[Black River Pack 01.0 - 03.0] Crying Wolf, Shoot for the Moon, Thrown to the Wolves

by Rochelle Paige

  I let out a loud howl, alerting my brothers to the danger that was near, before running back inside to grab my phone. Annora was sitting up in the bed with a startled look on her face when I made it back to our room.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Get some clothes on,” I ordered. “Make sure they’re dark and warm.”

  “Why?” she asked after jumping out of the bed to dig in the dresser.

  “Someone’s coming,” I explained. “Wolves, and not from our pack.”

  Eight

  Annora

  “I’m not waiting for you here while you face the danger that’s coming for me,” I argued.

  “It’s my job as your mate to keep you safe!” Parker yelled.

  “And it’s mine to do the same for you,” I pointed out reasonably.

  “No, that would be mine as alpha,” Hunter disagreed.

  “Or mine as pack enforcer,” Spencer chimed in.

  “Oh, stop being a bunch of macho idiots and let Annora go with you—even if you keep her away from most of the action,” Grace grumbled.

  “I’ve spent my entire life being told what to do and agreeing like the good little girl my father wanted me to be,” I tried to explain. “Not this time. Not when I know my mate and new brothers are out there fighting for my safety against someone who came here for me because he thinks I belong to him after my father sold me to him!”

  “Annora, baby,” Parker sighed. “I don’t have time to argue. We have the advantage right now because they think we don’t know they’re coming. If we don’t hurry, we’re going to lose that and the odds won’t be in our favor as much.”

  “Then I guess you better agree and let me come with,” I replied stubbornly.

  “Or handcuff her to something,” Spencer suggested.

  “Spencer!” Eliza scolded. “I agree with Annora. I think she needs to be there.”

  “Of course you agree,” Spencer said. “You three are all about sticking together.”

  “That’s not why,” she snapped back. “I saw her there in my dream. She was with the three of you, and it looked like you defeated the enemy. Why risk changing that future by making her stay here?”

  “Fuck! Get in the truck,” Parker conceded.

  “Elias, you’ll stay here and protect Grace and Eliza?” Hunter asked.

  “Of course,” he answered. “With my life if need be.”

  Elias’s words rang in my head as we drove to the edge of town. The woods lining the road seemed eerie, whereas they were usually welcoming. The early morning sky was cloudy and dark since the sun wouldn’t rise for a couple of hours yet. When a bit of fog rolled in, I shivered. If someone were filming a movie battle with werewolves, this was exactly the scene they should use.

  When we reached the outskirts of town, Hunter swerved and pulled to the side of the road. He and Spencer climbed out of the truck, leaving me alone in the back with Parker.

  “I know you felt like you needed to be here, but I’m begging you. Please stay in the truck until I know what to expect.”

  I wanted to decline and insist on facing the danger at his side, but I could see his concern for me flashing in his eyes. “Okay,” I agreed. “But don’t you dare get hurt.”

  “You either,” he ordered. “In fact, you better take this in case you need it.” He reached into the console and pulled out a gun. “Have you ever shot before?”

  “A couple of times with my father,” I said as I took it from him and turned off the safety so it would be ready to go if worse came to worse.

  “Be careful,” he warned before claiming my lips in a punishing kiss and exiting the truck.

  I watched as he walked over to two pack members and spoke with them. They glanced back at the truck, nodded, and walked over to stand in front of the passenger’s door. I couldn’t see much with them blocking my line of sight, so I climbed into the front to get a better view.

  Parker had his brothers and about five more male wolves with him standing in the road when two trucks pulled up and stopped in the middle of the street. Wyatt Lyall climbed out of the driver’s seat of one of them at the same time that his pack enforcer exited the other truck. I’d seen him before when they’d been in my old hometown, and he was just as scary now as he had been back then.

  “I’ve come for my mate,” Wyatt growled. “Hand her over and nobody needs to get hurt.”

  “Over my dead body!” Parker yelled. “My mate isn’t going anywhere, especially not with you.”

  Wyatt looked Parker up and down before an evil smirk lifted his lips. “Little Annora thinks she found herself a mate?”

  “It’s a done deal,” Hunter answered. “She’s mated and marked with my brother and is now a member of my pack and my sister. If you try to take her from here, you’ll be declaring war on the Black River Pack and we’ll respond accordingly.”

  “Like that would fucking scare the Lyall wolves away,” Wyatt’s enforcer sneered. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

  “Annora is mine. Bought and paid for,” Wyatt announced. “You don’t hand her over and I’ll be forced to take her.”

  “My mate isn’t for sale. She was never for sale,” Parker growled, his whole body shaking with anger.

  “Then why did her daddy sell her to me?” Wyatt taunted.

  “Because he was a motherfucking idiot who didn’t know better,” Spencer answered, holding Parker back with an arm across his chest. “What’s your excuse for trying to buy a mate? Too damn crazy for any woman to be willing to accept you as theirs?”

  As soon as the word “crazy” left Spencer’s lips, Wyatt jumped forward and shifted into a huge, gray wolf. He was practically foaming at the mouth in anger, and all of the wolves behind him shifted right after and began to run towards us.

  “We fight to protect my brother’s mate!” Hunter called, and the Tate brothers shifted to their black wolves simultaneously before racing to meet their foes, the other pack members following behind.

  Wyatt was the biggest wolf, so the brothers moved as one to take him down together. The Lyall enforcer tried to intercept them, but our pack mates attacked him before he could reach them. The fight was brutal—with claws ripping into fur, jaws clamping down onto necks, and howls of pain. Two of Wyatt’s wolves took a wide berth from the fighting and crept towards the truck to attack the men Parker had tasked with keeping me safe. I steadied the gun in front me, taking aim and waiting for a clear shot.

  Roars of rage filled the night, and four huge black bears ambled towards us. I almost hyperventilated until I realized they were on our side as they swiped at Wyatt’s men with giant paws, tossing them far into the air.

  When the battle died down, Wyatt was the only Lyall wolf left standing. Hunter and Spencer backed away, leaving Parker to fight the alpha who had tried to take me away from him. The two brothers shifted to their human form and silently watched as Parker showed Wyatt what crazy really meant.

  The wolves who had been guarding me had moved away from the truck, and it seemed like most of the danger was gone. Still gripping the gun Parker had given me, I climbed out and walked towards Hunter and Spencer, wanting to be there waiting for my mate when he finished this. By the time I got there, he had Wyatt’s neck clamped in his jaws, and I could hear the snap when he bit down. The alpha’s body fell to the ground in a limp pile when Parker dropped him and swiveled to stare at me. Then he shifted and stalked towards me, a mixture of frustration, anger, and pride in his gaze as he looked at me.

  “I thought I told you to stay in the truck,” he grumbled as he neared me.

  Just over his shoulder, I saw Wyatt move. His hand was sliding down to reach into his shredded pants, where they lay in the road. Nobody was paying him any attention because we’d all thought he was dead. When I saw the flash of silver in his hand, my arm instinctively lifted and I pushed Parker out of the way as I aimed and fired. The bullet tore through the center of his forehead, so there was no doubt remaining. The bastard was d
efinitely dead now.

  “Holy shit! You shot him in the head,” Parker said, pointing out the obvious.

  “It was either that or watch him toss this knife into your back,” I explained as I picked up the weapon Wyatt had grabbed before I’d killed him.

  “Damn, baby sis. You’re a badass,” Spencer complimented me.

  “A welcome addition to the family and the pack,” Hunter said.

  As we stood over the dead bodies of Wyatt Lyall, his enforcer, and several other members of his pack, I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Since the moment my father had told me his plan, there had been a heaviness in my heart. Even mating Parker hadn’t made it go away completely because there had been a part of me that had known that Wyatt was going to come after me. I hadn’t been able to allow myself to truly believe we’d have a chance for happiness because his shadow had hung over me.

  Now, it was gone and I knew we could move forward as a mated couple without anything else coming between us.

  Just as I turned back to Parker, I heard Hunter’s phone ring. The terror on his face when he glanced at the display told me that I’d let go of my concern too early. When he answered it and gasped out Grace’s name, I knew it was going to be bad.

  We all listened as Eliza told him that they were on the way to the hospital with Grace and he needed to head straight there. Her water had broken, but the baby wasn’t due for another month.

  “Take her with you,” someone told Parker. “We’ll take care of everything here and meet you at the hospital.”

  Parker bundled me into his car and raced to the hospital. Sitting in the waiting room, wondering when someone would come out to tell us what was happening with Grace and the baby, was torture. I felt incredibly guilty—certain that the stress of her mate having been in danger because of me was what had put her into early labor.

  I tried to be strong for Parker because I knew he was worried about the fate of his niece or nephew. The entire pack was here to hold vigil, but there were a few people who were still strangers to me. One of them was a man who towered over everyone else, and he’d walked into the room about an hour ago—a man who hadn’t moved his gaze from me the entire time he had been across from me.

  “You have your mother’s eyes,” he finally whispered.

  I’d never met him before, so I was surprised to hear that he knew what she looked like. “You know my mom?”

  “Paired with my mother’s smile,” he continued softly, as though he hadn’t heard what I’d said. “This doesn’t make sense. Tell me I’m fucking imagining things and I have this all wrong.”

  My body froze at his words. If I looked anything like this man’s mother, then that meant he was the one who had raped my mom. As I began to tremble in shock, Parker turned away from the conversation he was having with Spencer and wrapped his arms around me.

  “Shhh, honey. Everything’s okay now. Carrick was here to help. He was lying low so the Lyall pack wouldn’t know we had reinforcements,” Parker reassured me. “He’s one of the good guys.”

  “Good guys don’t rape women, leaving them pregnant with a child their mate will treat like shit for their whole lives,” I spit out before jumping out of my chair.

  Carrick’s entire body jerked like I’d landed a physical blow with my words. “Rape?” he repeated, his brow furrowed in confusion as a look of horror spread across his face.

  Parker stood and shoved me behind him. “Do you know Lucie Channing?”

  “Rape?” Carrick asked again. “Why would Annora think I raped her mother?”

  “Because that’s what her mom told her father when my mate shifted to a bear and not a wolf,” Parker explained.

  “She was pregnant? She made me leave, told me she couldn’t abandon her mate even though he wasn’t the one she was fated to be with. She never told me I’d fathered a child with her,” Carrick said, shaking his head as he spoke like he couldn’t believe the words that were leaving his mouth.

  My knees almost gave out at the despair I heard in his voice. I squeezed under Parker’s arm and peered at the man who might be my real father. There was a pallor to his skin that hadn’t been there moments before, and his head was hanging low in defeat.

  “Made you leave?” I repeated. “You knew her?”

  “Yes, baby girl. I knew your mom,” he confirmed. “The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the mate fate had intended for me. She was already mated, but the pull between us was too hard to resist.”

  “You didn’t rape her?” I asked, a kernel of hope coming to life in my heart.

  “Never,” he swore. “I wouldn’t hurt any woman that way, let alone your mother.”

  “You wanted to mate her?”

  “More than anything in this world,” he admitted before shaking his head. “Or that’s what I thought until I met you because I would have wanted you in my life even more than I wanted to mate her. Knowing the hell you’ve been through kills me. I should have been there to protect you. I never would have walked away if I had known she was pregnant. She might not have been willing to leave her mate, but I would have stayed and fought for you.”

  “Dad?” asked another stranger who looked quite a bit like Carrick as he and two other guys walked up behind him. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you have a sister,” he replied.

  All three of the men turned to look at me as one. They were identical triplets with jet-black hair, eyes the color of whiskey, chiseled jaws, and tan skin that spoke of hours spent in the sun. Their eyes held an incredulous wonder as they looked at me.

  “A sister?” the one closest to me repeated.

  “She’s younger than we are,” another one said.

  “We have a baby sister!” the last one exclaimed before they all crowded me, forming a circle around me and hugging me.

  Parker tolerated it for a couple of minutes before he reclaimed me from the guys and tucked me under his arm. I was happy to be able to lean against him because I felt like I might pass out from the shock of meeting my biological father and discovering I had three older brothers—shock they seemed to share.

  “How the hell do we have a baby sister we didn’t know about?” one of them asked.

  “Let’s all sit down so I can tell the story once and get it over with,” my father instructed.

  It was funny to watch these big guys listen to him without question. Their dad wanted us to sit and talk, so they looked around the room and found several seats open in the corner. Then they walked over there after gesturing for us to follow. Parker took one of the open spots and pulled me into his lap. Feeling his arms wrapped protectively around me gave me the confidence I needed for this conversation.

  “You knew my mom was mated to my father?” I asked, curiosity making me unwilling to wait for him to start his story.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I met her while I was out of town for work. The boys were being looked after by my mom because I was supposed to be gone for a couple of weeks.”

  “I remember that trip,” one of his sons said. “You were gone for about a week and then Camden got sick so you came home early.”

  “Yeah, and when I got better, you seemed so sad that I was scared that I’d caught something horrible and it was going to come back and kill me or something,” the one who must be Camden said.

  I noticed they were each wearing different color shirts, so I noted that his was blue so I’d remember which brother he was for now—until they changed clothes in the morning or I figured out another way to tell them apart.

  “Only you never seemed the same afterwards,” the first one, who was wearing a red shirt, said.

  “That’s right, Alasdair,” our father agreed. “I left a piece of myself behind, and at the time, I thought it was because Annora’s mother was my fated mate and she’d rejected me. I didn’t know until now that I’d also left her with child.”

  “My mom was your fated mate?” I gasped. “But she was mated to my f
ather.”

  “That’s why she wouldn’t leave,” he explained. “The second I saw her, I knew she was the woman fate had intended to be mine. By the look in her eyes, I could tell she felt the same pull, and before I knew it, we were in bed together. I was getting ready to mate and mark her, and then I saw the mark on her shoulder and realized she hadn’t waited for me. She’d already accepted another wolf as her mate.”

  I burrowed closer to Parker, not wanting to imagine the betrayal I would have felt if I had learned he had mated another woman before he’d met me. Shifters rarely picked the wrong person to take as their mate, and it usually ended badly when it did happen. Either the mate they’d taken was left brokenhearted when they left after having found the one fate had intended for them or their fated mate was doomed to a mate-less life unless they were willing to settle for someone else.

  “I begged her to choose me,” Carrick continued. “Assured her I could give her a happy life. Care for her. Provide for her. But she wouldn’t budge. Your mom told me she regretted meeting me and that I should leave and never come back again. That she was happy with the mate she’d chosen and she would never be willing to leave him for me.”

  “You did as she’d asked,” I whispered.

  “Exactly as she’d asked,” he agreed. “I never came back. I didn’t call. Didn’t write. Hell, I even avoided any news from your hometown like the plague because I didn’t want any reminders of what I’d lost.”

  “That’s when word spread that you didn’t get along well with the wolves,” Parker added.

  “It was hard to stop thinking about her, so I did what I had to survive and build a good life for my sons,” he admitted. “Their mom wasn’t my mate, but at least she told me about them.”

  “Yeah, she abandoned us and sucked as a mom, but it sounds like we were lucky compared to you,” my brother in the green shirt said. “At least we had each other and a dad who loved us.”

  “But now, she has us too, Braden,” Alasdair said.