Chapter 15 Jaime
JAIME
Consciousness returned in slow, heavy waves.
At first, I thought I was still on the ground outside the relief area. Everything felt wrong enough for that to make sense.
My head throbbed. My body felt like it had been poured full of wet cement and left to harden.
I tried to open my eyes. They barely cooperated.
When I finally managed to force them apart, the world swam in and out of focus. The room was dim. The only steady light came from a single exposed bulb hanging over a desk in the far corner.
I tried to move. Pain flared immediately, sharp enough to cut through the fog. My shoulders burned. My wrists screamed. My leg—
My leg felt like it was on fire.
The memory returned in fragments: the water. Marion. The gun.
I tried to speak, to test my voice, but my jaw wouldn’t open more than a fraction before I felt rough fabric pulling tight across my mouth.
I forced myself to breathe slowly through my nose and take in my surroundings. Windows ran along one wall, but they’d been covered from the inside with some kind of dark material.
Not perfectly, though. Along one edge, a thin blade of daylight cut through.
It was morning already. How long had I been out?
I shifted again, more carefully this time, and nearly blacked out from the spike of pain in my shoulders. My arms were stretched above me, and when my vision steadied, I tipped my head back and caught the dull glint of metal around my wrists.
Handcuffs.
They were looped around a pipe overhead, forcing my arms up at an angle that made every muscle in my back strain. My legs were bound as well. When I tried to draw my knees in, something bit tight around my ankles.
“Finally up?”
The voice came from my right.
I turned my head slowly, squinting into the shadows. For a split second, panic flared. He was that close, barely a few feet away, and I hadn’t sensed him at all?
It was as if my wolf had been muffled, buried under something I couldn’t shake. All I noticed was the faint metallic tang in the air and the constant, gnawing burn in my leg. The silver bullet was still inside me.
Marion sat in a chair, leaning back as though this were a casual conversation instead of captivity. He reached up and flicked on another light above us.
The sudden brightness stabbed into my eyes. I squeezed them shut on instinct, then forced them open again.
My vision was still slightly blurred, but I could make him out now, watching me like I was a project he’d already started taking apart.
In his hands was something small and dark. It took me a moment to recognize he was holding my wallet.
He flipped it open, thumbing through it with idle curiosity.
“Thanks for this, by the way,” he said mildly.
He slid something free and held it up between two fingers. Even through the haze, I recognized the white card with the thin black stripe. My hotel key card.
He hummed in approval and slipped the card into his shirt pocket before returning to sift through my wallet, turning each item over as if expecting something more to fall out.
I kept my expression blank.
“Ah,” he murmured at last. “There we go.”
He drew out another card and angled it toward the light.
“So you are…” His eyes lifted briefly to mine, then dropped again. “Jaime Hale.”
He tilted his head. “Is that your real name?”
I refused to make a sound. After a few seconds, I gave him a single, tight nod.
“Good,” he said softly.
He glanced at the license again, tapping it lightly against his palm. “From Pecan Pines. That makes you pack, then.”
My jaw tightened against the gag.
Marion’s smile spread slowly, satisfied, as though I had confirmed a theory rather than answered a question.
He rose and walked back to the desk. I tracked him through the haze in my vision as he reached past it and tugged something loose from the wall.
That was when I saw it clearly.
The wall behind the desk was covered in newspaper clippings pinned in tight rows. Flyers. Printed screenshots. Some circled in red ink, others crowded with notes in the margins.
And there, repeated across several pages, was a symbol I recognized: a stylized claw mark slashed through a human silhouette.
I’d seen it online before, in forums, anonymous threads. The kind of groups that talked about “preserving humanity” and “containment measures.”
Marion plucked a clipping from the board and crossed back to me. He crouched, holding it inches from my face.
It was from a few months ago. An article that had run right after the town’s winter festival. The headline was optimistic, about strengthening community ties between Pecan Pines pack and the town’s human residents.
Marion tapped one of the figures in the photo.
“This one,” he said. “Who is he?”
My stomach tightened. Cooper.
He stood near the front of the image, relaxed but unmistakably in command. Even frozen on paper, there was something about him that drew the eye.
Marion tapped the picture again, harder this time. “You know him, don’t you? What is he to you?”
His gaze lifted to mine. “Enforcer?” He leaned closer. “Or is he your leader? Your alpha?”
He reached forward and dragged the gag down from my mouth.
Air scraped raw across my lips. I swallowed, testing my voice, but stayed silent.
“Go on,” Marion prompted lightly. “Is he your alpha?”
I hadn’t meant to react, but the word struck something instinctive and deep.
A growl tore out of me before I could stop it. My wolf surged up, fierce and protective. For the first time since waking, I felt him clearly, no longer distant.
Marion went still. As he straightened, something caught my attention. A faint red light blinked from the beam to my left. A camera.
My stomach dropped, and I clamped my mouth shut, but it was too late. Marion drove his knee into my wounded thigh.
Pain exploded through me, as if the bullet had been shoved deeper into bone, silver searing through muscle and nerve.
Gold filled my sight. Claws tore through my fingertips in a jagged, painful extension that should have been effortless. Instead, it felt like dragging myself through barbed wire. I jerked against the cuffs on instinct, but they didn’t budge.
The silver in my system weighed down my strength, turning what should have been easy into the impossible. My wolf raged uselessly beneath my skin. I bared my teeth at him anyway.
Marion recoiled with a sharp inhale, and for a split second, genuine fear flashed across his face.
“Whoa,” he breathed. Then he laughed. “Well. I think that proves enough.”
He went back to the board and pinned the article into place again. Distantly, I noticed that when he returned to his chair, he dragged it several feet farther away from me than before.
He sat down and pulled the gun from his waistband. He rested it casually against his thigh, but the barrel angled unmistakably in my direction.
“So,” he continued conversationally, “you and ‘John’—if that’s even his real name—must be enforcers or something, right?”
My pulse spiked. Chris.
He smiled, watching for a reaction.
“Has to be. I mean, John’s a pretty big guy. And you’re… well.” His gaze dropped to my hands, to the claws I kept extended despite the strain. His smile faltered slightly.
I forced my claws to remain out. It hurt. The silver fought every shift in my body, but I refused to let him see weakness.
“Anyway,” Marion went on, clearing his throat, “I heard that’s what they call the strongest ones in a pack. Enforcers. So it makes sense you two would be sent here.”
Under normal circumstances, provoking a man holding a gun less three feet away would have been a poor tactical decision. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered it.
But nothing about this was normal.
The silver was spreading fast. I could feel it in the way my limbs grew heavier with each passing minute, in the way the edges of my vision softened and blurred if I didn’t actively force them into focus.
If I was going to make a move, I would only get one. I wasn’t strong enough yet, so I needed information first.
I forced a rough, humorless chuckle. “For this?” I nodded faintly toward the wall of clippings.
Marion frowned slightly. “What?”
“This is barely a case,” I said, breathing carefully through the pain.
“We were sent here to check it out. Heard some shifters were getting nervous. Someone called in a favor. The pack alpha did it as a gesture of goodwill. They sent whoever was available. John and I just joined the pack a month ago. We’re barely even part of it.
” I kept my tone as dismissive as I could manage.
“This wasn’t high priority. In terms of actual threat levels, it barely registered. ”
I let a small beat pass before adding, “The pack wouldn’t waste an enforcer’s time on something like this.”
Marion shot to his feet so fast that his chair tipped backward with a crash. In two strides, he was in front of me, the gun raised and pressed hard against my temple.
“You’re lying. No one would have figured it out,” he snapped. “We covered everything. We threw off the trail. We—”
He cut himself off.
We. My mind latched onto the word immediately.
“You almost made me screw it up,” Marion continued, breath coming faster now.
Almost. So he hadn’t planned to escalate this yet. Good to know.
While he was focused on his anger, I slowly forced my claws to retract. It took too much effort to extend them.
Marion’s expression shifted abruptly. A strange light entered his eyes.
“No,” he murmured. “No, this is better actually.”
The barrel of the gun stayed pointed at my head as he stepped backward toward the table, never taking his eyes off me. He groped across its surface with his free hand.
My stomach dropped when I saw him pick up my phone.
He returned slowly, the gun settling back against my temple as he turned the device over in his other hand and switched it on.
It lit up and immediately began to ring.
Marion’s mouth curved. “Well. I think your husband is calling.”
John. The name flashed across the display.