The Hyena's Hope

by Emilia Hartley

  Rodrigo wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. Dante pointed at the door as he stared down the shifter who’d started the fight and gotten in a cheap hit. The shifter sulked and left. Rodrigo wondered what Dante would have the shifter make tomorrow.

  Would there be a new grill pit out back? Or would he make some benches to go out front?

  He was partial to the idea of a grill pit, but before he could whisper the idea into Dante’s ear, Rodrigo heard an argument coming from the other side of the room. He groaned and pushed through the crowd toward the sound of the fight. It was turning out to be a raucous night.

  Instead of a shifter, Rodrigo found a human man leaning over a table in an alcove. A growl slipped up his throat before he realized who was sitting at the table. The hem of her black skirt stuck out before she inched away from the human man.

  Rage filled Rodrigo’s gut with acidic warmth. He stomped forward. The human man was leaning over the table, throwing his hands around as he shouted.

  “Excuse me,” Rodrigo grumbled.

  The man ignored him. Or, possibly, couldn’t hear Rodrigo over the sound of his own voice. So, he grabbed the man by the shoulder and yanked him away from the table. The look of fury on the man’s face died quickly.

  “Rodrigo,” Lily whispered, almost like she wanted to tell him to stop.

  The man ducked out of Rodrigo’s grasp. He turned back to Lily. She flinched. He wasn’t sure if she realized what she’d done, but it left a burning heat in the pit of Rodrigo’s gut. He was done. The man was going to leave.

  But it was Lily who stood. She slid out of her chair and stepped away from the both of them.

  “I think my night is over.” When she looked back at them, her gaze lingered on Rodrigo before flicking to the other man. As if the sight of the man scared her, she ducked into the crowd and disappeared.

  The man shoved Rodrigo. “I had my chance to get her back and you came over and ruined it!”

  Get her back. The words echoed in Rodrigo’s skull. His beast clung to them, like small rays of hope that it could use to light the dark spaces. Lily didn’t belong to him, though. He certainly wasn’t going to let his beast have anything to do with her.

  Nor was he going to let this man frighten her. He grabbed the man by the chin, like he might do to a woman, and dragged him close.

  “Go home,” he growled into the man’s face. “Your time here has run out.”

  The human scurried away and left Rodrigo on his own. Even though the bar was crowded with bodies, Rodrigo felt apart from them. The sound of their voices, of the music, became nothing but a dull drone. Claw scraped at him from the inside. The beast whispered in his ear, somehow louder than everything around him.

  He groaned and lurched for the basement door. Dante reached for him as he passed, but he ducked out of his alpha’s reach. Downstairs, he locked himself inside the lockbox. He flopped on the cot and let his beast dream of the woman named Lily.

  Chapter Two

  She couldn’t believe Brock had followed her out to the bar. When she told Frida, her friend agreed to drive her home. Lily apologized over and over, but Frida waved her off. She promised to send Vivian after Brock, but Lily asked her not to do that. Lily didn’t want to stir the pot. All she wanted to do was move on.

  Brock should have been back on campus, not around town. Had he come back just for her? She didn’t want to believe he would forego his classes for her. He was probably seeing the fitness instructor while he was in town.

  Frida asked Lily if she was okay to be alone. Maybe she wasn’t, but she didn’t want her friends to give up their night, so she promised that she would be alright. Lily let herself inside. A neon sign glowed on the wall, greeting her in bold pink letters. It cast a glow over the empty apartment that made it a little less foreboding.

  She needed to get a pet, or something. The corners seemed hollow. They no longer held the echoes of laughter. All she had now was quiet space. She ditched the dress in favor of jersey pajamas, collapsed on the couch, and fell asleep to a sitcom marathon.

  When she woke in the morning, she didn’t think about her stiff neck or the piercing pain in her lower back. Her first thought was of the empty space beside her. It wasn’t even like Brock spent all his time in her apartment. Yet, she still reached for him and was disappointed when he wasn’t there.

  She groaned and rolled off the couch. In the shower, she washed off her glittery makeup, watching it swirl down the drain. Rodrigo had seen her all dolled up. When she wiped the fog off her mirror, she wondered if he would like the plain version of her, too. She let out a choked laugh at the sight of her smudged eyeliner.

  It always refused to be erased. Brock had hated the way it turned her into a raccoon overnight. Lathering a cleanser between her hands, she then furiously scrubbed the black smudges away until she was fresh faced. The redness would disappear…

  She hoped.

  In the bedroom, she reached for a summery dress before stopping herself. It wasn’t like she was going to see Brock. He couldn’t tell her what to wear anymore. Lily grabbed a pair of high waisted pants instead, reveling in the comfort of being covered. She wouldn’t have to worry if the hem of her skirt was stuck in her underwear or fear a stray breeze from the front door whipping her skirt up. She paired the jeans with a tucked in button down shirt that had pink flamingos all over it and short sleeves.

  Facing the mirror, she cocked her hip and winked at her own reflection. The outfit needed bracelets, she decided. With no desire to bother styling her hair, she wound it into a damp braid. Brock would have had a fit that her hair wasn’t loose so he could play with it. She was just relieved to have it out of her way.

  Every moment spent away from her ex-boyfriend reminded her of the things she hadn’t been allowed to do. There had been good moments, she thought. There were photos that still needed to be taken down, of them smiling and gazing at one another. Those moments had been happy.

  Even if she couldn’t remember much about them.

  When she tried to think back to those moments, all she could see was Brock hammering the fitness instructor. The image replaced every good memory they’d ever shared. How could she have wasted six years of her life with him? It didn’t seem right.

  Her stomach churning because of her inner turmoil, Lily stopped at a bakery to find something bready to settle it. She ordered a chocolate croissant as well as a lavender latte. It was all the rage and she’d fallen hopelessly in love. If the bakery ever took it off the menu, she might very well cry.

  She had an hour before her shift at the bookstore began, so she found a table and dug a battered paperback from her bag. There was a man with fangs bending over a corseted woman on the cover, and it earned her a few concerned looks, but she didn’t care. Count Giorgio was in the midst of confessing his love to Lady Violetta.

  Lily needed to know how Lady Violetta’s fiancée was going to react. The whole reason the couple had visited the Count’s lands was to hunt vampires. Lady Violetta was in direct opposition to everything she believed when she was with Count Giorgio, but her heart refused to let him go.

  This was the kind of romance Lily wanted. She would never admit it to anyone, but she wanted someone who could kiss her gently while their hand was wrapped around her throat. She’d tried to bring it up to Brock, but he’d been awful at it. In the end, he’d thrown his hands in the air, very confused and frustrated. She never mentioned it again.

  It hadn’t been worth the fight.

  Now, she found herself filled with a desperate yearning. As she read, the words morphed on the page until she envisioned Rodrigo as Count Giorgio and herself as Lady Violetta. The scene unfolded, Rodrigo’s fingertips grazing her neck while he looked down at her with untapped hunger. Her head fell back to reveal her neck, an invitation, a release.

  “Ma’am? Excuse me?”

  Lily’s head snapped up, cheeks flaring with heat at what she’d been doing. Ahead of her was a lanky boy with a laptop and a tablet
under his arm. A stylus was tucked behind his ear. All in all, he looked like the nerdy hero of a bad anime.

  He nodded to something behind her. Her brows furrowed and she turned but saw nothing but wall.

  “This is the only table with access to an outlet. Considering that you’re not using the outlet, could I steal your table?”

  She looked around, but all the other tables had been taken. Even the large, family sized table in the center of the room was taken, by one woman with a laptop and several stacks of paper. Lily sighed and vacated her seat, unwilling to be mean to the poor kid. She wasn’t about to encroach on the woman’s table, either.

  Instead, she decided she should probably head to work early. She didn’t have the kind of job that she dreaded going to every day. If anything, she was excited to go to work. The small indie bookstore downtown didn’t get a lot of traffic, but the regulars were sweet and access to advance reader copies of upcoming books was nice.

  With her iced latte in one hand and the open paperback in the other, she approached the intersection. Lady Violetta was having a moral quandary and Lily needed to know how Lady Violetta was going to decide. Would she stay with her plain but doting fiancé and continue hunting vampires with him? Or would she choose her heart and the night, becoming a vampire with Count Giorgio?

  Distantly, she thought she heard the ding of the crosswalk light and stepped forward. Lily’s stomach clenched as Lady Violetta leaned toward her fiancé. Lily wanted to shout no!

  Then, she was yanked back. She let out a yelp, returning to reality. She caught a glimpse of a truck as someone wrapped their arms around her. Her cheek pressed against a hard chest, warm as the spicy scent surrounded her. She laid a hand on the chest and leaned back to look up at her savior.

  “Rodrigo!”

  He was breathing heavy, glaring at the speeding truck with narrowed eyes. At the sound of her voice, he looked down at her. His shoulders relaxed and he offered a wan smile. His hands were warm on her back, and she didn’t really want to move yet.

  But the moment couldn’t last forever. Rodrigo pulled away and bent to retrieve something. She turned, confused until she saw what he held up. Her paperback book had fallen into a puddle. The pages were damp, and the ink smeared. Lily let out a cry of dismay.

  “Now I’ll never know if Lady Violetta chooses Giorgio.”

  Rodrigo raised a single, questioning brow. Her cheeks warmed in response. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Especially not in front of her sexy savior. There was a monster lurking beneath his skin, just like Count Giorgio. But he’d proven time and again that just because he held a monster inside him didn’t mean his heart was monstrous.

  “I’m sorry about your book,” he said, offering the wet paperback.

  She took it, scowling at the mess that it’d become. It was beyond saving. She didn’t know how to dry out something so dense and fragile. But she wasn’t ready to throw it away either, so she let it hang by her fingertips.

  Rodrigo looked like he wanted to say something but thought better of it. He lingered in her presence. She wasn’t going to argue, enjoying the scent that washed over her when she took another small step toward him. Being pressed against his chest had been nice. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so excited.

  That could have been her near brush with death, though.

  “Are you, ah, off work?” Lily asked.

  Rodrigo flashed an envelope with his name on it. “Payday. I’m on my way to the bank.”

  “Oh…Nice?” Lily didn’t know what to say. It’d been a long time since she’d flirted with anyone. Had she even flirted with Brock? She was starting to think she didn’t know how to do it.

  He jerked his chin toward the intersection. “Where are you headed?”

  “I’m off to work.”

  She lingered, too, unwilling to leave him just yet. Her vocabulary was splendidly stunted in Rodrigo’s presence, but that did not stop her from staring at him. He was a stunning man. His jaw was square and defined, but his lips were plump. It cut a stark contrast that made him approachable, because if anyone looked him in the eye they would have run in the other direction.

  His beast, whatever creature it may be, was close to the surface. It made her think of a shark in shallow water, the fin just above the water’s surface. The primal part of her brain was screaming in terror while the rest of her, rather stupidly, grinned up at him.

  “Are you doing anything…” Before Rodrigo could finish his question, a howl cut through the air.

  All the tiny hairs on her body stood on end. Her eyes flashed wide as she searched for the source of the sound. Whatever made it was nowhere in sight. She thought someone’s dog had gotten off it’s leash and run into traffic until Rodrigo offered a quick apology and darted down the street.

  She was left feeling bereft. It was like the loneliness she’d been avoiding while reading had finally caught up to her. Without Rodrigo, she was adrift in the world again. All the faces passing her by, families pushing strollers and couples walking dogs, made her feel like the waves would wash over her head at any moment.

  She’d been so close to getting a ring on her finger, to the happily ever after. She thought they would buy a big farmhouse and a couple of goats. Once Brock got a promotion at work, they would put in a pool, and she would be able to read romance novels with her feet in the water.

  Now, the dream was nothing more than a handful of dust. As much as she wanted to hate Brock for all he’d done, all the ways he’d controlled her and lied to her, she still found herself longing for him. For what they could have had.

  She looked in the direction Rodrigo had run off in. Her heart beat a little faster, excited. The waves of loneliness reached a little higher when she told herself she was only yearning for a rebound. What she felt for the shifter wasn’t real.

  She was alone.

  The crosswalk light turned white and she made a mad dash across the street, wet book hanging from between her fingers. She blew through the bookstore doors and made for the back room. Shelves of stacked books and boxes of unpacked books greeted her in a warm and familiar way. Already, their smell was setting her anxious heart at ease.

  ***

  Rodrigo wanted to hunt down the driver of that truck. He had caught the man’s scent as he drove past. It might take a few hours, but he would find the driver one way or another. The man hadn’t even bothered to slow down. His gaze had been downcast, probably checking his phone in his lap.

  But pack business came first. He skidded around a corner and found a young wolf hunched in a dirty alley. She crouched between a dumpster and a couple of boxes. His shoulders fell when he saw the gashes on her leg.

  “What were you up to?” He tried to keep his voice soft as he approached, but his anger rose.

  Carol was a new addition to the pack, arriving not long after he did. He felt a connection with her since they been given their beasts around the same time and worked on learning to control themselves together.

  Then, she’d disappeared. Rodrigo had thought that she’d failed to control her beast and Dante had put her down. Yet, here she was. Alive and nearly whole.

  The wolf lowered its head and growled. She pulled her lips away from her teeth, but he could see the way she trembled. She was in no shape to fight. It was all theatrics. So, he stepped forward, grabbed her and tucked her under his arm. Carol snapped and tried to wiggle away from him, but he kept a firm grip on her.

  His beast roiled inside him. The creature wanted blood. It wanted to rip apart whoever had hurt Carol. It wanted to hunt the man who’d nearly run over Lily.

  Oh, man. Lily.

  He totally owed her a new book. The one she’d dropped when he grabbed her was ruined. The human woman had seemed truly heartbroken at the thought of not being able to finish the book.

  He glanced down at the wolf tucked under his arm like a chihuahua. “You need to get your shit under control because I need some advice. Womanly advice.”

&n
bsp; The wolf stopped squirming and raised its head to look at him. Maybe if he talked to her, Carol would return to her humanity. It was a long shot, but it was worth a try. They had a long way to walk anyway.

  “I met a girl yesterday. I can’t stop thinking about her. What does that mean?” He looked down, but the wolf only gave him a blank stare. “You know about as much as I do about what we are. Maybe asking you isn’t the best idea. You do know about women, though. Right? Is that safe to assume?”

  He went on and on about how he met Lily, about the man who confronted Lily at the bar, and the way he’d just saved her at the intersection. It wasn’t like Rodrigo had been searching for Lily. He didn’t get up that morning and decide to go looking for her, but running into her had been serendipity.

  A few streets later, Rodrigo became aware of someone following. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The soft scuff of footsteps came from behind him, a few feet back. He didn’t stop. Nor did he look over his shoulder. Carol tensed under his arm, probably aware of the follower, but he didn’t show any indication that he heard anything.

  His beast scraped against his skin. It begged to fight the stalker. Whoever was behind him would be no match for the hyena in Rodrigo. His beast was overconfident. It craved violence, and here was a perfect moment to indulge.

  Rodrigo couldn’t do that. Not in public. He needed to lead the stalker away from here and to somewhere more private. If he knew the town, there was an empty warehouse nearby. It would serve as a good place for a showdown.

  He didn’t have time to lead the stalker in the direction of the warehouse, though. Carol slipped free of his grasp and bounded down the street. She ran away from him and whoever was behind them without once looking back. Rodrigo let out a shout and gave chase.

  If she was alone and cornered again, then she could be hurt or killed.