“You’re going to let her go to prison where there will be no release for her?” Reed asked skeptically. “Well, that seems like the cruelest cut of all.”
“The need will fade once she’s not around any alpha,” Gray said. He gave me an encouraging look. “If you do feel anything, it’s not… going to last forever.”
“Oh, she feels something.” Reed gave me another one of those looks that seemed to go right through me, and a strange, tingling feeling swept across my skin. My knees clenched together, revealing far more than I meant to, and Reed laughed out loud. If he hadn’t been laughing at me, it would have been a nice-sounding, boyish laugh.
Just then, there was a pop outside the car, followed by a whap-whap-whap sound that seemed to be coming from the front right tire.
“Fuck.” Blue exploded, slapping his hand against the steering wheel.
Gray leaned forward, drawing his gun from the small of his back. He and Blue exchanged a glance, as if they expected this might be the prelude to an attack.
Reed smiled to himself.
“Stay put,” Blue said, again. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car, and Gray did the same. Gray moved quickly to the trunk of the car, and when he had closed it, I glimpsed a long barrel, like he’d gotten a shotgun or a rifle. I couldn’t see exactly.
Gray stood watch as Blue knelt beside the tire, and then I lost view of him as he began to set the jack.
“Want to get out of here?” Reed tilted his head at me curiously.
“Obviously,” I said, wondering what game he was playing. “Did you set this up?”
“No,” he said, and I thought he meant it. “I wish.”
“Then how would we get out of here?” I asked.
“We.” His lips twitched in a widening smile. “I like the way you think. I was right, wasn’t I, little Omega? You don’t want to be alone?”
“No wolf wants to be alone,” I shot back. “It’s not just because I’m…”
He studied me for a second. “You never felt it in your old pack, did you?”
I didn’t owe him any answers. And yet, despite myself, I found myself saying, “No.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t do what you were told? You wanted to hold out for true love and fated mates and something beautiful?” He said it in such a mocking tone that anger flared in my chest.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I just didn’t want someone else to make all the decisions for my life. I didn’t want to be told what to do by a bunch of assholes.”
“Ah, I know that feeling,” he said. He jerked his chin toward me. “From the way you’re sitting, they made you pay for it. Why didn’t you give in then?”
“I don’t know.” I still didn’t know where the strength had come from to resist. Surely they’d all thought I’d give in.
Even I had thought they’d win, in the end.
But here I was, going off to prison. I’d been thrown away because I hadn’t broken. That sure didn’t feel like a victory.
Reed was watching me, and his gaze seemed to tingle across my skin, although I couldn’t quite read his expression.
“What?” I asked.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said. Those words were so unexpected that I felt myself frown slightly, at the same time as an unexpected warmth blossomed in my chest. “And I hope we both find some freedom. Let’s help each other, Saoirse.”
The car tilted as it went up on the jack, and I found myself sliding toward him, inch by inch. “I’m open to any ideas.”
“It’s a bad idea to put a car up on a jack with people inside it,” he told me. “They must be feeling pretty desperate. If I kick the window out—and I can, I’ve done it before—at the same time as you bang yourself into that side, they’ll lose the jack and the car will fall. They won’t be able to get the jack back under it, so they’ll be limited to chasing us on foot.”
I could picture Blue pinned under the car, and I hesitated. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Then you’re going to get hurt,” he warned me. He studied my face, before he sighed. “You got a better idea? Better yet, you got a weapon?”
I had the knife in my pocket. I wasn’t sure I trusted Reed to tell him about it, though. He was willing to hurt someone to get free, and I wanted to protect Blue and Gray even more than I wanted to escape.
“Is it true,” I asked slowly, “that if they don’t bring us to prison, they take our place?”
He shrugged, as best he could, his big shoulders barely moving. “Might just be a story the Shifter Guard spread to make themselves sound more scary. What does it matter, anyway?”
I shook my head. It mattered to me. They’d implied they had enemies already, just driving through pack lands. I wondered what would happen to them in prison.
“Saoirse,” he said, his voice low and intimate. “Talk to me. What’re you scared of? More scared of than prison?”
“Nothing,” I said, studying the moonlit night outside.
“Look at me,” he said.
Despite myself, I found myself meeting his gaze. I found it less unsettling now, but it was still magnetic. He had beautiful green eyes, lush-lashed; they were surprisingly vivid against his tanned skin. There was a roughness to his features, his big jaw and a nose that looked like it had been broken once upon a time, but he was still handsome. Maybe it only made him more handsome.
“Saoirse,” he said again, his voice low, but this time there was an edge of lust in it, and in the way he looked at me. “Did you know that you’re driving us all crazy?”
He meant with my heat. I had thought I was the only one who was losing my mind, but I could see it in his eyes. “I’m not trying to.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s part of what makes you so…”
He shook his head, breaking off the thought. “You could, you know. You could use it against them.”
He didn’t have to indicate Blue and Gray for me to know. “They’d break if you teased them, I’m sure they would.”
I bit my lip at the thought; it was all too easy to imagine myself up against that car, out in the cool night air, with their hands and mouths against me, caressing my skin, satisfying this heat that burned through me…
“And then we’d have our chance to escape,” he murmured.
Something about that felt so wrong that it broke my fantasy. I shook my head.
“For someone who says she doesn’t want to go to prison, you’re awfully picky,” he muttered. “Why?”
Because I don’t want to hurt them. I didn’t dare say it aloud. I barely knew them, and anyway, it was probably just my body talking. I’d been told a hundred times that fated mates weren’t real.
And yet when I imagined myself with them, I couldn’t imagine betraying them at the end.
“Because I have a better idea,” I said, the idea crystallizing even as I said that. I glanced toward the guys outside. I couldn’t tell him about the knife. I didn’t trust Reed not to hurt them.
But I held my palm out. The key seemed to twinkle under the moonlight, and Reed grinned so big that it crinkled the skin around his eyes in a way that was very sexy.
“I could kiss you,” he said, when I’d unlocked his cuffs, and then he’d done the same for me.
And then he leaned toward me and did just that. His lips were soft, warm against mine.
It was the first time anyone had ever kissed me. For a second, I froze.
He started to pull back, and I glimpsed how his eyes had gone tender. They didn’t look crazy at all anymore.
I swayed toward him, kissing him back. His lips caressed mine open.
He held his hands behind his back still, as if he hadn’t been freed of the cuffs.
So there was nothing to warn Blue that he was loose, as Blue suddenly wrenched his car door open. He yanked Reed out of the car bodily. I could feel his possessive fury sizzle through the air before he slammed Reed into the ground.
Reed expl
oded into motion, and I saw the oh-shit look flash across Blue’s face as he realized Reed wasn’t chained anymore, right before Reed clocked him.
Gray threw open my car door. “Saoirse, are you okay?” he asked.
His face was so earnest that it wrenched my heart.
But that didn’t stop me from bolting.
“A little help!” Blue shouted from his side of the car, and so instead of chasing me, Gray ran around the back of the car, slipping the stock of his gun into his shoulder.
I ran. I didn’t want to leave any of them to the nightmare scene behind, and my heart was racing furiously, afraid for all of them, but I left the angry shouting behind and raced into the woods.
By the time I’d gotten pretty far into the pines, it was silent. I should shift now, while I had time to outpace Blue and Gray before they could shift, and yet I knew I wouldn’t think clearly as a wolf. I couldn’t stop listening for the crack of a shot behind me, but thank god, I never heard one. I didn’t want Reed to get hurt either. I hoped he’d managed to get free.
How did I get free of them and escape north? Blue and Grey would be big wolves, bigger than me and likely faster too.
I heard a rushing sound ahead of me in the distance, and it took me a second to figure out what it was.
Water.
I ran for it.
Chapter Five
I plunged myself into the cold water, knowing I’d have to get away from this point to escape them. They’d lose my scent in the water, but that wasn’t enough.
The water just ahead of me seemed to move fast. I’d found the edges of a river, and I was half-submerged now, but it would be a rough swim from here. I didn’t know what was downstream.
But there were reeds at the edge of the water. I hastily reached for one and found it hollow in the center. Relief flooded my chest. Finally, luck was turning my way.
I wrenched at it, but I couldn’t pull it loose. I grabbed the knife from my pocket and opened it up, sawing at the reed until I had a tube I could twist free.
I moved quickly through the shallower water, as fast as I dared, even though the rocks I had to move over rocked underneath my feet. I had to get away from the spot that was my obvious entry point.
In the distance, I could feel them coming for me, as if we were connected.
When I scented them in the air, I plunged myself into the water, using the tube to breathe. I miscalculated, trying to get the tube’s opening as close to the surface of the water as I could to avoid being detected, and accidentally drew in a breath of water. Icy-cold water filled my mouth and I breathed it in, feeling it burn through my lungs.
I surfaced abruptly, sputtering, as panic rippled through my body. Even as I was coughing, I could hear Gray in the distance. “You hear that?”
I focused on my breathing, letting myself cough up the last of the water before I managed to get it under control again. The water rippled around me as I settled back under the surface, and I squeezed my eyes shut, straining all my other senses.
Please don’t find me.
In the distance, even underwater, I could hear Blue and Gray talking, even though it felt far-away and muffled.
“Shit. If we go back without the girl…”
“At least she’s free,” Blue said. “She didn’t deserve to be here.”
“I know,” Gray said. “but we don’t deserve to be there, either.”
“At least we bought ourselves freedom for a little while.” Blue said. And then, his voice betraying his emotion, “Fuck. You know what they do to runners who go back in…”
Oh my god. It wasn’t just an urban legend. They really were going to prison.
I waited until their voices—and their presence, which I was eerily attuned to—had faded away into the distance. The cold seeped through my muscles, then faded into an ache as if I was losing strength.
I finally sat up, before drawing a deep, gasping breath. The cold night air felt so good now that I could breathe freely.
I pulled myself out of the water, my legs weak underneath me so that I staggered through the rippling surface. The water seemed to pull at my water-logged clothes, trying to drag me back under, and I hit my knees in the soft mud at the bank of the river. I had to get warm. If I had the strength to shift, I could run, keep moving north. My wolf would naturally try to stick to unmarked territory.
I had to find my way to the Freed.
Yet even as I started to pull off my wet clothes, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Blue and Gray had said. They’d brought a lot of convicts to the prison, and apparently, they had enemies. Blue’s voice kept replaying in my ears. You know what they do to runners who go back in.
I let out an anguished groan as my desire to be free and my desire to protect them warred within me. Reed had encouraged me to be selfish, and I knew that made sense on some level.
But did it matter if I was free, if I hated myself? If it cost other people their freedom?
Goddess help me. I dragged my sodden t-shirt back over my head and traced my way back through the woods, my wet shoes squelching with every step.
I emerged onto the road just as their car started to pull away. I glimpsed Blue and Gray in the front seats, their faces tight with tension. They didn’t see me.
I could just melt back into the woods and disappear.
I hesitated, on the verge of doing just that.
Then I ran forward, waving my arms, stepping into the circle of light glowing from their headlights. Blue slammed on the brakes, angling the wheel, and the car slid to a stop just a few feet from me.
In a second, the two of them were both out of the car. Blue held his gun trained on me, but Gray was at my side in a few steps.
“Saoirse,” Gray said, a question in his voice. He held his hands out as if he was trying to calm a wild animal, before glancing at Blue. I wasn’t sure which one of us he was more worried about. “Why’d you come back?”
I licked my upper lip, reluctant to confess. “I heard what you said. About what happens to runners.”
Blue and Gray exchanged a glance.
“She’s too tender-hearted for prison,” Gray said, his voice soft.
I thought for a second they’d let me run, and my heart leapt. Maybe there was some kind of plan we could all come up with together, something that would let me have my freedom without costing theirs.
“So am I,” Blue deadpanned, even though it hardly seemed true.
He holstered his gun and in one smooth move, was on top of me. When he caught my wrists and yanked them behind me, his touch still sent a shiver of desire through my body, no matter how rough it was. Maybe it was so strong in part because of how he touched me.
“It’ll be alright,” Gray promised me, but then the cuffs were cold against my skin, and dread settled into my stomach.
It wasn’t going to be alright.
From the day I was born, a helpless girl to be married and mated at the convenience in my pack, it was never going to end alright.
In the car, Reed glanced at me skeptically, then shook his head.
There was silence in the car, the only sound the hum of the tires over the road, and then it began to rain, big drops that splattered the windshield and drummed against the roof. Every time Reed or I said something, we got nothing but silence in turn, or a brusque warning from Blue to shut up.
I’d thought they’d appreciate what I’d done, at least, but they didn’t. Gray turned the heat on full blast, though it did little to ease the tension of my muscles rippling with constant shivers from my cold, wet clothes.
After a while, Reed bumped his shoulder against mine. Just the heat of his body against mine was comforting.
“I bet you wish now you’d just let me kill them,” he said. “We’ll see how you feel about that soft heart of yours in the long run.”
I stared out the window, looking away from him.
The miles spun away under the wheels, bringing me closer and closer to the end of the road.
&
nbsp; Chapter Six
Gray was the one to get me out of the backseat. He opened my door and helped me out, his hand hovering near my shoulder but not touching me, as if he was keen not to hurt me. That seemed funny, given the circumstances.
I gazed around at the moonlit space around me. We were in a concrete loading dock, basically, a narrow stretch surrounded by high barbed wire fences. In front of me was a brick building. I glanced around frantically, my nostrils flaring as I tried to capture every scent, tried to figure out this place I found myself in.
Softly, in my ear, Gray murmured, “My real name is Jude.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him, my lips parting. I’d felt betrayed by him, and yet somehow, that he gave me his name seemed like…everything. Not just an acknowledgment of what I’d done, but a promise for the future. Like I’d see him again.
Or maybe I just desperately wanted some hope to cling to.
Grey gave me a wink, and then he nodded to the female guard who came toward me. They’d already dropped Reed off at another checkpoint.
“Good luck,” he said, his voice dry.
When Blue and Gray drove away, and Reed was gone to the men’s side somewhere, I felt alone.
The next several weeks passed in a monotonous blur that all blended together. Blue hadn’t lied when they said no one would hurt me here. I was in a cell block that was all thrown-away girls, kept far away from more hardened inmates and from any males.
The heat faded away without anyone near me to trigger it, the way those three maddening men in the car had teased my body with their very existence.
A week or so into my time there—time that stretched endlessly in front of me—I got a roommate, a fresh arrival with bruises across her face and spirit in her eyes anyway.
In this place where a lot of people already seemed to feel like they’d given up, she and I soon became fast friends, and some of my loneliness faded. We had nothing to do but read, to work out in the little gym we were given access to, to walk in our yard. From there, we could just glimpse the men’s yard in the distance, and I always wondered if Reed was out there somewhere, if one day I’d feel him looking back at me, even through the distance.
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