by Zoe Chant
Too shocked to scream, Sasha jumped, gasping.
Oh my God, oh my –
She knew she had to get out of there. But in her single moment of shocked hesitation, an arm burst through the newly-created hole in the mesh. Before Sasha could cry out, a hand clamped over her mouth and nose. A sweet, chemical smell filled her throat and nostrils. And then everything went black.
Chapter Seven
Joe
Joe knew something was wrong the second he set foot in the house.
Charity stood in the middle of the dining room, pale, her eyes full of tears and her hands clasped protectively over her belly.
In a second, Mason was by her side, his arms around her. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
Charity looked between them, as if she was having trouble collecting her thoughts – it was the most distressed that Joe had ever seen her.
“I don’t – I don’t know, I just went to check on Sasha, but – I’m sorry, Joe – I just… I don’t know what happened –”
Joe felt like someone had reached into his chest and pulled out his heart.
She’s gone.
He didn’t know how he knew, but he felt it in his heart with dead certainty. It might have been the mated bond. But whatever it was, he knew it.
Sasha was no longer in the house.
She’d gone.
Joe felt his guts twist inside him. She must have been horrified to discover what he’d been keeping from her. That after everything she’d told him – how terrified she was of shifters, and how she hoped she never saw one again – he had turned out to be the very thing she hated.
And worse than that, he’d kept it from her.
I should have told her, Joe thought numbly. He should have told her, right from the start.
He’d thought they’d had a moment of understanding, in the second before his father had ordered them to run Larssen and Colfax off the property. He’d thought he’d seen it in her eyes – that she could find it in herself to forgive him for keeping such a secret.
But maybe he’d been wrong.
Or maybe she had changed her mind.
Both were her right.
And honestly, Joe couldn’t say he blamed her.
Everything felt numb. Charity was speaking, but Joe could barely hear a word.
“She said she’d like a coffee, so I stayed in the kitchen to make it. She just said she was going to splash some water on her face, but then after the coffee was ready and I went to check on her, she was…” Charity shook her head in distress. “I thought everything was fine. She was shocked, of course, I but never thought… I mean, she seemed like she understood why…”
Joe could barely hear her. The only sound in his ears was the slow beat of his heart, and the quiet voice in his head, repeating She’s gone. She’s gone.
“I’m so sorry,” Charity said, voice quiet. “I only went to check on her literally a second ago. I should have –”
“No, don’t apologize,” Joe said, his voice rasping. “It wasn’t your fault – don’t even think that. You couldn’t have known.”
“You should go after her.” It was Mason who spoke up next, his voice resolute. “She’s your mate. You should –”
Joe cut him off with a quick shake of his head. “She’s my mate – but she’s also a person with choices. If this is the choice she’s made, I can’t just…” He took a deep breath. “That would make me no better than Larssen or Colfax. I can’t force her to come back.”
Mason sighed. “You’re right. I know you’re right.” He shook his head. “Still, this just doesn’t add up.”
Joe wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear this right now. Mason in sheriff mode was not what he needed. He just needed to think. To figure out where to go from here.
“Charity, you said Sasha seemed shocked, but like she understood. And she told you she was only stepping out for a moment, right?”
Charity nodded. “That’s right.”
“Did she say anything else?”
Charity considered for a moment. “She said… she said she wanted to talk to you, Joe, about not telling her sooner. But she didn’t seem angry or that she felt like this was unforgivable. She was just shocked. I didn’t think for a second that she felt like this was the end.”
Slowly, Joe’s mind started to unfreeze, his reason emerging from the small, numb ball of horror it had retreated into on coming home and finding Sasha gone.
Maybe Sasha had been shocked and angry on finding out the truth. Maybe even furiously so. He couldn’t blame her. But one thing she wasn’t was two-faced. She wouldn’t have told Charity everything was okay – or as close to okay as it could be, given the circumstances – and then secretly snuck off into the night.
He and Mason had run Colfax and Larssen off the pride’s lands, and well beyond. They’d stayed until they were certain they weren’t circling back, and, as Joe had discovered, his dad was out patrolling the borders in case they had a mind to lay in wait there.
“Something isn’t right here,” he said, only vaguely aware that he’d spoken at all. The disappearance of his mate was making his lion crazy – it roared and prowled, flexing its claws and scrabbling up the walls of his mind. It didn’t understand anything. All it knew was that its mate was gone. It made it hard to think with his lion so agitated, his human intellect overtaken with the lion’s pure base instincts.
“You’re damn right there’s something not right here,” Mason said. “For starters, you said she’s terrified of Colfax and Larssen. Does it make even a lick of sense she’d run straight out into the night with them still around?”
Joe blinked. Using all his mental strength, he pushed the lion’s distress away from the forefront of his mind.
Mason was right. Even if Sasha had been furious at him, he couldn’t imagine she’d be so angry as to forget about her safety and dash off, maybe straight back into the waiting arms – and teeth – of her tormentors.
Unless…
“Unless she felt like she wasn’t safe here either,” he said, reluctantly. He wasn’t sure if he believed it, but the idea had to be considered. “And she was just saying what she had to before she could escape.”
“Maybe,” Mason admitted. “But think about it this way: running straight out of the house – straight back toward people she knows are going to hurt her if they can get her again – is something only a person in a panic would do. Not someone who’s had the time to consider their actions and work out a rational plan. Charity says Sasha was relatively calm – she wasn’t fearing for her life. So does it make sense she’d put herself in harm’s way just to get away from us?”
As Mason spoke, Joe could see the sense in his words. The more he disentangled his rational thoughts from the lion’s frantic anguish, the more he realized just how wrong things seemed.
He nodded slowly. “You’re right.”
“I’m always right,” Mason said, only half-joking. “And besides, Joe – she knows you. She might’ve been shocked at first, but she’s your mate. And you’re a good man. I just don’t believe she’d run away like this.”
Joe pulled in a deep breath. To tell the truth, he didn’t either. Not after what Charity had told him about how Sasha had reacted to discovering he was a shifter. And he simply couldn’t bring himself to believe that Sasha would simply disappear without saying a word to him about it. She wasn’t that kind of person.
If he discovered that he was wrong, and she’d left of her own free will, then he’d respect that.
But if she hadn’t…
His lion growled, teeth glinting dangerously.
“But that leaves the question – if she didn’t run away, then where is she?” Charity asked.
Mason glanced grimly at Joe. Joe felt anger bubbling up inside him.
No – it was worse than anger. It was pure, boiling rage.
If Sasha hadn’t left on her own, then that only left one option.
Colfax. Larssen.
Joe didn�
�t know how they’d done it, but somehow, they must’ve grabbed her and taken her away.
It seemed impossible – he and Mason had been with them the whole time.
But maybe he had someone else stationed nearby. Someone we never saw.
It would have been a massive breach of shifter law: anyone who wanted to petition for the right to cross into the borders of another shifter’s territory needed to present themselves and everyone in their party to the alpha. If Colfax had concealed someone on their land…
Turning, his fists bunched, Joe strode down the hallway to the spare room where Sasha had been sleeping. He switched on the light. The clothes she’d been wearing yesterday were still laid out on the bed, cleaned and folded. She’d been wearing an old t-shirt and a pair of Charity’s pre-maternity sweats to bed, and Joe couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t have gotten changed first if she’d made a run for it.
Idiot, he thought to himself, his anger turning inward. If he hadn’t been so caught up over the past few minutes thinking Sasha had left him, he could’ve been searching her room and finding this out for himself.
But instead, he’d wasted those precious seconds thinking Sasha hadn’t wanted him. He hadn’t been thinking straight.
Swallowing, he walked through the room and into the bathroom. The room seemed fine, and he paused, looking more closely.
It took him a moment to realize what was wrong: the mesh screen over the window had a gaping hole in it. Joe narrowed his eyes. The bugs got pretty bad in the height of summer, and he knew there was no way his dad wouldn’t have immediately replaced a damaged screen.
They took her.
The thought, clear as a bell, rang out in his head.
Larssen and Colfax, knowing that Joe’s pride would do their duty and escort them off their land, had laid a trap. They’d waited until Joe and Mason were safely away, and then one of their pack had snatched his mate.
His lion roared furiously in his chest. Blood. I want blood. Make them pay! Nobody hurts our mate!
Joe was so overwhelmed by protective fury that he barely heard Mason come into the room behind him.
“Did you find –” With his trained eye, it only took Mason a moment to spot what Joe had seen. “Fuck.”
“They waited until we were gone.” Joe could hear the strain in his own voice. “These cowards.”
They’re worse than cowards, his lion insisted, trembling with rage. They’re mate-stealers.
Of all the crimes a shifter could commit, stealing another’s mate was up there with the worst. A mated bond was sacred. It could never be broken. It was to be respected by all. A shifter who tried to come between a mated pair was the most despised kind of criminal.
He felt Mason’s hand on his shoulder. “Joe – you know I’m with you. Whatever you want. Whatever you need.”
For a long moment, Joe simply stood where he was, staring out at the night sky beyond the window. Then he turned, going back up along the hall to the front door.
The air outside was freezing cold, but Joe barely felt it. Now that he was paying attention and the heavy scents of Larssen and Colfax’s wolves didn’t hang over everything, Joe could pick up on the more subtle scents in the night air.
Some weren’t anything worth worrying about: scurrying animals, the scent of oncoming snow. The scent of the fir trees from the distant wood.
None of these were what he was looking for. Making his way around the back of the house, Joe saw what he was looking for immediately: the snow that had come down heavily over the last few days was filled with footprints. From the looks of things, it’d only been one man. But that had been enough.
Mason, still following at his shoulder, sniffed the air loudly. Joe could sense that he’d let his lion come forward to smell the air.
“One man,” his cousin confirmed. “Tracks lead out that way, back to the woods.”
Joe nodded. His lion, desperate to get free, scrabbled against the walls of his mind, where he kept it when he wasn’t shifting. Kill them. Kill the ones who took our mate.
Again, Mason put his hand on Joe’s shoulder, as if he was concerned. Joe realized he’d been breathing heavily, his breath puffing out in front of him like a stormcloud.
“I need to do this myself,” he muttered, when he’d gotten a hold of himself enough to speak. “The proper way. The right way.”
Mason understood immediately what he was saying. “You don’t have to, Joe. They broke shifter law. They’re mate-stealers. They deserve no respect from you. If you want me to call the law – the human law – down on their asses, I can do it. Just say the word.”
Joe swallowed thickly. He didn’t doubt for a second that Mason would do it, but it didn’t sit right with him. Sasha was his mate, and she was his responsibility. He was the one who had let her be taken, and he was the one who had to get her back. His mate should have been under his protection. It was his failure, and his responsibility.
“No,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I’ll deal with this – the shifter way. I don’t care whether they deserve it or not, but it’s the way I need to do it. She’s my mate. There’s nothing more important than that. This has to be done the right way.”
Mason nodded. “I understand. But know I’m with you if you need me.”
Joe glanced over his shoulder at his cousin in wordless thanks. He knew Mason would understand.
“I need to go,” he said.
Where was Sasha now? His heart thumped against his sternum as he called his lion forward, and began to shift. Is she frightened? Is she wondering if I’m coming for her?
The last thought, that Sasha – that his mate – could be out there, alone, frightened and waiting for him, powered his lion forward in a mighty leap out into the night.
The newly-fallen snow was powdery under his massive paws, and he left it churned up in his wake. In his lion form, the night was suddenly alive with new scents and sounds, his lion’s senses sharp and true. He followed the scent of the intruder into the woods. Sasha’s scent was here too, mixed in with his – as well as a vague, chemical smell that Joe’s lion wasn’t familiar with, but his human mind could identify as chloroform. Infuriated, the lion roared.
Racing through the forest, crashing over fallen branches and other debris, Joe ran on until he caught the scent of diesel in the air.
A car. They took her away in a car.
Joe knew it was unlikely Colfax or any of his men were still in earshot. But the lion didn’t care about that. Raising its head, it let out a sky-rending roar. In the moments that followed, the forest around fell into complete silence: nothing and no one dared to challenge a lion when it was roused.
And whether they could hear it or not, the lion meant the roar as a message: I’m coming for you.
Chapter Eight
Sasha
Sasha’s tongue felt thick and dry in her mouth as she struggled back to consciousness. Her head felt fuzzy, and it took her a long time to realize she was awake again. She didn’t feel as if she’d truly been unconscious, however – as she became more lucid, she realized she had impressions of images and sounds: footsteps in the snow. Voices. A car starting. But they were vague and dreamlike, and the more she tried to hold onto them, the more they seemed to slip away.
Where am I? How did I get here?
Feeling sluggish, Sasha tried to move, blinking in the low light. Maybe if she could get a look at her surroundings, she’d remember how she –
It was only then that she realized her hands were tied behind her back. The reason her muscles ached and her movements felt constrained was because there was rope binding her wrists, and she was slumped over on some kind of bare concrete floor.
Sasha struggled to sit up, panic lancing through her chest. In a sudden flash, her memories returned: Colfax and Larssen coming to the ranch house. The argument with Joe, Mason and Lincoln. And then… and then…
Joe turned into a lion.
Joe was a lion shifter.
For a moment, Sas
ha thought she couldn’t possibly be remembering right. Had that just been part of some kind of fever dream?
No. No, I know it was real.
Sasha remembered the way he had looked over his large, shaggy shoulder at her before Lincoln had closed the door. She’d known it was him, then. And that he was sorry he hadn’t said anything sooner.
But how… how did I get here…
Sasha gasped, her breath shaky. Now she remembered. The bathroom. The knife. The rag over her face, sinking her into blackness, until she couldn’t see or think or control her limbs…
Oh. Oh my God…
Panic tore anew through her stomach as she remembered everything that had happened. And who must be responsible for it.
As if to confirm her worst fears, she heard Colfax’s low, cruel laugh ring out, echoing through the large, cold space of wherever they were keeping her.
“Time to wake up, sweetheart.”
The light was too low for her to see anything. There was a hurricane lamp sitting a few feet away from her, but it was turned down low and only illuminated a small circle of concrete floor.
Sasha struggled into a sitting position, the concrete cold beneath her, her arms aching from being bent into such an unnatural angle. Her breath puffed out in front of her in white clouds – it was clearly freezing cold in here. And she only had on a large shirt and a pair of sweats. If she didn’t get warm soon, she’d run the risk of hypothermia.
“Colfax,” she said, hearing her voice shake. Well, she couldn’t help that. It was no use pretending she wasn’t scared. It would be ridiculous not to be. “Why… why have you done this?”
In response, Colfax only laughed again. A second later, Sasha heard the sound of shoes hitting the floor, as if he’d jumped down from a high place.
“Now, now. Don’t play stupid – you might only be a human, but I know you’re not that dumb.”
Sasha swallowed as he finally came into view – or at least, his feet and the lower halves of his legs did, illuminated in the pale light of the hurricane lamp.
