by Sam Hall
I stood at the end of the bed once I got free, just letting the moonlight caress my skin, and sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Mother Moon. Like any parent, her decisions hadn’t always made sense to me at the time, but now that I saw the bigger picture, I could see it. I’d thought I knew what I wanted and had felt like I was going to die when that was taken off the table. I looked back at those beautiful forms, completely at peace right now. This was what I needed.
My last prayer went to my father. I liked to imagine that in the mottled shapes of the moon, I could see him in the pack lands beyond, looking down upon me. He’d be proud, I realised, of the men I’d found, the ones I’d taken as mates. Lorcan might’ve pressed the boundaries a little, but… Tears formed as I saw in my mind’s eye all of us sitting down to eat at the table, talking shit over one of Nan’s roast dinners, together, a family.
“I’ll find them, Dad, I promise,” I whispered. “They tried to take that from me, from you, but you’ll see. We’ll have that dinner, that family, and when we do, we’ll raise a toast for you.”
My mistake came from my wolf’s nature. My instincts should have told me there was someone in the house, but they were dulled, soothed by the sense of my pack I felt throbbing inside me, calling me back to the room as I went downstairs to get a drink. I should’ve heeded it.
Because I thought I had all the time in the world. That I could walk into the darkened kitchen and open the fridge door and grab a bottle of water, drink it down, then go back upstairs and crawl into bed, teasing my loves with my mouth and hands until they woke up hard and hungry, wanting to slake that appetite on my skin.
It was a rustle that alerted me. An innocuous enough sound in the city, but my head jerked sideways, my eyes searching the dark for its source. They were dulled by the artificial glow of the fridge, so I shut it, leaving the bottle inside it and padding out into the dark.
Later, I thought about all of the shoulds. I should’ve shouted out for the guys, for the enforcers. I should’ve gone to fur, my nose more sensitive, my fangs more deadly. I should’ve turned the light on, to unmask what I thought was a mouse scurrying around in the dark.
But instead, it was a rat.
The rush of air on my face was the only warning I got, then the rapid skitter of human, not rodent, footsteps. My fangs snapped down, my hands went to claws, but that wasn’t going to do much against a baseball bat to the head. At least I thought that was what it was. All I knew was a brief, explosive moment of pain when I felt the impact of the bat like an IED to my brain. It was so sharp, so intense, I couldn’t even force out a scream.
And then there was nothing, just me, lying on the floor in a slowly spreading pool of blood.
Chapter 35
Mason woke way too early from habit, but he knew this day would be different the moment it all came back. The forest, his girl… His thoughts didn’t get past that bit. They couldn’t. He’d prised them away from thinking about Paige that way, over and over, but now… When he took a deep breath in, his chest seemed to expand further, his lungs filling more completely. That was fitting. She was as necessary to him as oxygen, and now he had more of all of it. He rolled over, looking over Zack’s shoulders, expecting to see her buried beneath the pile of bodies as she had been last night. It’d made him smile, that deep need for her being expressed even in sleep, but this didn’t.
Her spot was empty, Lorcan’s hand reaching out into the space she’d left. Mason frowned, looked around the bed, hoping that she’d just wriggled free to go and snuggle into Micah or Declan. He was up and off the bed, wriggling back into his jeans, then grabbing the gun he’d stashed in the chest of drawers, making sure it was loaded and the safety was still on.
“Micah, Declan,” he said, a short sharp order with enough dominance to jerk them out of sleep. They just stared at him bleary-eyed for a moment, and he didn’t wait for them to focus. He was out the door and down the stairs in seconds.
She’s gone for a run. She’s making breakfast. She’s having a shower. She’s talking to the other enforcers. She’s searching her father’s office. His brain frantically threw logical reasons why he hadn’t woken up next to the woman he loved, but none of them stuck. She didn’t know, he’d never told her of the rush of pure unadulterated fear he felt when he didn’t know where she was. As a teen, that had been brotherly, protective, but as an adult, that just increased. Now? His hand clawed at his sternum, the customary ache turning into an outright stabbing pain.
Because he smelt it first, the blood, and then he saw her.
“No…” he whispered, because it couldn’t be true. Now when… Not after… He took a faltering step forward, something he reamed himself out about afterwards. He kept saying that stupid word over and over as he forced himself onwards, his feet almost silent on the wood floor. He didn’t pull his gun, scan for whoever did this to her, because he couldn’t look away. She was sprawled out on the floor like a dropped doll, her closed eyes making her look like she was just sleeping there on the polished floorboards, the blood matting her beautiful chestnut hair making a lie of that.
His brain raced, trying to insist that he initiate lockdown, go through all of the fail safes Alpha Spehr had put in place if Paige got attacked.
“She’ll need protection from everyone, if what I think is going to happen eventuates. She’ll need you to stand firm against the lot of them for her, even from her own family.”
But instead, he fell to his knees beside her, and he begged. For her to wake up, to open her eyes, for her to be OK. To forgive him, then, now, for all the ways he’d failed her, as he should’ve the moment she came home.
“No, no, no, no, NO!” His voice rang out throughout the living area, but it made no difference. She didn’t move, she didn’t waken. Instead, she lay there, a bloody naked facsimile of her father when he’d found him.
His tears touched her skin before he could bring himself to. His fingers shook, his whole body quaking in an attempt to process this. Finally, he forced them down, wrapping around her wrist. Warm, alive! his brain shouted at him. He made his fingers press down on the veins there, the time between his search and the feel of her pulse feeling like an age. It was strong, slow but strong.
“What the fuck?!” Declan shouted.
“Call an ambulance now, Dec!” Micah said, dropping down beside her. “Tell those fucks they better be here in twenty seconds or I’m coming for them myself. Mase…”
He couldn’t respond. He had no words. Everything inside him was just smashing at his lips, caught all snarled up together in a log jam that stopped everything getting out but this.
“My girl…”
She was, he’d always known it. She beat inside his heart, came in and out of him with every breath, saturated him so deeply, no one else could get in. She was his motherfucking world, and he’d held out on her, let her walk out and away from him. His hubris, his arrogance shocked him almost as much as her current state, as Micah bent over her, listening to her heart beat, the one that beat in him, as Declan shouted at emergency services. Some instinct had him shuffling forward, smoothing her hair back on the uninjured side, not wanting anything to obscure her face.
“Jesus,” Micah said with a start when her eyelids fluttered. “No,” he snapped, his hand shooting out to hold Mason’s still when he went to pull away. “Hold on to her, Mase.”
“ETA two minutes. I’m getting the boys in. We go into lockdown. Codes changed. No one in or out but enforcers and her.”
“What the fuck happened?!”
Feet came thundering down the steps, but he couldn’t focus on them, on the shouts. It all faded away, the sharp scream of the approaching siren unlocking an answering one inside him.
“Sweetheart…” His voice couldn’t convey all the pain inside him. “Hold on, my love. You’re such a ballsy little fighter. You never back down, never give an inch. You’ve gotta hold on. Fight this, fight them, fight the fucking monstrous cunts who…” His hands started to ball up hard
, needing to hit out, strike, but even as he felt his mouth fill with fangs, he continued.
“All that’s good in the world is in you. You go, the light goes with you. The moon won’t rise, it can’t, not when her favourite daughter is laid low. There is no moon, no sun, no day or night, no rain, no life without you. I…”
He choked on it, his past cruel declarations stabbing into him like sharpened knives, making him bleed when his life blood was already leaching out with hers.
“Just wake up, sweetheart. Wake up, smack me in the face, kick me in the nuts, bring me down, baby, because I deserve it. I fucking deserve it for walking away from you.” He shook his head over and over, hearing the shouts and stampeding feet, officious voices asking him to step back.
“He can’t,” Micah said. “I think…I think he’s holding her here.”
He grabbed that flimsy idea, ridiculous and not standing up to close inspection, but he didn’t care. There was no life but for hope, and right now, all of his was tied up in her.
It always was.
“I’ll do anything, Paige. Absolutely fucking anything if you wake up. You’re not my girl, you’re my whole fucking heart.”
“Well, if you let us get through, we can make sure hers keeps beating. She needs to go to hospital.”
The voice cut through the haze, then the men, his pack, her mates, all came into sharp focus. Micah looked desperate, Declan horrified, Zack pacing back and forth, but it was in Lorcan he found what he was looking for. Did his own face look the same? That devastation so complete and utter as to be seamless?
Lorcan knew.
He knew what it would be like, if they didn’t get her to the hospital, if they didn’t help her body’s natural healing abilities bring her back. To them.
Mason shook his head, scrambled to his feet, moving to allow the paramedics closer but still holding on to her.
“All right, we’re going to stabilise her neck and then get her onto a stretcher. Staff at the hospital are on standby.”
And so they did, while Lorcan took her other hand, the two of them walking out with her when they moved her stretcher, and the heavy steps felt way too close to the way they’d carried her father to his final resting place.
Come back to me… That beat inside him now, over and over, a call to arms, an imperative, a destiny. He’d give anything he had for that to happen, anything, including this fucking town if that was what it took. He looked the alpha estate over with a dark eye as they slid her into the back of the ambulance, him taking up one side, Lorcan the other, and despite everything that had happened or hadn’t, he knew the other man would join him in tearing it apart to find those that dared hurt his mate.
Mate…
One last knife to the chest, he let it twist, breathing little sharp pants as he considered what he’d turned his back on, but he’d have plenty of time to kick himself in the arse when she was safe, stable, healing.
The doors slammed shut, a thud on the back letting the driver know he was good to go, the sirens, as far as he was concerned, announcing their intent to the town. They might’ve thought to bring their best and brightest down for reasons Mason would never understand, but that would not stand.
If they wanted a war, he was more than happy to bring it.
What next?
THIS BOOK WILL BE OUT MUCH EARLIER THAN THE DATE ON AMAZON.
Get it here!
So, who the hell killed Paige’s dad? And will Mason pull his head out of his arse? Will whoever is pulling this shit finally take out the Scooby gang? Find out more in what I think is the final book in Paige’s story!
Want another shifter tale set in the same world?
Get it here!
Never tell them what we are, Shannon’s grandmother had always said.
Working as a faux-Reiki healer in her local veterinary clinic, Shannon uses her psychic abilities to help sick or anxious animals, worried that one day people were going to see past the New Age façade she’d constructed.
With good cause.
Men from the newly created Capricorn Institute bring her to the newly renovated prison on the hill to work her wiles on their beasts, creatures she’d thought she’d only ever seen in a zoo, but they don’t respond to her psychic overtures like a normal animal would.
Because they aren’t.
Beautiful, wild, Shannon’s about to find out the truth about the Big Bad Wolf and all of his apex predator friends. These sexy shifters track her every movement, memorise her scent, because even from behind bars, they’re hunting her. Physically, psychically, these men will use whatever tactics they can to get what they want: her.
THERE IS AN EXTENSIVE TRIGGER WARNING INSIDE THE START OF THE BOOK. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO READ IT.
This is book one in a brand new super steamy series from the author of the Pack Heat series. If you love hot shifter romance, you’ll love Tail ‘Em. Some MM
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Acknowledgments
To my author group: a better group of ladies can’t be found. You gave me permission to step out on my seriously crowded dance card and spit this baby out. The support, as always, is amazing.
Super editor Meghan Leigh Daigle cast her eagle eye over this one. She’s an outstanding editor, if ever you’re looking for one!
https://www.facebook.com/Bookish-Dreams-Editing-105567517555119/
Cover was created by the team at CJ Romano
https://www.facebook.com/groups/coversbycjromano
Special thanks to Mollie, Teresa, Richelle, Jami, Amanda, Steph, Lizzy, Rebekah and Jennifer. This was a labour of love and you helped support me all the way through it.
Super special thanks to the trope advisors, Kayla, Sarah, Amanda, Jessie, Terrin, Met and Clare.
