Caught: A Paranormal Romance (The Swamp Book 3)

by Rebecca Royce

  He visibly swallowed. “I was in so much pain. So much. And the Omegas didn’t help me. Why didn’t they help me? That’s why…that’s why the second I could, I got rid of them all. I am Alpha. I decide what happens. Even with the humans. They don’t know I can control them, but I do. And every werewolf ever born. I am the strongest of them all.”

  I dropped my hand. Something about that just felt wrong. The water looked lovely, serene, almost too much. As though I needed to throw a pebble into it to make ripples, just so that it would be less perfect. Instead, I sat down on the edge of the dock and stared forward.

  “Don’t ignore me!” he shouted.

  I turned toward him. “I’ll be happy to speak to you when you are not saying ridiculous things. If you want me to answer, stop saying braggadocious things. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about anyway. It all seems like nonsense.”

  His face became a shade of orange reminiscent of a pumpkin. Yes, he didn’t like what I’d said, and much as my hands burned and I wanted to do…something…I didn’t really care that he was having a temper tantrum. Any second now, he might stomp his foot.

  Instead, he sat down next to me. “You not remembering things is actually a gift I’m giving you. I’m afraid you might go insane if I let you know what is going on.”

  MacKenzie…

  Whose voice was that talking to me?

  I’m home, baby. We’re going to get this taken care of.

  I felt like I should know that voice the way that I should have known the man who was here temporarily. Only I didn’t.

  “You’ve done something to me. That much I understand. In the same way I know this place isn’t real. Nothing is this beautiful, this serene. If you want to talk to me, it should be on equal footing. Give me back what you took from me, so that I know you as well as you know me, and we can go from there. Until then? Sorry. I’m going to sit here and think about nothing… I’ll contemplate my belly button for hours. I don’t care. I’m not doing this with you anymore.”

  He widened his eyes. “You shouldn’t be able to summon that kind of temper. Not here.”

  “I may not know much about myself, but I do know that I’ve got a backbone, and I’m not afraid to use it. So do you want to talk, or do you want to sit here? I’m good with either. But if you want to get anywhere with me, cut the crap already.”

  Anton

  Sometimes, it was frustrating not knowing what was real, what I’d made up in my head, and what had been planted there in the years that Ross Morgan had fucked with my life. I shouldn’t even have been thinking of that in past tense. The man was still fucking with my life.

  Now it was in the shape of taking my mate from me, stealing her mind.

  I’d do anything to protect her from this.

  Who in the world would have thought I’d even have a mate? Me, the broken Lejeune. The man without a voice. My mother hid me from the world, not letting me see people outside of our small inner circle, terrified every second that something would happen to me. There were days I’d considered hopping out the window, disappearing, and never coming back.

  But then I’d thought of Preston and how he’d always had my back, always seen to it that I was treated like everyone else, how it would hurt him if I did that, and I’d stayed. Jarret had been around, too. Now that I understood he blamed himself, much of our earlier relationship made sense. And Rainer? Well, I’d worshiped him. Not that he’d known it. He’d always seemed larger than life to me, like our fathers.

  I’d never thought I’d have a mate, let alone that she would be the one and only Omega. Or that she would smell like springtime and understand what I wanted to say without me needing to speak. How was that possible?

  The second I’d seen her, when Gus brought her into the house, I’d simply known. I’d never shifted in my life, never been a werewolf, and yet it was like all of those instincts were right where they were supposed to be. I’d scented her, then I’d seen her and boom…she was mine. Hadn’t surprised me she was theirs, too. Much as we were the most dysfunctional bunch of werewolves ever born to a family, we were always meant to be together. Who else was going to put up with us?

  My beautiful mate loved us all.

  I scanned through my books. I’d never in a million years have imagined that I would encode inside the pages messages to myself and others to explain this craziness. How had I even done this? How strong a connection did I have to this Loup? Could I become one myself?

  Being silent meant I had lots of time to think, since I had no desire to try to make my ideas understood to those who didn’t want to take five seconds to let me get them out. My brothers, fine. They seemed to be willing to pause, but the rest of the bunch searching the Internet with Preston could all go jump in a ditch. They whispered about me and never took the time to know the man they spent all that time discussing.

  It was bothersome but low on my list of things I worried about.

  We needed a lake. I’d written about one. Hadn’t I? What did it mean that I couldn’t really remember? They were my books. Shouldn’t I have known them inside and out? And yet there had always been a distance I’d felt in regards to them. As though someone else had written them.

  Now I sort of understood why. Maybe I wasn’t talented. Maybe I was just some kind of conduit.

  Questions for another time.

  I wasn’t finding anything I needed here.

  Rainer leaned against the doorway, watching me. Jarret was upstairs with our mate, where I’d like to be if I had a choice, but I didn’t. Preston had become mister organizer. Who would have thought it? And my big brother was back.

  I’d scented his arrival, heard him come in, and hadn’t blamed him in the least when he’d headed straight upstairs to our mate.

  “Seems you saved the day.” Rainer strode toward me. “Thank you.”

  I nodded. Even if I could speak, there wouldn’t be more to say than that. Yes, I’d come up with the idea about the Loups being spotted. But Preston had taken it to a whole other level. We were a team, and I was grateful we were all in this together.

  “Need help? I can’t get near a computer to help any of them. Besides, I think my role in this is going to somehow be to Alpha challenge the Loup when we find him.”

  I jolted. Was that a thing? Was Morgan an Alpha? That meant there was an explanation for how he controlled us. All the years running amok in my head was because he’d been…what…my Alpha? I hadn’t consented to that. There was a give and take between the Alphas and everyone else. We had to want to be with them. Their dominance made that happen, but still, I’d been a baby way too young to agree to anything. Fuck. It was like a mind rape.

  Rainer placed his hand on my shoulder, and I jumped.

  “You okay? Where’d you go? Nowhere good.”

  I hugged him. We weren’t really huggy people, but I was so glad he was here, so glad he was Alpha, so glad to share MacKenzie with him. If anyone could save her, could save all of us, it was Rainer. He just didn’t know it. The Accords and council had broken him. What was worse was I was pretty sure the council had done it on purpose. Break the strong, make them weak, knock them down.

  But she was bringing him back. She was doing that for all of us.

  He patted my back. “It’s been a lot. And we’ve had no time to deal with any of it, little brother. You keep coming through. You always do.”

  I hoped I could continue to do so. I waved my hand over the mess on my desk. So far, I was getting nowhere.

  He looked over it. “Do you make notes anywhere, or do you just write directly on the page?”

  I jolted. Fuck. Yes, I made notes. I used to do it more than I did lately, but when I first started writing, I saw so many scenes in my head I could barely contain myself. There had been notebooks. But I didn’t have them here. I grabbed the tablet.

  “Back at the house in New Orleans.” The computer spoke for me.

  He winced. “Just got back from there. We need those notebooks. Can you t
ake the car and go back and get them?”

  I nodded. That I could do. No problem. Without conscious thought as to why I looked up at the ceiling. She was right upstairs, right above our heads. My love. My heart. My everything.

  Rainer sat down in the chair. “She’ll be okay. I won’t settle for less.”

  How did he not know he was Alpha? I shook my head. It didn’t matter. He would be when it counted.

  Where were my keys? He held them up, and I grinned. Yeah, he knew me.

  Stepping out of the quiet of the office to the chaos of the living room, I knew why Rainer had sought me out. Preston was in the center, barking orders. He took a long pull of a bottle of water. They were going to solve this, and I was going to help them. I just had to get to New Orleans and back with nothing going wrong.

  Chapter 3

  Preston

  I had a list of five places. That was so much better than where we’d started. I sat back in my chair. Fuck. I really wasn’t cut out for this. I was a wolf. Give me something to hunt and kill, I’d get that done. These incremental movements were killing me. Let the cats stalk, I wanted to attack. I sat back in my chair. Maybe I was just a lousy wolf.

  Rainer’s scent hit me, and I spun around to see him. I knew he’d gotten back, smelled and heard it, but he hadn’t come to see me yet.

  My older brother was all Alpha in that moment. I wasn’t sure I could explain the difference, how and when it worked. Sometimes, Rainer didn’t come across like we all needed to follow him, like he was always in charge. He’d been born for it and seemed on track to take the position for years. Then prison happened, and it changed him, broke him.

  But like everything else our Omega did, she’d gotten him back to the place where I could see him again. And yeah…I wanted to follow him right now.

  The room quieted. Everyone’s gazes moved from what they were doing to stare at Rainer. That was saying a lot, considering Miranda was here and she gave off the same look at me vibes. But right now, Rainer’s were stronger.

  Interesting.

  I got to my feet. “Brother.”

  He put his arm on mine. “Thanks for keeping things under control here. I’m going to go see her in a second. Wanted to tell you Anton had a thought and I sent him to go collect notebooks from New Orleans.”

  I nodded. There was a time I would have worried about Anton doing that alone, but these days, I understood that Anton might actually be the strongest out of all of us. He could do pretty much anything. “Jarret is proving to have some pretty incredible psychic wolf talents.”

  “Not surprising. He’s always been untapped in his abilities.” Rainer rubbed his eyes. “This was smart thinking, trying to look at the reports. Good work with this.”

  I shrugged. “Anton, too.”

  “Rainer, can I see you please?” Miranda wanted his attention, and I stepped back to get onto my computer. There were a few more things to check, and if the Alpha wanted to talk, then I’d let them do it.

  My brother’s eyes turned wolf for a second, and he took a long breath. “Later.”

  He turned his back on Miranda and headed upstairs, leaving her standing there. What was that about? I went back to my seat. I didn’t need to be in the middle of that mess. Miranda waited a second before she took off toward the kitchen. I quickly glanced between them before I went back to ignoring what had happened. I had enough things to concern myself with without getting into some Alpha thing with them.

  Who was going to talk to who on whose terms? It was going to turn out to be some shit like that.

  I cracked my neck and looked over the computer again. What had I been doing?

  All around me, the sounds of typing and clicking filled the air. When had we gotten so many chairs? With the amount of people we had around here, it had become a place I hardly recognized. Not like the swamp outside. Houses became homes in no time flat, they changed to fit the people in them. Packs were like that, too. Add a member, and the way it felt to be in them could be entirely different.

  I understood the ins and outs of it. I just hated having to focus on the details. I lifted my hands from the keys. The details.

  What did we know about Ross? He employed humans. There were paper trails for that. I employed small numbers, and it was endless paperwork. Morgan must be paying taxes. I growled at the humanness of it.

  I was going to talk to my lawyer. He’d know how to find someone who didn’t want to be found. The trouble was that I didn’t have his number here. I had it locked in my work cell phone in my desk at the swamp tour office.

  Great. It was a perfectly valid excuse to get out of the house and my would-be pack.

  “Hey,” I spoke to the guy sitting next to me. What was his name? Tony…maybe? I needed to pay better attention to these things. Or fuck it. Maybe I didn’t. This was Rainer’s domain. I was the eccentric, reclusive brother. He could figure out names, give everyone a tag to wear if he wanted to. “If anyone needs a break, make sure they know it’s okay to take one.”

  Were we going to have meetings with this forming pack? Hi, my name is Preston, and this week…

  I shuddered. He’d better not make our pack like that. All I wanted was my mate and my brothers. Everyone else would be peripheral. Not that I wasn’t grateful all of these strangers were helping me get my mate free of this nightmare. Of course, she’d saved all of them. It would be pretty shitty if they hadn’t helped.

  I jumped in my car. I could take the airboat and reach the offices via swamp, but I didn’t want to draw that kind of attention to myself if anyone was watching. Everyone drove, it wouldn’t make anyone watching take notice that I’d gotten on the boat.

  My stomach clenched, getting so far away from Mac. I pushed it away. She needed me to figure this out, not to coddle her. She had Jarret for that. And Rainer was home now. He might not seem like the type to do that, but he was. Even Anton would when he returned. My job was to fix what was wrong. It always had been.

  I drove down the small country road that led to my business office. To people not in the know, it would look like it was just a road that someone had to drive down to get to the tour. They didn’t know the amount of time I spent with so-called experts working on this approach over the years. It was all about what they called branding. When the customers turned down this road, they had to feel like they were about to venture into something very special.

  The real ‘swamp’ experience.

  We could have, and maybe should have, paved this road. Certainly, the buses would have preferred it not to bounce through the small holes. But what we’d gained in setting the scene this way seemed to have worked.

  Not that I thought the whole thing rested on the fucking road. It didn’t. We gave a great tour. All of my guides were boat captains and getting various upper level degrees at LSU in science and history things. They were all a lot smarter than me.

  That worked fine. This was just the kind of job they wanted. It was part time, they could manage their hours, make money while they studied. None of them remarked if they found me at all odd.

  The place was empty now. Wednesdays, we didn’t open until noon. It was the perfect time for me to get in and out without being noticed. I didn’t want to answer questions about where I was yet. The business should basically run itself, even if I liked to micromanage.

  My office was locked, which made me enormously happy. No one was breaking in during my extended absence.

  Not to mention, there was still plenty of evidence that it was running smoothly.

  I stopped where I stood. I’d never gotten Mac inside of my offices or on the boats. She’d never been further than my parking lot. In the time we’d hidden her away, it had seemed unsafe. Knowing what I did now, I should have brought her. She’d have liked to have seen this place. Maybe I could have taken one of the airboat tours with her. It had been a long time since I’d done one. I’d love to see it the first time through her eyes.

  I unlocked my office and headed for the desk. Another
lock had to be opened to get to the phone. I might have been paranoid, but it turned out I was right. The whole world was trying to fuck with my life. I scanned through the phone, looking for the number. Totally not letting myself think about the fact that I could have just googled the guy from home to get the number, since denial was my new best friend, I smelled the wolf.

  Stopping what I was doing, I set down my phone. “All right. Who the fuck is out there?” I gripped the side of my desk. “You don’t want to fuck with me right now. I’ll tear you in two.”

  Did I expect a Loup to stumble into my office half formed, looking like the monster it was? No, I didn’t. But there it was.

  I clenched my teeth. “Boy, did you pick the wrong fucking day to do this.”

  “Help,” its voice grumbled. It was sort of hard to hear it, and if I hadn’t spent enough time around these guys to know that they spoke, it would just sound like mishmash to me. But the sonofabitch who was in my place of business was asking for help.

  I looked up at the sky, trying to find my equilibrium. Was this for real? Finally, I spoke to him. “I’m not the Omega. This is a place humans go.”

  He sniffed the air. “Smell her.”

  Oh, that made sense. I guessed. “I smell like her.” I let out a breath I held. “Okay. Here’s the deal. The Omega is out of commission at the moment. And you obviously have a really lousy sense of smell. Shouldn’t you be…tough or something?”

  This was the worst Loup I’d ever encountered. Not that I’d had that many of them. More than I’d ever envisioned having, but whatever. This was Mac’s life, and I was happy just to be a part of it. Loving her was everything.

  I waved my hand at the Loup. “We can’t help you right now.”

  It stood there and stared at me. Fuck my life. I took a deep breath. “We can’t stay here.” That much was clear. My wolf prowled on the edges of my consciousness, begging to come out, desperate to shift and kill this abomination. But that wasn’t what he was. My human mind could think through this. He wasn’t wrong, he was sick. Omegas fixed Loups. My love would not want me to just kill it…ah…him. I took a deep breath.