Breaking Free

by Layla Nash

  Going back to normal life. Nick made a rude noise and all eyes turned to him. He refused to look away, instead meeting their gazes without hesitation. Normal life wasn’t possible for him, or for Lacey. She pretended like it would be, and maybe she’d even convinced herself that she could go on as the hyena queen as if that were enough. It wasn’t enough for her; it would never be enough. And she would be miserable every day of her life until she recognized that.

  “You have something to add, wolf?” Kaiser frowned at him, though it was an honest, well-intentioned question. As if he expected Nick to continue on with the revelations.

  But Nick had had enough. Lacey was lying to herself, and to him. “No. Not a thing.”

  He shoved away from the wall and stalked out of the chamber, walking away from the building as the wolf took over. Fury at Lacey and her ridiculous need to save her family from itself burned through him. He needed to run. He needed to hunt, to hurt something. Normal life. What the hell did that even mean?

  Normal life without him, clearly. Normal life as the hyena queen, alone and lonely and surrounded by enemies. Normal life for him, back on the run from mission to mission or locked up in the corner of the bears’ building, waiting for permission to run again. No way in hell.

  He’d get Smith free and leave, take the next mission from Smith, and get on with running from his demons. Even if Lacey was his mate, that didn’t guarantee them a happily ever after. Life happened. They both had scar tissue and sometimes that didn’t leave room for the heart to grow or move on. He’d just have to live with it. At least they’d had one time together. He growled to himself and headed for one of the Russian bars. An underground fight would help burn off some of the anger, and vodka would soothe the rest. They all made choices in life, and Lacey had made hers. The pack before her own happiness and future. He couldn’t compete with that.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Lacey

  The day passed in a blink. The Council meeting lasted just long enough for the other alphas to warn me away from trying to free the djinn, and for me to reject whatever arguments they put forward, and then I confronted the other two cousins who’d been bodyguards for Cass. I tried not to think about the woman that Eloise turned to stone.

  The bodyguards swore their loyalty to me, though I believed that about as much as I believed Nick when he said he loved me. Nick. He’d looked so betrayed when I chose the cackle. There had never been any doubt, at least in my mind—my life belonged to the family. All the dreams of freedom and Europe and a future where I could choose whatever kind of life I wanted... those were just dreams. Fantasies. They belonged in the realm of the impossible, and that was that. Other people could dream. Not the hyena queen.

  We didn’t alert the den that power changed hands once more, and so all hell broke loose when I walked inside. It gave me a flash of insight into who really wanted me to be queen, just on the expressions on their faces—some were overjoyed, and others... not so much.

  I found Savannah in one of the cells in the basement, locked up and quite the worse for wear after Cass was done with her, and made sure she was recovering in her room with her sister before I summoned the rest of the cackle into the throne room. I looked at all of them—cousins and sisters and even those I’d considered friends—and wondered what they’d said and done to protect themselves in the week that Cassidy ruled instead of me.

  “It takes more than BadCreek to kill me,” I said. “A lot more. Any betrayals like that of my former security chief will be met with swift reprisal. I don’t give second chances. Let this be a lesson. If you have an issue with what I’m doing, raise it the normal way through my second-in-command. If you try to take power into your own hands, there is no helping you. It only ends one way.”

  The young ones looked scared, but the older hyenas just looked... resigned. Another power-mad queen to rule over them. I’d used to think the same thing, wondering when there would be a chance for democracy or at least some kind of enlightened autocracy. It made my chest hurt. I saw in their faces the same sort of fear I remembered feeling when I watched my mother pass judgment on those in the cackle.

  I’d become my mother. The realization hit me out of nowhere as I watched them watch me, and a sudden out-of-body experience showed me how I looked through their eyes. A cold, unfeeling bitch holding power for herself, untouchable and unreachable, and distributing favors to those she wanted, punishing those she hated. It all seemed so fucking arbitrary. Cass might have been a better queen than I, or at least a less bad one. I’d done my best, but I still followed the invisible rules that my mother set out. Might made right. And that... that left a sour taste in my mouth. It wasn’t who I was.

  It wasn’t who I wanted to be.

  Before I broke down on the throne, I ordered everyone to their rooms for the foreseeable future. I couldn’t afford to leave the den for any length of time, but I wouldn’t miss the meeting with the witches at midnight. Even if Nick acted as if I’d already betrayed him, too.

  Once everyone in the cackle retreated to their living quarters, I went to check on Savannah once more. It didn’t leave much time to prepare myself before meeting Nick again at the cemetery, but I needed to know she was fine. At least until someone else challenged me.

  With everyone in lockdown and Savannah monitoring the security system to make sure no one staged another coup, I sneaked out the back. Hopefully everyone believed I remained in my quarters, and no one would take the opportunity to create more trouble. It was a gamble, but I was in a gambling mood. Maybe if there was a second coup, I wouldn’t go back.

  But I wasn’t even fooling myself. I was too scared to walk away from being queen of the hyenas. It was all I knew, and that felt safer than taking a leap into the unknown alone. Or with Nick.

  I used the relatively short walk to the cemetery to get my thoughts in order. Nothing else stirred in the historical cemetery as I approached the tree on the slight hill in the center of the small green area, and for a long moment, I wondered if Nick set me up and this was all an elaborate prank. It fit with his personality. Either a prank or another way of getting me alone so he could proposition me.

  Although hopefully he’d gotten that out of his system earlier in the afternoon. The thought made me flush. We’d gotten a lot out of our systems.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” he said from behind me, and I turned. Nick straightened from where he leaned against the tree, his expression difficult to read in the darkness. “What with consolidating control and knocking heads together and all that.”

  I wouldn’t apologize. I really didn’t want to apologize. There wasn’t anything to be sorry about; I did what was right for my cackle and my family, and that was it. He couldn’t hold that against me. Except I had the sneaking suspicion he did, and that I resented myself a little for it as well. “I still have to make the deal with the djinn.”

  “We’ll see.” Nick fiddled with a few blades of grass, looking at his hands more than me. “I get the feeling not much will change even if you do free the poor bastard.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What happens when BadCreek is gone and you don’t have an enemy to worry about anymore?” His eyes glinted gold, and I wondered if maybe it was the wolf talking instead of the man. “You’re going to need something external to worry about, otherwise you’ll have to confront yourself and your past and everything that’s fucked up about how your pack is run. So if it’s not BadCreek, it’ll be something else. The wolves, maybe. The jackals. It could be anyone.”

  I shook my head, folding my arms over my chest. It was all bullshit, just a wounded ego lashing out however he could. “Look, we had some fun. That was all it was. It’s over. I’ve got real life to worry about, and—”

  “Real life?” He laughed, teeth flashing. “You think this is your real life, Lacey? How sad is that? What you’re doing every day... that can’t possibly be all you want from life. I know you, maybe better than you know yoursel
f, and you’ve got dreams. Ambitions. You’re meant for something more than being a petty alpha over a miserable pack. You’re so much more than that.”

  “Not all of us can run away from our responsibilities like you, Nick.” I clenched my hands together behind my back, wanting to hit him or run away when his words struck a little too close to home. “I might not want to be hyena queen for the rest of my life, but someone has to look out for the family, and that’s me.”

  “What happens if you leave?” he demanded. He loomed large out of the shadows and into the watery pool of light cast from a weak lamp on one of the nearby paths. “Someone else takes over. That’s how it works. So why are you martyring yourself over this pack like you’re the only one who can save them?”

  I bared my teeth, furious at him and me and my mother and everyone in that damn cackle. “Because I’m not my mother, and the rest of them will do exactly what she did and will get them all killed. I can’t let that happen. I have to make up for it. She did so many terrible things, and we still haven’t recovered. Someone has to clean that up.”

  “You’re not your mother,” he said. Suddenly he stood in front of me and caught my shoulders, not quite shaking me, but close. “You’re not. You don’t bear the responsibility for her crimes. You don’t owe them anything. I hope you figure that out before too much time passes, otherwise you might turn into your mother and do exactly what she did, just in service to another goal.”

  “I don’t need a lecture from you,” I said. I drew breath to tell him exactly what I thought of him, but froze as more shadows were cast into the weak light.

  A strange voice said, “We can return after you’re done with your little... discussion?”

  I turned and saw three women standing in the cemetery, watching us with varying degrees of interest. The hyena growled as she got a good whiff of them: they looked like humans but smelled very wrong. The witches.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Nick

  Nick would have preferred to keep arguing with Lacey over what the hell happened instead of facing the witches, and not just because he didn’t like witches. He needed Lacey to figure out how much she’d be selling herself short by remaining in the city as the queen. She deserved a much wider world, and instead she voluntarily chained herself to her mother’s past and gave up on all the adventures she might have had. The only end for a hyena queen was death; there was no retirement. And Lacey wasn’t going to save everyone in the pack. She couldn’t. Some of them would kill her to save themselves, and that was just how it was.

  But she went silent as soon as the witch spoke, and Nick had to clench his jaw from yelling at the witches to give them a second to sort through things. Estelle stood there, eyebrows arched, with her hands folded into the sleeves of the long, billowy coat she wore. Nick inclined his head to them, acknowledging their power, even though he heard his neck creak with the effort. “Thank you for coming. Hopefully we can get this resolved quickly.”

  “And you’ll never have to see us again?” She smiled, her oddly ageless face unmoving except for her mouth. “Such a pity, Nick. Introduce us to your friend.”

  He didn’t want to, and neither did the wolf. Nick felt the hair on the back of his neck standing up as he gestured at Lacey. “Lacey Szdoka, queen of the hyenas. Meet Estelle, head witch of the local coven.”

  “The only coven,” Estelle said, moving to shake Lacey’s hand. “But that’s a minor detail.”

  “Major enough for you to bring it up,” Nick said. “There aren’t many witches left, from what I’ve found, so it’s good luck that you’ve been able to survive.”

  “Good luck?” One of the other witches, a younger version of Estelle, raised her eyebrows. “Hardly. It’s because we don’t mix with anyone else. None of the fae know we’re here, and we’ve never worked with the animals. Except you.”

  From the way her nose wrinkled, Nick suspected she would have preferred rolling around in garbage to working with him again. But for the time being, he needed them more than they needed him. The tables might turn eventually, but now was not that time. “I understand. The rest of the shifters in the city will not be made aware of your existence, or the exact nature of your... assistance.”

  “Good,” Estelle said.

  Lacey remained oddly tense next to him, though none of it showed in her voice when she finally spoke. “What should I call you?”

  “I am Estelle,” Estelle said. She tilted her head slightly to the right to indicate the other witch who’d spoken. “My cousin, Hera.” Another slight head tilt, that time to the left. “And my niece, Deirdre.”

  The hyena queen nodded to them, clearly at a loss for words, and Nick decided to step in. He folded his arms over his chest, not liking being in the middle of a graveyard under the moonlight. Too many horror movies started that way, particularly when throwing in witches and werewolves. “Let’s get down to business, then, since I don’t think any of us care to stand out here longer than necessary.”

  Estelle’s dark eyebrow arched. “By all means.”

  Nick’s skin crawled. He tried not to look at the cousin or the niece, since they were even younger and even more disconcerting for having rank and power disproportionate to their age. “A colleague is stuck in the Betwixt. We need to get him out. He’s there with a turned human. Leave the human there or kill him, and get our colleague out. That’s it.”

  None of them blinked. Finally, Estelle said, “Who is it, the colleague?”

  He’d rather hoped they wouldn’t ask. They had every right to refuse, since their relationship with the fae was strained at best and downright murderous at worst. “Here, he calls himself Smith. There... he is the ErlKing.”

  All three witches took a step back, and Lacey tensed next to him. Nick tried not to react or immediately beg for their help. He didn’t know any other way to get Smith back.

  Estelle shook her head. “You are out of your mind, Nikolai. We do not mess with the ErlKing or his disputes. We do not wish to draw the evil eye to us any more than we already have.”

  “You wouldn’t be messing anything up for Smith,” Lacey said. “You’d be freeing him from where he’s been stuck the last few months. He would owe you a debt.”

  Estelle’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the hyena, and Nick’s wolf grew restless. He didn’t like her being the focus of the witches’ attention. But the head witch drummed her fingers against her arm as she watched Lacey. “Interesting.”

  The silence stretched. The youngest witch, the one called Deirdre, didn’t look convinced. “How did he get stuck in the Betwixt? It seems like the ErlKing above all others would know how to navigate his way out of trouble in that realm.”

  Another question Nick didn’t want to answer. He took a deep breath, ready with a lie or two, when Lacey answered for him. “A djinn trapped him and the other man there. The other man, Ray, has one wish left, then the djinn can be freed.”

  “A djinn,” Estelle said, and her tone turned caustic as she looked at Nick. “And when were you planning to tell us this?”

  “Soon,” Nick said. He fought the urge to give Lacey a dirty look. She didn’t act like someone who wanted to get things done; if she was serious about freeing the djinn, it was usually better to not admit to things that would send the witches running for the hills.

  “Not soon enough,” Hera said, shaking her head, and she took a step back. “The coven will not take on both the ErlKing and a djinn. Good luck to you, Nikolai.”

  Estelle also retreated. Only the young one, Deirdre, remained as the other two began to walk away. After a long time, as Nick ground his teeth to fight the urge to chase them all down, the witch spoke. “We should do it.”

  Estelle half-turned, a hint of irritation around her eyes. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “That’s why we have magic,” she said. Deirdre’s green eyes remained serenely focused on Lacey, and Nick watched the calculations go on in the younger woman’s head. “And remember—the ErlKing in our
debt, Nikolai in our debt, the hyenas in our debt, perhaps even a djinn in our debt… The list goes on. It seems to be a great deal of advantage to hold for later, no?”

  Which was what Nick had feared. He hated being indebted to anyone, much less witches. Just the thought made his skin crawl. But the only chance he had to get Lacey to break free from her pack and go off on an adventure with him was to free the ErlKing and take care of BadCreek once and for all.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Lacey

  My heart drummed against my ribs as the witches started to walk away, and I felt the chance to find Smith and free the djinn slip away. We didn’t have any other options, and unless Nick had some other fairytale creatures hidden in his sleeves, we were screwed. Fuck.

  So I did something I normally wouldn’t have done, and pointed out the favors we would owe the witches if they assisted us. The hyena didn’t like them—the witches smelled wrong and made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Something about their serenity unnerved the wild side of me. Anything with that much control would be disastrous if shaken from their calm.

  The young one, Deirdre, worried me more than the others. The other two just saw things on the surface, dismissing Nick and me as animals, but the young one with the dark hair... She searched below the surface. She looked a few moves down the chessboard; I could tell as she asked the other two to wait and reconsider. The hyena didn’t like the idea of her around us, around the cackle, or around Nick. Not with the way she weighed and measured. The air crackled around her.