And my virginity was one more thing that our pack owned, that they could trade away to another pack.
I floated between sleep and wakefulness, sorting through vague plans. I had the knife, sure. It was a comforting weight in my pocket. But what was I going to do with it? I couldn’t picture using it to hurt Blue or Gray. They might be my captors, but they were kind, in their own way. Victims in this whole mess too, if they really would be imprisoned if I escaped.
Guilt tightened my chest at the thought. What would it cost them if I escaped? Maybe I should be smart and just look out for myself. No one else is going to do it, a voice whispered in the back of my head. It’s time to just take care of yourself.
But I didn’t want to hurt them.
I felt Blue twist in his seat, as if he was checking on me. I kept my eyes closed.
“She’s sharp,” he said, his voice soft, as if he didn’t want to wake me.
“Yeah,” Gray said. “Seems like a waste.”
“Don’t go all soft on me again,” Blue warned him.
“It’s just that if she’d been born anywhere else…”
“I know.” Blue sounded resigned.
“Do you think she even knows about the Freed?”
The Freed? My heart began to beat a little faster at the thought, and I forced myself to focus on breathing softly, easily, as if I was asleep. They might sense the change. Even in human form, wolf shifters have keen senses.
Blue snorted. “No. She looked pretty hopeless.”
“She did.”
“If she thought she could run, that she could head north and find the free omega enclave in the packless territories, then she’d have tried to claw her way out, I bet,” Blue said. “I think there’s some spirit hidden under all that…”
Blue trailed off. I wished he’d keep talking. Hope had sparked in my heart at the mention of the packless territories. I didn’t know where I was running to, exactly, but I’d be able to scent unmarked land when I found it. I’d just have to avoid being captured on any other pack’s territory. I’d have to hide my scent, move fast…
“Maybe they’ll hit the prison again,” Gray said, after a minute.
“Don’t say that,” Blue warned. “You know what’s going to happen if the Warden thinks you’re sympathetic to the Freed.”
“As if things can get so much worse.”
“You know they can,” Blue said sharply. Then, in a gentler tone, he said, “We both know how bad things can get.”
That tone makes me feel something unsettling, as I try to imagine what they might’ve been through.
“All right, well, let’s focus on what we’ve got to do,” Gray said. “I wish they hadn’t sent us to get two of them at the same time.”
“He’s on our route.”
“His pack had a lot to say about him. He’s got quite the taste for violence…soft spot for the ladies, though.”
Oh really?
“I don’t like having the girl with us and him at the same time. If things go south…”
“If things go south, we’ll figure it out. Just like we always do.” The words came out quick, pat. Then, he added, “We’ll protect her.”
For a few long seconds, silence hung between them, and I barely breathed. Of course they’d protect me. They had to deliver two bodies, right? But as much as I told myself that was what they meant, I couldn’t help feeling like it meant something more.
I dozed off then for real, but I woke up a bit later, startled out of my sleep by one of their rough voices. It took me a second to understand what I’d heard through my daze. One of them had asked, “Anything feel…off…about her to you?”
The question hung there. Yes, there was something off. The way my body had responded to them from the first time I locked gazes with Blue and Gray…there was definitely something going on.
It wasn’t just my body, though. The stop at the diner had been because they needed to deliver me healthy; it seemed they couldn’t stand what my pack had done to me, couldn’t stand for me to be weak and miserable.
Guilt twisted through my stomach. The energy from that food was what would power my escape, because I’d been too weak to even try just a few hours ago.
“Yeah,” Blue said finally. “I think maybe she’s on the verge of her first heat.”
“We’ve got to get her there ASAP,” Gray said. “It wouldn’t be right… she shouldn’t feel that for the first time like this. Not with us.”
“Yeah—“ Blue twisted in his seat suddenly, as if he’d sensed the change as my heart started to pound. “You’re awake there, huh? Eavesdropping?”
“Heat?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but there was a hitch in my voice.
Blue and Gray traded a look full of fear themselves, as if they’d just walked into a conversation they weren’t prepared for.
“I don’t know, lass,” Gray said. “I’m no expert.”
“I wish we could skip this guy…” Blue ran his hand through his hair.
“Yeah, if only there were a fairy godmother for shifters,” Gray said. “Seems like we’re out of luck on wishes.”
“What guy?” I asked, sitting forward.
“He’s just the other prisoner we’re picking up to transport. You don’t need to worry about him.” Blue had his usual quick, dismissive tone. Then he added, “You don’t need to talk to him.”
“Pretty close quarters to ignore someone in,” I said. Even though they managed to ignore me.
We skirted a city—cities were neutral territory for wolves—and then, once pines rose around the highway, we pulled off, down increasingly rural roads. I leaned my head against the window, watching them. We were heading north as we left my Florida pack behind. Closer to the Freed?
When the car stopped, I looked out curiously, but I didn’t see much around me but trees that seemed to press in.
“Stay put,” Gray warned me, looking back.
Blue opened my car door a second later. He dangled the cuffs from one finger, looking almost reluctant. “Come on. You know the drill.”
I shifted toward him at the same time as he swung into the bench seat, which brought my shoulder bumping his. I flinched away, and something sparked in his face.
He smelled so good. The same heat between my thighs that I’d felt earlier throbbed, on the verge of being an unbearable ache.
“Show me your back,” he said. His voice was gentle, but commanding, and a shiver ran up my spine. I didn’t want to show him. Maybe he would feel sympathy for me, maybe he’d let his guard down. And yet…I didn’t want him to pity me, to see me as nothing but a girl he had to rescue. They’d been right before we walked out of my family’s house; at least I could cling to my pride. That would be enough of a fight in prison.
“Now, please,” he said, a faint note of steel under that gentle tone. “If you’re hurt, we need to know.”
“It’s nothing,” I mumbled, but when he raised a finger and mimed me turning around, my resistance felt futile anyway.
I shifted, turning my back to him. In the front seat, I heard Gray sigh, and I wondered why.
Blue’s fingers skated under the hem of my shirt, raising it up to my shoulders. I wasn’t sure what he saw; I’d looked at my back in the mirror once, then avoided looking again.
Usually, only male shifters were whipped for disobeying the alpha, but when my father caught me in the driveway and pushed me to the ground, the alpha had only been a few steps behind. They’d tied my hands over a low-slung branch of a tree in a front yard, the tree I used to climb when I was a kid.
When I’d dared to look in the mirror, my back had been livid with welts and wounds, still oozing blood. But it wasn’t bleeding anymore.
Blue went still behind me, but we were so close that I could feel his heartbeat quicken, that I could feel him tighten with rage.
“I thought you must have been beaten, from the way you flinched…” he began, his voice flat and cold. Despite the way he spoke, his thumb stroked gen
tly across the skin between welts. His touch felt so good, slightly painful but in a way that was pleasant, almost healing, that it made me tremble, my thighs beginning to shake.
He went on, “But I didn’t expect they did this to you.”
“It’s fine,” I said, easing away from him. “It’s already healing.”
He tugged the hem of my shirt down. “Where you’re going, no one will ever hurt you like that again.”
A laugh tinged with other emotions—bitterness, nerves? I couldn’t even tell—slipped out of my mouth. “In prison? I didn’t know that was a kinder, gentler place.”
“You’ll be on a block with other thrown-away girls,” he said. “It’s different there. Hands.”
For a second, his anger had felt so protective, and now he was back to being cool and indifferent. I twisted to give him my wrists, but a strange sense of betrayal had settled into my skin. It didn’t make sense. I barely knew this man; I didn’t even know his real name.
“Jesus,” Gray said. “Other thrown-away girls. You’ve got a real flair with words.”
But that wasn’t even what bothered me. It was the truth.
There had been something about Blue’s stern, caring voice that had sent a thrill through my body, though, that had stroked the throbbing heat there to an almost unbearable level, and then he’d taken that away from me.
Even now, he’d locked the cuffs on, then shifted away from me out the door, and it felt as if he was taking himself away from me, the warmth that made me feel better when he was close to me.
If this was my heat, playing tricks on my head, then maybe it was a far more powerful thing than I’d ever realized.
“Be right back,” he said, and then he closed the door. He touched the key fob in his pocket, and the locks all activated in the car with a beep. Through the window, he warned me, “I’ll hear the alarm if you open a door or break the glass. And remember what the cuffs will do to you if you shift.”
As if I could forget.
Blue and Gray strode down the road away from me, and I watched them go. Blue was tall, broad-shouldered, the picture of an alpha, really, in his jeans and fitted shirt. Gray was more slender, but the way he moved was mesmerizing, and his leanly muscled body was sexy and athletic. Then they followed a bend in the pines just ahead, and I lost sight of them.
I didn’t know how long they’d be gone. I quickly threw my leg over the center console and slipped into the passenger seat. It smelled faintly of Blue up here, of the same scent of his body that I found so magnetic when he was near me. The pockets in his door were empty except for a water bottle like the one he’d given me. I leaned forward to open the glove compartment with my cuffed hands, fumbling with the latch as I hoped it would open but didn’t really expect good luck.
It opened, falling open onto my knees, and I grinned in triumph even though I hadn’t found anything yet. I dug through the glove compartment, past the owner’s manual in its leather case and an array of maps, looking for anything that could help me. There was a small leather bag, and I pulled it out and hastily unzipped it on my lap to find a small emergency kit.
Deep inside it was a spare handcuff key.
How did these guys stay alive? They had to transport far more dangerous prisoners than me. Were they just sloppy because they trusted me for some reason, the same way I kind of found myself trusting them? Hell, were they trying to let me escape?
Stockholm syndrome, I told myself sternly. I’d read about that before. You just want to be able to trust them. You have to be smart.
I didn’t want to hurt them—I wouldn’t, I could feel that in my bones when I imagined using the knife on one of them—but in the end, they were still the ones taking me to prison.
If they were a pair of assholes like my father and the alpha, I’d uncuff myself, run, stab one of them if I had to.
I hastily packed everything else away, making sure not to drop the key, stealing glances at the moonlit road ahead. I didn’t want to be discovered with the key.
When I glanced up this time, I saw bodies moving down the road toward me. I didn’t have time to look at them twice. Instead, I hastily closed the glove box, then swung back into the backseat. Had they seen me moving through the windshield?
I tried to still my breathing, closing my eyes, drawing slow breaths through my nose and exhaling through my mouth. I had to slow my heartbeat down. I’d been so frantic at the thought of being caught by them that my heart had hammered in my chest.
The key felt sharp in my palm, I was clutching it so tightly that the tip dug into my hand. The key was my chance, an unexpected miracle.
I opened my eyes again and leaned forward in my seat, trying to prepare myself to play a role. They’d expect me to be curious about this man who was joining us. I’d had so many questions already. I wondered if he’d make it easier or harder to escape. Blue and Gray had made it sound like he was dangerous.
Through the windshield, I could see them coming closer. In between Blue’s tall frame and Gray’s slighter one was a man close to Blue’s height, his head down and his wrists bound behind him, which drew back his powerful shoulders.
Then Gray opened the car door across from me, and Blue pushed him down into the seat.
The man’s glittering eyes met mine. They were bright green, magnetic—or maybe full of madness—in a face that was otherwise handsome, with a faint scruff of dark blond hair across his jaw and tousled hair above. When his gaze met mine, my heart stopped beating, and his lips arched up in a faint smile.
“You can’t leave me like this for the ride.” He had to sit forward, with his hands cuffed behind his back, and it looked uncomfortable, especially with his size. “It’s cruel and unusual.”
Blue settled into the driver’s side. “That really doesn’t matter to me.”
My lips parted, and Gray looked back at me. “He’s tried to strangle guards before, Saoirse. It’s unavoidable.”
“You don’t need to explain things to her,” Blue said.
“Maybe I want to,” Gray shot back.
The man next to me said, “Saoirse.” He said it slowly, as if he was rolling the word around in his mouth, as if it was delicious.
It did sound delicious in his warm honey voice, to be honest.
“Shut up,” Blue warned him.
The four of us drove off into the night. I craned my head to look at the pines vanishing behind us, wondering at the fact that I’d never seen any signs of the pack who lived here. What had this mysterious man done that his pack handed him off in the middle of nowhere? What was he capable of?
Chapter Four
I wasn’t sure about the man with the glittering gaze, or about the way my body seemed to respond to his presence, just like it did with Blue or Gray. Suddenly I knew why my mother had been in such a hurry to marry me off before my heat.
Because if I weren’t in cuffs, if these men weren’t my captors, I’d have mounted Blue and Gray and even Mr. Crazy Eyes over there without any hesitation. That was the danger, I guessed, in being an omega. I thought that the intensity of that sensation would be reserved for mates, but I wanted Blue and Gray already in an intense way that defied sense.
“So, Saoirse,” the man said, flashing me a smile. He had to look over his shoulder at me a little, since he was leaning forward due to the cuffs, but there was something sexy about that. “What’re you in for?”
I ignored his question. “What’s your name? You know mine. Doesn’t seem fair.”
His smile widened. “Does anything about this situation strike you as fair?”
He had a point, but he was already going on. “My name is Reed McKinney. Pleasure to meet you, Saoirse.”
“Shut up,” Blue warned, glancing back at us. “Saoirse, he’s a sociopath. You don’t want to talk to him.”
Reed rolled his eyes. “Hurtful.”
“Maybe I do,” I told Blue, feeling a spark of heat ignite in my chest. “At least he told me what his name is.”
�
�You don’t need to know our names,” Blue said.
“I prefer psychopath, not sociopath,” Reed said to me in a confidential tone. “Sociopaths are disorganized, antisocial. That’s not me.”
Blue snorted. “You’re not antisocial? You’ve killed more than your fair share of people.”
“And so have you, I’d wager,” Reed shot back. Looking to me, he added, “I’d be happy to fit into society, if society weren’t so damn terrible.”
“Right now, that’s pretty hard to argue with,” I said.
“Oh, let me guess,” Reed said. He cast a critical eye over me, and I felt my cheeks heat faintly as his gaze sharpened. He looked at me as if he liked what he saw, his eyes roaming my face first, then down my body.
He seemed to pause for a second on my fists on my knees. I had the strangest sense he saw through me and knew about the key I gripped in my hand, as if the man could read me.
His gaze drifted back up to my face. “Resisting the alpha’s advances? Not resisting the alpha’s advances, and becoming inconvenient? Refusing to marry?”
“Maybe she’s an ax murderer,” Blue said. “I told you to shut up.”
“Maybe she should have been an ax murderer,” Reed shot back. His gaze went back to me. “What do you think, Saoirse? With everything they did to you…”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said. “I just want to live my own life.”
“Mm.” Reed cast a critical eye over me one more time, then turned his attention to the road, looking over Blue’s shoulder. “Speaking of. We’re coming closer to Freed territory.”
Blue shook his head, refusing to answer, but my heart raced at the thought.
“Not that it matters right now,” Reed murmured, his nostrils flaring. “She’s in her heat, isn’t she? She’ll need to mate. She won’t want to be alone until she has.”
I shook my head, rejecting his words, even though the way my blood burned through my body, my core clenching, made me think he spoke the truth.
“I could help you with that,” Reed said, his voice low and sexy. “If you choose.”
“No, you bloody well can’t,” Blue said.
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