by Alisa Woods
But Noah stood by his side, and Jace was next to him. They both had their guns out, but they were pointed at the floor. Owen had a feeling it wasn’t the weapons that made the other wolves back away.
Noah gripped Owen’s shoulder, hard. “You got it together, man?”
Owen gave him a shaky nod.
Jace stepped in front of Owen and faced the pack. “All right, listen up, assholes. This guy…” He pointed to Brad. “Is my least favorite shifter on the planet at the moment, but we’re missing a girl, and we need to find her. So we’re going to put all this the fuck behind us and focus on the mission at hand. Are we clear?”
There was an uneasy rumble through the pack. They looked to Brad for guidance. Of course… he was their alpha now.
Owen raised a hand to point at Brad, and a surge of satisfaction ran through him to see the man flinch. “You’re going to tell us exactly what happened when you lost her. And you’re going to let me clean up your fucking mess until we find her again.”
Brad snarled, but he didn’t say anything. Then he glanced at the pack, and even Owen could tell he was losing face. After all, Nova was snatched under his watch. When Owen was her bodyguard, she’d survived an attempt on her life.
Finally, Brad straightened and pulled his bloody hand away from his throat, looking at it with disgust. “Of course, we’ll take any help Riverwise would like to give in finding Nova.”
It seemed like a sigh of relief went through the pack. These people were programmers and coders and game designers—not fucking security. As their alpha, Brad shouldn’t have been asking them to take on that role. He should have been looking out for all of them… including Nova.
“All right, then.” Jace ran a look over Owen’s shredded and bloody clothes. “You ready to get to work?”
The gashes on his chest hurt like hell, but they were already healing. Owen gave him a quick nod.
Jace pointed to Brad. “You going to live?”
Brad curled a lip. “How about you fuck off?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Jace said. “The rest of you are a bunch of computer nerds, right? Nova’s been kidnapped by a psycho somewhere in the city. We’ve already got Riverwise searching the city’s public cameras for any trace of her. We could use some of your servers to crunch the data. I’ll get our guys to call in, and you can hook that up.”
There were a few murmurs and a lot of nods, but even Owen could see the hope lighting up their faces. He wished he could share it—he knew how long the odds of that kind of search were, and that the clock was ticking for Nova even as they spoke. He didn’t want to let his mind go there, but a part of it already knew they would never find her, except in pieces. And then he would fucking kill Brad Hoffman.
The pack drifted back to their desks.
Noah tugged him away from the still glaring Brad and spoke softly. “Hey, man, was that the first time you shifted? I mean, after the cages? Jace told me what you were thinking…” He left the rest unspoken. Too many ears to overhear.
Owen nodded. “You weren’t in there as long as I was. You didn’t see the things I saw. The monsters they were making.”
Noah narrowed his eyes. “I may not have been there long, but trust me, I saw some pretty nasty shit. And they gave me all the latest serums.”
Owen frowned, not sure what he meant by that.
“The question is,” Noah said, “are you able to control it?”
Owen grimaced. “Yeah. Barely. Maybe.”
Noah nodded. “The fact that you survived all that time… I’m thinking that means something.”
Owen squinted at him. “I figured I was just lucky, outlasting everyone. Or unlucky, depending on how you look at it.”
Noah’s face went solemn. “Luck had nothing to do with any of it. Those bastards had everything planned out.”
Owen nodded. He and Noah needed to talk—especially about what happened overseas, after his time in the cages. But before he could ask, a round of swearing went up on one side of cubicle land.
“Brad, come see this!” someone called.
Jace was on the phone talking to someone, probably Riverwise, but he shut it off. He, Owen, and Noah hurried over to where the entire pack was gathering around one screen.
A new video.
A wash of nausea flooded Owen. It was a video of Nova, trapped in a cage, with some psycho poking at her with a cattle prod. There was a large, red digital clock counting down in one corner. It took Owen a moment to figure out that it was live streaming, not a recording. A torrent of emotions ran through him—she was alive! But what the fuck was happening?
“What the hell is this?” That was Brad, who had finally fought through the pack to see the video.
On the screen, the man with the cattle prod laughed as she jerked back and screamed. A roaring growl simultaneously went up from every shifter in the room.
The man turned to face the camera, then stalked toward it. For a moment, his hoodie and metal-looking facemask filled the screen. He was making some kind of adjustment to the camera, and it shook. The mask was different than the last video. This time, it was more futuristic—almost like battle armor for a future soldier.
When the Wolf Hunter stepped back, the view had broadened to take in the whole area around Nova’s cage. Black rectangular bricks were stacked around the cage, connected by wires. They looked suspiciously like explosives. Nova huddled in the corner, sobbing, and the sound was ripping out Owen’s heart.
“Well, here we are folks!” The Wolf Hunter’s voice was light and snappy. Sick fucking bastard. “We’ve got ourselves a real, live shifter. She might look like just a girl, but trust me, she’s not. Let’s see if we can get her to shift and show her true nature, shall we?”
He went back to the cage. The electric spark and Nova’s scream filled the dead silence in the Wylderide office.
The Wolf Hunter laughed again and step back. “You’ll notice that the bars aren’t all that strong. If she shifts, she’ll have enough strength to get out. If she doesn’t, she’ll be stuck inside until the bomb goes off.” He gestured at the explosives ringed around the cage. “It’s not all that pretty, but I assure you, there’s more than enough to blow up a little she-wolf.” His face loomed into the camera. “Of course, either way, I promise she’ll be dead by the end of our livestream. At which point, I’ll be demonstrating those dissection tips from my previous video. You can see the countdown in the corner. Make sure you share the link with all your friends! Time for them to see that this is all real. No tricks, no movie magic. This is one hundred percent shifter Red Room. Payback for what they’ve done. This one will pay, and then another one after that, and another… until all shifters understand they can’t just take our jobs and our women and infiltrate our society without consequence.” He grinned. “Stay tuned for the fun.”
Owen’s beast wanted to claw its way through the screen and take apart the Wolf Hunter one chunk at a time. Every shifter in the room had the same look of anger and horror on their faces. Owen couldn’t help going after Brad again—only Noah and Jace being there, grabbing onto his arms, held him back from plowing into Brad’s face.
Instead, Owen just snarled and threw words at him. “If she dies, I will kill you.” Then he shook off their hold and turned to the rest of the pack. “Let’s go find our girl.”
The pack growled as one.
Nova’s teeth were chattering so hard, the clicking echoed around her cage.
The man who captured her was stalking around the room, muttering to himself. She’d watched him talking to his webcam perched on top of his screen—and she’d never been more terrified in her life. This guy was a raving lunatic, and he had devised this weird set up to torture her and blow her up in front of whoever was watching. A full-body shiver went through her that rattled her teeth again. This time, it was loud enough to grab the man’s attention.
He swung back to her, marched up to her cage, and stopped just outside
her reach. He had the cattle prod again, but he was leaning against it like a walking stick, not thrusting it through the cage bars at her. Still… she shrunk to the back, teeth clenched in anticipation of another attack. The shocks hurt like hell, but they didn’t seem to be permanently damaging her. Her shifter body could take a lot, which freaked her out—that only meant he could dish out a lot of pain without actually killing her.
He gave her a smile full of teeth. “Well, little shifter girl, you’re not so high and mighty now, are you?”
He seemed to be talking for the audience on the webcam. His face was covered with a futuristic mask, but she remembered what he looked like from before, when he snatched her from the parking garage. She was trying to figure out where she knew him from, and it was driving her crazy.
She’d been so foolish, running off like that, angry at Brad, trying to escape becoming his mate. She supposed that was a pretty damn horrible fate—being mated to someone you didn’t love—but it beat the hell out of dying. She should’ve tried to work it out with him, rather than just running off to find Owen. She’d been an idiot.
Her only consolation was that this raving lunatic had been messing with her car. He’d obviously been planting a bomb, and if she hadn’t interrupted him, she and Brad both would’ve been blown up in the morning—Brad had stopped looking for car bombs a few days after Owen left. Although, with all the explosives planted around her cage, it looked like blowing up was her destiny anyway.
She stared at her captor—she had a feeling there was a crazy grin under that mask as he mumbled to himself and fussed with something at a bench off camera.
What the hell was his deal? “This is all just a game to you, isn’t it?” she asked. She hadn’t spoken much since she woke up to the cattle prod sending thousands of volts through her body—mostly because she had been busy screaming. But he was holding off on the torture now, for some reason. The man raced over to the cage and banged his cattle prod against the bars. She jumped and lurched away.
“Yes, it’s all a game,” he hissed. “Only this time, I’m making the game map and the rules, not you and your kind.”
He lunged through the bars, reaching her at the back with his five-foot-long cattle prod. She screamed and twitched and thrashed against the bars while he electrocuted her. It seemed to go on forever, but was probably only a couple seconds. When he stopped, she slumped against the bars again. She couldn’t help the sounds that came out of her. Fuck, it hurt so much. She had to think a way out of this, but her brain was literally scrambled. For several minutes after each shock, she could barely get her tongue to work right, much less think straight.
The man stalked away from the cage, huffing in disgust. She assumed he was the Wolf Hunter—who else could he be? He had the mask and the crazy hate thing going on. But even her scrambled brain was starting to put the pieces together—the mask wasn’t quite the same as the other videos. And she knew she recognized him from somewhere, but she just couldn’t get her battered brain to figure out where.
After a few minutes, when she was able to get her mouth to work again, she shouted across the room at him, “What do you want from me?”
He was broadcasting this. Maybe she could work with that—not give him what he wanted, whatever that was. Maybe use that against him.
He hesitated a moment, staring at the workbench, then finally stalking back toward her. He faced the camera and spread his arms wide. “Entertainment, of course!” He turned to her. “And you’re the lucky girl who gets to pay for the sins of your fellow shifters.”
“What sins?” The lack of a cattle prod in his hands made her a little more brave. “What have shifters ever done to you?”
He shuffled across the concrete floor. “What have they done?” He asked this as if it was the most ridiculous thing she could say. “They exist. They take our jobs. They seduce our women for their half-breed monsters.” He walked back to the webcam, probably making his masked face loom for his audience. Nova didn’t know what kind of sick fucks would watch this sort of thing, but she was sure they were out there—he was probably streaming this on a Dark Web feed, the kind of place people went to explore the ugly side of their humanity.
He spoke into the camera. “These shifters are breeding with us, polluting our DNA with their genes. Taking our jobs, ruining our lives, destroying what it means to be human. They’re creating abominations just like themselves, and they’re taking over everything that rightfully belongs to humans. They have to be stopped before they corrupt the entire gene pool! This shifter is not only getting what she deserves… this is a lesson for all you shifters out there who think you can take over and become the dominant species on our planet. My fellow humans, wake up! This is fucking evolution, man, and it’s a battle to the death! It’s either them or us. We can do this—we’re way fucking smarter than they are, and tougher too—but we’ve got to fight! These shifters are just a bunch of filthy animals, and it’s time for them all to get back in their cages.”
His ranting was straight from the original video Nova had watched countless times. It was part of the manifesto of the Wolf Hunter. But she still didn’t understand why she was being targeted personally.
Personally. That was it.
The fact that she recognized him, even a little bit, even if she didn’t know from where… that had to mean something. There was some personal connection between her and this lunatic.
“Wait, wait, wait…” she said, dragging herself up to standing as much as she could in the short cage. She hunched over and clung to the front bars, sticking her hand through to point at him. When he turned back to her, she was pretty sure everyone on the livestream could see her.
“I know who you are,” she said loud enough for everyone watching to hear.
He stared hard at her for a second, then whipped back to slam his hand on the keyboard in front of the screen. The small red light on the webcam winked off—he had turned off the recording. She shuddered, praying that didn’t mean he was about to kill her. Then he whipped around and rushed at her, stopping just out of arm’s reach again. He flipped up his mask and stared at her with eyes that glittered with his insanity.
“Do you, Nova Wilding? Do you know who I am?” He was taunting her. “Or am I just another one of those humans you brushed aside?”
She frowned. What the hell was he talking about? For a brief second, she thought maybe he was one of the humans she’d dated… but no. There had only been a handful, and she would’ve recognized them.
“Sure I do,” she lied. “What I don’t understand, is why all this?” She gestured to the cage and the camera. “When did you lose your fucking mind?”
He bared his teeth and growled at her, then he slammed his hand against the bars of the cage. It still made her jump, even without the cattle prod.
“I’m not crazy!” he shouted in her face. “I just finally figured out what was really going on. Why everything always went to shit. Life is a game that you shifters have stacked against humans. You’re the overpowered characters in a game humans are supposed to win. But we’re going to show you! The Wolf Hunter… he’s going to stop all of you!”
We? And why was he talking about the Wolf Hunter in the third person? And overpowered characters? He was talking like a gamer. Did he play or… the light bulb went on.
“You’re that guy,” she said gesturing to him, eyes going wide. “The one who applied to work on the textures for AfterPulse.” She remembered him now—he applied for a job at Wylderide. She interviewed him. He seemed to know a hell of a lot about playing the game, and his resume was stacked with all kinds of degrees and experience, but when she looked into his references, they were vapor. It was all made up. She hadn’t said anything when she sent the standard rejection letter, but she should’ve known… he was living in some kind of delusional world already.
He sneered at her. “Yeah, the one you refused to hire because I
wasn’t a shifter! I wasn’t part of your little club! Well, your fucking club is going to be missing a member now, isn’t it? And this is just the beginning! I’m not the only person who was ever denied a job because shifters are rigging the game. We see what you’re doing, taking over everything, all the good companies. I used to think Wylderide was the most fucking awesome place in the world. I played every game, every beta, every demo, and what did I get? The door slammed in my face. That was before I knew you all were shifters. But it all makes sense now.”
Oh shit. This was personal for him—he wasn’t just crazy—and somehow that made the icy trickle of fear in her gut turn into a gushing waterfall. She wanted to say she didn’t hire him because he was a nut job with no actual experience in coding, but she was smarter than that. She knew he was a powder keg ready to blow, just like the explosives around her.
“Your name is Tommy, right?” she asked, trying to keep her voice level. “I remember that now, from the application.”
He squinted at her and pulled back, but didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, I remember it.” She shook her finger at him like she was just now putting it together. Her frazzled brain tried to spin up a good lie for him. “You know what, you’re right, that was a mistake. We got your file mixed up with some other guy. We were supposed to have sent you an offer letter, but somebody deleted your file accidentally. One of my idiot shifters, I’m sure, probably in personnel. Probably was jealous of what you could do with the game and didn’t want you on board. But you’re just the kind of man we need for AfterPulse.”
He stood a little straighter. “Damn straight.”
Her pulse quickened. “Yeah, totally, that’s amazingly clear to me now.” She swallowed. “Let’s just forget this whole thing. We really need someone like you working on getting all the kinks worked out of the beta of AfterPulse. Come in, and we’ll get you started. Heck, you could start tomorrow.”
