Shift. Back. Now,” he bit out, sounding incredibly pissed.
Not that she cared, because she really didn’t.
He could sit there, whine, bitch and yell at her all day and she wouldn’t care. She just wanted to lay here and feel bad for herself for a little while until she was forced to shift ba
ck and deal with the nightmare that was her life.
Maybe she should go to the country now while the Pack was in the city and find a cave or something where she could hide out for the next thirty or forty years or until she came up with a better plan. Since that was unlikely, she was probably looking at a lifetime of catching fish with her fangs and hunting down the occasional deer when the opportunity presented itself.
Then again, since she was planning on feeling sorry for herself for at least the first decade, she probably would just live off fish for a while or whatever happened to crawl inside her cave. Maybe by the time that she was ready to reemerge and rejoin civilization again everyone that wanted her dead would be long gone.
It was possible, she thought with a groan as she shifted onto her other side. Every twenty years or so, they were forced to move before humans started asking questions and pointing out the fact that they weren’t aging. Staying in any one area for too long would bring unnecessary attention that their kind didn’t need and put them all at risk.
They’d be gone, assuming new lives somewhere and she could reclaim her old one, or at the very least she could create a better life than this one. It was something to look forward to, she told herself with a depressed little sigh as she licked her chops and settled in for a nice long nap.
“Someone get me a goddamn plastic surgeon before this heals!” the big baby that had somehow made Beta cried hysterically, making her roll her eyes with a groan as she rolled back over, praying the whining would stop so that she could get some sleep.
“Fucking baby,” Drew murmured, and for once they were in complete agreement about something.
Chapter 9
“You can’t be fucking serious,” he said, sighing heavily as he pinched the bridge of his nose, because seriously, this could not be fucking happening.
To answer him, the large female werewolf baring his mark decided to bare her teeth with a warning growl. Apparently she wasn’t fucking moving, which was a problem since this was the night of the full moon and he needed to get his Pack out of the city before they started sprouting fur and howling at the goddamn moon.
“Kara,” he bit out in warning only to get a growl in return. “We need to get the fuck out of the city,” he snarled, letting his eyes shift to silver and his fangs slide down in the only warning that she was going to-
“Did you just roll your eyes at me?” he demanded in pure outrage.
He was her fucking mate, the Alpha of the most powerful Pack in Boston and she had the nerve to-
“Don’t even fucking think of it,” he snarled when she moved to climb back up the stairs and return to his loft. He leapt in front of her, landing on the stairs above her and growled the last fucking warning that she was going to get.
She growled right back and there was no mistaking its meaning, move or she would go through him. Like he was going to let that slide, especially after all the bullshit she’d put him through over the last two days.
Allowing his human fangs to elongate even further, he stepped down the stairs until he was eye to eye with the large beast that was quickly proving to be a giant pain in the ass. They could control their shifts and because of that they were always one hundred percent in control, but his Pack wasn’t.
They healed faster than a human and could technically live forever as long as they were extremely careful, but Pack meant you were weak, meant you were not in control of your shift and that was a serious fucking problem when you lived in Boston. He needed to get his Pack and this pain in the ass out of the city before nightfall or he’d end up spending the next five hours playing roundup and chaining his Pack up in the basement.
It would keep the humans safe, but since a Pack member could only shift three days a month, they needed to be able to run off energy, hunt and let their beast have complete freedom. Placing them in the cells downstairs with chains would make their anxiety go up and make the next time they shifted volatile, because the beast inside had been completely trapped. Not being able to run during the three nights a month for a shifter was fucking torture.
Literally.
Masters loved to do that to the shifters they’d been able to get their hands on over the years. They forced them to act as attack dogs, keeping them chained three-hundred and sixty-five days a year, because after missing two shifts, a werewolf lost his