by Renee Rose
Alpha’s War
Lee Savino
Renee Rose
Contents
Alpha’s War
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Recipe: Easiest Peanut Butter Cookies Ever
Author’s note
Want more Bad Boy Alphas?
Alpha’s Temptation (Bad Boy Alphas, Book 1)
Alpha’s Danger (Bad Boy Alphas, Book 2)
Alpha’s Prize (Bad Boy Alphas, Book 3)
Alpha’s Challenge (Bad Boy Alphas, Book 4)
Alpha’s Obsession (Bad Boy Alpha’s Book 5)
Alpha’s Desire (Bad Boy Alpha’s Book 6)
About Renee Rose
Want FREE Renee Rose books?
Check out Renee’s Zandian Masters Series!
Excerpt: Zandian Pet
Also by Renee Rose
About Lee Savino
Excerpt: Sold to the Berserkers
Sold to the Berserkers
Also by Lee Savino
Alpha’s War
I marked you. You belong to me.
Nash
I’ve survived suicide missions in war zones. Shifter prison labs. The worst torture imaginable. Nothing knocked me off my feet... until the beautiful lioness they threw in my cage. We shared one night before our captors ripped us apart.
Now I’m free, and my lion is going insane. He’ll destroy me from the inside out if I don’t find my mate.
I don’t know who she is. I don’t know where she lives. All I have is a video of her. But I’ll die if I don’t find her, and make her mine.
I’m coming for you, Denali.
Denali
They took me from my home, they killed my pride, they locked me up and forced me to breed. They took everything from me and still I survived.
But one night with a lion shifter destroyed me. Nash took the one thing my captors couldn’t touch—my heart.
Somehow I escaped, and live in fear that they will come for me. It’s killing my lioness, but I’ve got to hide—even from Nash. I’ve got to protect the one thing I have left to lose.
Our cub.
1
Denali
I still dream of him at night.
The deep rasp of his voice. The sense of quiet command, even as a prisoner. The giant bulge of his muscles when he moved. When he shook and sweat above me, his thick manhood filling me, satisfying me.
Sometimes I swear I feel the gentleness of his touch just before I wake. But then I always hear the nightmare voice. The rough snarl of a lion in pain.
Denali, I’m coming for you.
I bolt upright in bed, gasping. Just a dream. A dream, a dream, a dream, a dream. Another dream.
Not real.
It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to know what the dream means.
I shove back the memories of the lion who marked me, ignoring the familiar twist in the pit of my stomach.
Nash.
Did he ever make it out? Or did he die in there and it’s his ghost who visits me in the night?
Will the guilt over not going back to try to save him ever run dry? Doubtful.
I throw off the covers and pad silently to the kitchen, careful not to make any noise to wake Nolan.
I make coffee and wave through the window at my portly neighbor and landlady, Mrs. Davenfield, who is out early weeding her garden. She’s the reason I ended up settling here.
After I escaped, I stayed off the radar. Took only under the table cash jobs—gardening and migrant farm work. I ended up in Temecula—wine country—working the vineyards during harvest season.
Mrs. Davenfield was willing to take cash and skip the credit check to let me rent the little cottage on her property. She took one look at my swollen belly and decided I must be escaping domestic abuse. I never corrected her, because hell, she seems to love the drama and feeling like she’s my secret-keeper. And I needed her help.
And in a way, I was escaping domestic abuse. Just not the way she imagined it. Not some baby-daddy I had to get away from.
No. Nolan’s father is the only part of my horrifying ordeal worth remembering. I guess that’s why he’s the one who haunts me most.
Because I got away.
And I left him there to rot.
Nash
Cold light. Grey light. The howls rise in my ears.
The concrete walls never change, but at night, they close in. My lion can see in the dark but that doesn’t mean night doesn’t affect me. I always know when it falls.
And those howls.
I don’t know whether they’re real or imagined. I’ve killed so many. Their screams are my penance. Awake or dreaming, it’s all the same. My life is the nightmare that never ends.
Someone, somewhere is singing.
“When Irish eyes are smiling...”
Barred sunlight trickles over my face. I’m in bed, not a cot. The walls are no longer concrete but dingy white. And paper thin. I hear voices murmuring in the living room, along with the Irish caterwauling. The sound washes over me, and my knotted muscles relax.
My vision, tinged red, clears as my lion retreats. I’m in a bedroom, not a cell with guards outside the door waiting to burst in. But my animal is ready to fight. He always is. Years of abuse have permanently broken him.
Sweat soaks the sheets under me. Another bad night, filled with dreams of being locked in a cell. Or flashbacks. But sometimes, the dreams feel more real.
I pull myself out of bed and make it with military precision, like I have every damn day since week one of bootcamp. “You can take the man out of the army, but not the army out of the man,” my drill instructor told us. He was right. But sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to take the killer out of my lion.
As soon as I open my bedroom door, the singing stops.
“Nash?” A head pops into the hall.
“What are you doing here?” I glare at the shifter, a young face with a shock of prematurely grey hair.
Parker shrugs and steps back so I can enter the living room. “Got kicked out of my last place. They saw my animal running around and told me no pets. And you have an extra room.”
I have nothing to say to this, so I turn to the other two interlopers lounging on the battered couch. Two men, one with black hair and a bottle of rotgut in his hands, the other taller than all of us and too thin. The tall one wears thick glasses and blinks constantly. The black haired one grins.
“I told you not to come here,” I growl to the room at large.
“You’ve got the biggest place.” Parker hides a smile. For a moment I consider wiping it off his face, then wiping the floor with him. But no. He’s my manager. If I fuck him up, who will schedule my fights? Bleeding an opponent on a regular basis is the only thing keeping my animal alive.
“Hey.” I point to the black-haired man, who’s opening a bottle with an illegible handwritten label. “What the fuck is that stuff? Stinks like paint remover.”
“This? Just a wee bit o’ hair of the dog. Had a good night last night drinkin’ and such. This will perk me up right quick.” The Irish accent penetrates, and my brain throws up a name. Declan. Shifter—animal unknown. He smells a bit like a wolf, a bit like… something else. A shi
fter mix, a product of the experiments in the underground labs of Data-X. The Irishman is one of the few that survived. I’d call him lucky, but he’s not. The lucky ones died or escaped early. The rest of us still suffer, even though we got away. Even though we burned the place to the ground.
“Ya want some?” Declan offers the bottle. My lion surges to the fore. I beat him back down. As tempting as it is to get drunk before noon, I didn’t break out of the prison lab to waste my days.
“No. Drink it outside. Or better yet, use it to kill the grass in the driveway.”
“Right ya are, sir.” The black-haired man throws off a mock salute. “You’re the alpha.”
“I’m not your alpha,” I call as I head to the kitchen. Breakfast. Food. Normalcy. Go through the motions, even if normal is a foreign country I’ll never visit again.
“You’re the king of the beasts, aren’t ya now? If you’re in a pack, you’ll be at the lead.”
“We’re not a pack.” I open the fridge and grab the first thing that looks good—a container of milk. I tip it up and drink straight out of the carton, ignoring Parker leaning in the door.
“Ready for the big fight?”
I grunt.
“Another grizzly shifter. This one from Saskatchewan or some Godforsaken place. I swear all they do in the lumber yards is fight.”
“Good.” Less chance my lion will kill them.
“Betting’s pretty evenly split,” Parker muses. “The bruins are the only ones who can take you.”
A plastic container filled with some sort of homemade biscuits sits on my counter. I tap it. “What’s this?”
“Scones. Laurie made them.” As soon as he says it I smell the feathery scent of the owl shifter along with the sharp sugary tang of the baked good. I open the container and take two.
My pocket vibrates and pull out my phone. A text from an unknown number.
Layne and I are driving over. We have intel for you.
I type back, I’ll be at The Pit. And because I can’t stop myself. What intel?
Kylie got a hit on a woman living in Temecula. Going to confirm now, but we think it’s Denali.
Denali.
Red. Black. The cell door opens, I stand at ready. The guards come in, weapons trained on me. I expect them.
I don’t expect her. The scent of cinnamon fills the air. Cinnamon… and arousal.
“Nash? Nash?”
The memory goes dark, and ebbs away, leaving Parker’s worried face. Behind him, Declan and Laurie stand at the door, staring at me.
The world tints red for a second. My lion trying to take hold. These flashbacks are unmanageable. I’m barely sane on a good day. What will happen if it is Denali?
“I gotta go.” Two steps to the door, and I reverse, grabbing another scone and holding it up for the tall man to see. “Thanks. These are good.”
The owl shifter blinks at me from behind his Coke-bottle glasses.
I leave out the back door.
2
Nash
This time of day, The Pit is mostly deserted, which is a good thing, my lion is riled up enough at the lingering smell of shifters. I let him out and prowl around the grounds. We’re far enough in a run-down industrial district that no one will see a lion pacing the perimeter of a dingy warehouse. No one comes back here but shifters, and the shifters who come here will recognize me. This is my territory. My kingdom. I let my mad lion mark his territory, slinking along the chain link fence that surrounds the parking lot, then I shift and put my clothes back on. I head inside for a drink, trying not to think of how pathetic I’ve become.
A few minutes later, a blond man steps inside, sniffing the air. At the bar, I raise my glass in invitation. He nods and steps back, allowing his companion to enter before him. A striking, young Asian woman with long dark hair approaches. She stares right at me. I meet her gaze in mild challenge. She’s a new shifter—one of the more successful creations of Dr. Smyth’s, and dominant. My lion normally would challenge her boldness, but right now he doesn’t see her as a threat. This is a meeting of allies, and he knows he’s about to get what he wants.
Sam sits. Without a word, he lays his phone on the bar, screen up. There’s a picture of a woman leaving a house, her face half shuttered behind the screen door.
My chest tightens. Denali. The room blurs, turning red.
Sam puts a finger on the screen and swipes to show me the rest. Denali headed down the drive, entering a car. Long legs in cutoff shorts, a plain white tee showcasing lean taut arms. “My contact took them this morning. Confirmed the address of the house. She seems to be living there.” Sam slides a piece of paper to me, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the picture. In every photo, there’s a serious expression on her face—not quite sad. Distant.
“Is this her?” Layne asks.
“Yes.” I find my voice. “It’s her.” Denali. Mine, my lion roars, shaking the bars of his cage. He wants to come out and go on the hunt. Find Denali, make his claim. Mine.
Crimson clouds my vision. I blink, and everything goes black.
I raise my head, realizing I’ve been silent for a few minutes. The air is thick with tension. Layne’s eyes are shifter bright. They know I’m unhinged. Hell, I could’ve killed Sam last year when he decided the best way to enlist my aid in finding Dr. Smyth was to go a round in the ring with me. He brought up Denali and I partially shifted right there in the cage. Put my claws right through him. But he survived, and we got Smyth. And this is what he promised me in return—finding my mate.
“Sorry it took so long,” Sam says. The hair on his arms stands on end, but his voice is calm. He might not be the biggest shifter, but he’s a cool head under pressure. Unlike the rest of us. “I thought for sure we had her last time.”
My fist clenches and I have to work to relax it. “She probably moves around a lot.” She’ll be hiding like we are. Always looking over her shoulder. Never knowing if someone who wants to do more testing will show up.
“She seems to have settled. The landlady of this place wouldn’t say when she moved in or give any information about her.” Sam flicks the paper bearing the address. “But we better move fast. Layne and I can—”
“No.” I pocket the paper. “Just me. Alone.”
“With all due respect—” Sam eases off the barstool a second after me. He doesn’t try to get in my way, but he steps too close. Color explodes behind my eyes. Darkness dances at the corners, then takes over.
A second later, I come to. My hands are fisted in Sam’s shirt. I’ve slammed him against the bar. He shows his neck, a wolf’s signal of yielding. His hands go up, spread in surrender, but my lion doesn’t care. My canines ache as they grow, a growl blasting from my throat.
A second later pain explodes in my back.
“I wouldn’t if I were you.” A purr in my ear, soft and sibilant. The claws in my skin flex and tighten, ten points of agony, needle sharp. “Be a good kitty and let him go.”
Wrenching hold of my lion, I release Sam’s shirt, and snarl as the claws bite deeper.
“Layne,” Sam murmurs. A half purr, half growl and the weight leaves my back abruptly. I stretch, ignoring the shriek of pain along my spine, and turn slowly. The woman stares straight at me with almond-shaped cat eyes. If she were male, my lion would want to have a round with her, even though I’m the asshole here. But I admire her strength. Her grace. And I appreciate what she and Sam are doing for me.
Still, my lion can’t stop me from posturing. “Most wouldn’t provoke the king of the beasts in his territory.”
Layne meets my challenge with a glare. Sam slips to her side and she takes his hand without breaking her gaze. Don’t threaten my mate, she seems to say. My lion grudgingly approves.
“Maybe it’s best if you do go alone, Nash.” Sam tugs Layne to the door.
As soon as they step outside, I cover my face with a hand. My forehead is clammy with effort from keep my lion on a chain. He’s violent, lashing out at friend and foe. I�
�m dangerous. Desperate. I’m dying, and there’s only one cure.
Denali.
The paper in my pocket nudges my palm. I crumple it and fight the rising red tide that threatens my vision. It hurts, but I push it back.
“Well, boss? You gonna get her?” Parker stands in front of me.
I didn’t realize the gang had followed me to The Pit from my house, but it figures. They’re omnipresent. “I can’t.” I force the words out, ignoring my lion’s howl of loss.
“Ya must,” Declan says at my side. “Your lion can’t hold on any longer.”
“I know.” I close my eyes. I was supposed to find Denali, go to her. Apologize. Make sure she’s safe.
It’s too late. My lion is out of control, and I need to find someone to kill him. To kill me.
“If someone was able to kill you, they would’ve by now,” Parker points out and I realize I spoke aloud. “You fight every day—and win. The biggest, baddest shifters, the half deranged—anyone who will step into the ring. Sometimes two at a time.”
“Ya can’t stop fighting,” Declan murmurs. “Not that I’m complaining. Business is good. Bets are up. The cops stopped sniffing around, and the Shifter Fight Club in Tucson only made us more famous.” He swirls his drink. “The Pit. Home of the King of the Beasts.”
Right. And what happens if one day my lion kills someone in the ring?
