Taming The Alpha: A Wolf Shifter Mpreg Romance (Savage Love Book 3)

by Preston Walker

  Robbie thought of his daycares.

  “So, I started looking around to see what I could do to pick up the slack and I realized there’s a whole skeevy underbelly to the repair world. There’s chop shops. Vehicles come in, and they come out in pieces. You sell the pieces, you get money. And except for the cost of labor, it’s free, because you steal the cars yourself. So, that’s what I did. But I only planned to do it until our feet were back on the ground.

  “But I just never stopped, and isn’t that the shittiest thing you’ve ever heard?”

  Robbie did agree that was pretty shitty, though he didn’t think he was thinking of it in the way that Wheeler was. He wasn’t so much passing judgment on the man as he was agreeing that it was terrible luck for him to have had to do that in the first place, and then to get caught up in the pattern.

  He supposed it was the same reason people down on their luck got into selling drugs, then continued to do so even when they had reached a place in their life where they no longer needed to do it. It was hard to cut off connections with suspicious people once they were formed. It was hard to turn your back on something that had gotten you through hard situations.

  It was hard to let go of the extra money, for fear of slipping into debt again.

  Robbie hadn’t had that kind of situation happen to him. He had made the best choices he could and it had all turned out well for him.

  But what would he have done if it seemed like he would lose everything he had worked so hard for?

  What would he do if he suddenly was at risk of losing the daycares? He had put so much into them. He wouldn’t just let them collapse into oblivion. He had himself to think about, but it wouldn’t merely be his future at stake, his situation that became uncertain. All of his employees would lose their jobs. All the kids under his care would lose the stability he had been trying to give them. Dozens of parents would find themselves floundering to find another way to take care of their kids while they went off to their jobs.

  Even thinking about it made him feel stressed. All those people, counting on him.

  Wheeler must have felt the same way. He had customers who depended upon him, mechanics and engineers who received their paycheck through him.

  “I understand,” Robbie said, before he knew the words were going to come out of him.

  “I figured you would,” Wheeler said. He flipped on his turn signal, angling them toward the northwest again. They were getting nearer to the border of the city with every passing second. Robbie thought they knew where they were, as he could see many areas of plowed ground and roped-off streets around them. This was an older part of Pensacola that, up until very recently, had been somewhat of a ghetto area, forgotten and downtrodden. It was being reworked now, restructured slowly as the months passed, in the hopes of eventually turning it into yet another vacation location. He had heard about a real estate battle as a few companies vied for command of the land, each one hoping to plant down their own condos.

  He couldn’t imagine what they were doing here. Were they just passing through? Heading off to a destination unknown?

  “You look like the kind of guy who would understand. It almost makes me sorry that I was going to shoot you. Almost.”

  I understand that, too. I really need to stop being such a pushover. I need to stop being so fucking understanding.

  “I don’t know why someone like you would even bother with someone like Ulysses.” This last part came out nervously. Wheeler slowed down, his eyes bouncing around. He seemed to be trying to remember where he was going, as if he didn’t come to this place often. “He doesn’t seem like your type. Too much of an ass.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Robbie murmured. Ulysses could be so abrasive, but it was only because he had his insecurities, just like everyone else. It was how he chose to deal with the fact that he didn’t fit his own mental image of what an alpha should be.

  Underneath that was a sweet man, one who could say the damnedest things at times. You never knew what you were going to get. That was the reason Robbie had fallen for him in the first place, and it would always be a part of the other man that he cherished, especially now he knew what lay underneath.

  “I guess I would be. He good to you?”

  “Yes.” Robbie paused, thinking hard. The threat seemed to have abated for whatever reason. Wheeler was being talkative. He should take advantage of this for as long as he could. “I don’t understand how all of this connects, sir. What does it have to do with Lee? What does it have to do with me?”

  Wheeler turned down a side road, his pace slowing to a crawl. He gave a small nod to himself, as if he’d finally found his way. It seemed as if he would stop at any moment.

  Robbie had no idea what their destination might be. These were only decimated husks of buildings, abandoned and forgotten. Their fate was most likely to be torn down to make room for condos. What could possibly be here for Wheeler?

  “The cops were coming on to me. They had their suspicions, but couldn’t really pin anything on me until that one guy happened to be able to follow our trail. We got sloppy, careless. They saw Ulysses steal their van.”

  I remember.

  “That kind of cemented for the cops that they were on the right track. I did some digging around, trying to see if Ulysses had someone he cared about. The only thing we could turn up was… you.

  “The plan is to take you hostage. Your people at the daycare will already have called the police. They’ll be on their way, but they won’t want to do anything for fear of risking your life. Ulysses will be alerted. He’ll come here. He’ll tell the cops to do whatever they have to, to save you.

  “And we’ll make an agreement. We let you go, they let us go. We’ll disappear. I’ll start again somewhere else.”

  Robbie would have asked if that wasn’t pretty much like having to start over, but he knew better than that.

  If Wheeler had lost his business, he would have been left with nothing.

  If he vanished, he could take his money, his connections with him. He wouldn’t have to work his way from the ground up. He could open up shop in some other city, maybe in some other country, with the help of the people he knew and who had worked with him so often already.

  Robbie was unimportant except as a bargaining tool.

  Wheeler came to a stop almost at the end of the street, in front of one of the many empty houses. He stayed looking straight ahead, his hands on the wheel for a very long moment before he reached down to put the car into park. “We’ve got enough time for one last question.”

  He had a thousand questions which still needed to be answered, yet he found himself struggling to decide upon one in particular. They kept slipping through his fingers like he was trying to grab handfuls of fish, sliding out of his grasp. In the end, there was only one thing he could decide upon.

  “Why even bother telling me all this? Don’t you think I’ll tell the police everything you’ve told me?”

  He felt safe saying that. He felt like he might potentially have built up a rapport with this other man, that they could communicate like this. There was a chance to have this end peacefully, wasn’t there?

  Wheeler sighed and said nothing for a long moment. Then, he turned his head and looked right at Robbie. His small eyes were very hard and cold. “Because you deserved to know the reason. Because I’m not really going to let you go.”

  Wheeler had said he would make a bargain with the police. Let him go and he would let Robbie go.

  He hadn’t said Robbie would be alive.

  Acting on impulse, terrified out of his mind, Robbie grabbed for his seatbelt and started to yank on it. He fumbled with the buckle for a fraction of a second.

  It was a fraction of a second too long. Even if he had managed to get the belt off, he probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid what happened next.

  Men emerged as if from nowhere, surrounding the small black car. Robbie had no idea where they had come from. He only knew they had not been in sigh
t when they first stopped outside this house.

  Wheeler unlocked the doors from inside.

  A man outside the passenger side door pulled it open, then reached in. His arm was long and oddly tube-like, though his face was strangely familiar.

  Robbie knew him. He had seen this man talking to Ulysses, at the shop.

  After a few moments, he figured out that he what the tube-like thing was. It was not an arm. It was a length of pipe, veering at a high speed towards his head.

  A starburst of pain, followed rapidly by darkness.

  14

  Ulysses sat up straighter in his chair, frowning a little.

  “What the hell was that?” he growled, bringing one hand up to rub at his forehead. For a brief instant, he had been blinded by a sudden pulse of pain that could only be described as the worst headache in the entire world. It hardly lasted long enough for him to even register it happened. There wasn’t even any sign that it had been there in the first place, no residual throbbing or aching of any kind.

  The last time he’d hurt so much was when he crashed his motorcycle. And all he’d been doing right now was reading over some of the papers Robbie had been given, trying to learn about what his mate would be going through during his pregnancy. There should have been no reason he was in such pain.

  Ulysses put the papers down and then went into the bathroom, flipping on the light as he went. Leaning over the ink, he stared at his face in the mirror, turning his head this way and that. A shifter could not heal a problem caused by its own body. They were as susceptible to defects and certain illnesses as regular humans were.

  His suspicion was that he might have had a stroke. He knew there were signs of it afterwards. Drooping eyes or mouth, spots that had no feeling.

  He could detect nothing out of the ordinary.

  Leaning back, Ulysses frowned. If it hadn’t been a stroke or an aneurism, then what the hell was it?

  He would have to ask Robbie for his opinion on it. He could slip that into the discussion he’d already been planning to have, which revolved around his desire to move in. They were mates with a baby on the way, so it only made sense. Robbie had the better place for it, too. Nice location, nice house.

  But, he wouldn’t be a freeloader. He was going to get right back out there on the horse, find another job, another garage that could use his expertise.

  Robbie.

  His thoughts circulated back to his mate. For some reason, something inside him wanted to equate the pain he’d just had, with his beautiful partner. Those two things just didn’t mesh in his mind.

  Yet, they did.

  Ulysses pulled in a short, sharp breath. He understood. With terrible certainty, he understood. Something had just happened to Robbie and he had caught only the tail end of it through the connection they shared with each other.

  He squared his shoulders, bared his fangs as if threatening some invisible enemy. Marching out of the bathroom, he grabbed his shoes and jammed them on his feet, one after the other.

  Robbie had come to his rescue, way back at the start of all this. Now it was his turn to do the same.

  Ulysses shouldered his way out of Robbie’s perfect little house, smashing the door open so hard he thought the hinges might have squealed from an incoming breakage. He’d worry about the damn thing later. There were more important things at stake.

  Standing out in Robbie’s tiny patch of yard, Ulysses closed his eyes. He had never done something like this before, but it came almost as naturally as breathing, like any other base instinct. Reaching deep inside himself, he searched for his awareness of his mate and found it quickly.

  It was a difficult sensation to describe, being aware of another soul besides his own. It was like the ability to know someone was standing at his side, even if he wasn’t directly looking at them. It was that intangible sense of presence, of space being filled, only within instead of outside.

  He recognized his awareness of Robbie in the same way as he might be able to find his omega in a dark room, with his ears and nose plugged, his mouth covered. This thing inside him felt like Robbie.

  And Robbie didn’t feel like he was doing very well. His awareness was a heavy thing which wavered almost drunkenly, back and forth. Back and forth.

  Ulysses was struck by a mental image of someone having tossed a sack of potatoes over their shoulder, which flopped and bobbed as they walked, vegetables thumping against their back.

  Robbie was being carried, and not in a very nice manner.

  Ulysses pushed deeper, grabbed roughly for any more information he could reach. It was almost like there was a wall between them, but a wall made of glass. He could see through it, but he couldn’t get at anything on the other side.

  He caught a few images, glimpsed as quickly as the pain had come.

  A silver thing, clutched in a man’s hand.

  A car he had never seen before, though he had seen that particular type in the past.

  A street of old, disgusting buildings, fit only for feral cats to live in. The sidewalk along one side of the street had been partially removed, leaving a strip of disturbed soil in its place.

  All of these things combined to tell a fragmented story, one which Ulysses would have to believe. Someone had taken Robbie, had hurt him, took him to place on the edge of Pensacola that was always being renovated.

  Ulysses looked around, straining every single one of his senses. He couldn’t hear or see or scent anyone nearby. He could have to risk it.

  Because he damn sure wasn’t going to take the bus for this.

  He shifted, dropping down to his paws. No one screamed, so he could only assume no one had seen him go from a man to a gray wolf with classic coloration.

  He never cared much about his colors before, but now he found himself wishing that he didn’t look quite so much like a wolf. If he was black or white or mainly brown, he could be more easily mistaken for a feral dog.

  Oh, well. It was something he had no control over. He would just have to hope no one in this sheltered city knew what a wild animal looked like.

  Ulysses oriented himself to the northwest, letting the wolf part of his mind guide him for that since there were clouds obscuring the current position of the sun. He really was a terrible navigator, needed landmarks to help him figure out where he was, and what was the sun but the biggest landmark of all? People and animals had been using it to guide themselves for as long as they had been around.

  Digging his paws into the ground, he threw himself forward into an enormous leap and ran as hard and fast as he could. Wolves, especially alphas, were meant for endurance and not speed, but he pushed through the ache that accumulated in his legs, fighting against it, letting everything else he felt carry him forward. Fear and anger and guilty excitement, propelling him on and on.

  He raced unabashed through yards and flower beds, leapt chain fences as if he was merely stepping over a crack in the floor. He hit a trash can with his shoulder, caused it to go toppling into the street, spilling garbage everywhere. The resounding crash made a dog bark crazily, and also made a woman scream from inside the nearby house. Her yell contained mostly surprise, no fear.

  Ulysses was long gone before she ever came outside, giving her nothing to fear at all -except maybe the errant drivers she was accusing as she picked up pieces of trash from the sidewalk.

  He left the neighborhood behind, slowing down from a gallop to a loping trot as he reached the more dangerous part of his journey. A dangerous or unsuspecting driver might not stop in time to avoid running down an enormous dog crossing the street, even if he tried to do so at only crosswalks.

  He stuck to the alleys for as much of the time as he could, not caring at all about the stench of the passageways.

  He knew the alleys of the west side of the city very well, because Shadow Claws had controlled the west for several years. He had often gone on patrol, whether it was his turn or not, making sure nothing strange or unwelcome was occurring on his turf.

  Re
ally, he’d gone around sticking his nose in places where it hadn’t belonged.

  But it was coming in handy right now. He traveled from alley to alley, avoiding the spots where he knew the drug dealers, the muggers, the homeless spent most of their time. He took the thoroughfares between those sites, the wider alleys which were usually only used by drunks and passersby, to vomit or make an emergency bathroom stop.

  When he had to cross the street, he did so as fast as he could, bounding over the concrete.

  His sudden appearance often startled the nearby humans, making them cry out in alarm and surprise.

  And still no one was afraid of him, because he moved on too quickly for them to realize he was no ordinary overgrown mutt. He didn’t look at them, didn’t show them his burning lupine gaze.

  At long last, with his muscles burning and his lungs echoing, he emerged through one last alley and found himself in a land that time had forgotten. Hulking machinery - bulldozers, excavators, lifters and others- had been parked here and there along the streets, like dinosaur fossils waiting to be discovered once more. Sections of road and parts of building had been blocked off, but the blockades were leaning or had fallen over, signaling no one had been along to finish whatever job had been started in the past.

  It was a place of limbo. Broken things being repurposed, yet never quite getting there.

  Ulysses slowed down as he came deeper and deeper into the construction zone, swinging his head this way and that as he kept an eye on his surroundings. He felt as if he was coming to some sort of stopping point and he would know it when he saw it.

  See it he did, as he twisted his head to the right to look down a street he was about to pass.