Chapter 6 #2
Lena’s concern rushed through our connection. She was watching. Of course she was watching. I sent her what reassurance I could and focused on the wolf trying to kill me.
We traded blows in a rhythm as old as the pack itself, two wolves who had once hunted together now hunting each other. He was strong. I was faster. He had experience. I had desperation. Lena was inside that cabin, and if I fell, nothing stood between her and whoever was left standing.
I would not fall.
His hand closed around my throat and he slammed me against a tree. The impact knocked the breath from me. Bark scraped my back raw. His fingers tightened, cutting off my breath, and his face twisted with rage and grief both.
“Vor,” he said. The word was both title and accusation. “You were Vor. Max sends his regards.”
His grip tightened. Black spots crowded my vision. Lena’s terror peaked, her fear sharp as a blade. She was watching through the cabin window, screaming my name without sound.
Something snapped inside me. Not bone. Something older. Deeper.
I got my feet between us and kicked. He flew backward, hit the ground hard, and I was on him before he could rise. The wolf surged forward, and I let it. Let the beast take my hands, my teeth, my rage. Let it do what needed to be done.
My fist connected with his face. Once. Twice.
His cheekbone cracked under my knuckles.
He tried to block, to roll, to escape. I did not let him.
My hands found his throat, and I squeezed until his eyes bulged, until his heels drummed against the dirt, until the wet crunch of cartilage told me I had crushed his windpipe.
Still I did not stop.
I grabbed his head and twisted. The snap was loud in the morning air. Final. Absolute. His body went limp beneath me, and I stayed there, straddling his corpse, my chest heaving, my hands slick with his blood.
The wrongness of it should have settled into my bones like poison. This should not be. Pack did not kill pack.
But savage satisfaction was all that remained. He had come for my mate. He had died for it. Any wolf who came after him would die the same way.
Movement at the cabin. Lena in the doorway, her face pale, her eyes fixed on me. On the blood. On what I had become.
I waited for her horror. Her disgust. The moment she finally saw the monster and turned away.
Instead, she nodded once. A small motion. An acknowledgment. An acceptance.
She had seen what I was capable of. And she was still here.
Viktor stood over the younger wolf’s body, his chest heaving, blood dripping from a gash above his eye. The kill had been quick. Merciful, even. The young one had not suffered.
Dmitri was still fighting Alexei. They circled each other, both bleeding, both determined. Alexei was the better fighter, but Dmitri was fueled by loyalty that bordered on fanaticism. He would not let our enemies live.
As I turned to help, I saw Alexei’s blade catch the light of the rising sun.
It caught more than light.
The blade sank into Dmitri’s side, and Dmitri’s roar of pain echoed through the clearing.
But he did not fall. Instead, he grabbed Alexei’s wrist with his free hand, his grip iron tight despite the blood pouring from his wound.
He yanked the blade free of his own flesh, the sound wet and terrible, and drove it into Alexei’s throat before Alexei could react.
They collapsed together, Dmitri on top, Alexei’s blood spreading dark across the forest floor.
The clearing went quiet. Only the rasp of heavy breathing and the distant call of a bird that did not know what had happened below.
I moved to Dmitri’s side and helped him up. The wound in his side was deep, blood flowing freely, soaking through his shirt. But he was standing. Still alive. We all were. Three enforcers sent to execute us, and we had survived. But it had been close. Too close.
“Inside,” Viktor said. “Now.”
We half-carried Dmitri into the cabin. Lena was already moving, the first aid kit open on the table, her hands steady as she pulled out gauze and antiseptic.
I laid Dmitri on the narrow bunk and stepped back to let her work, watching her fingers press white cotton against the wound, her face set with determination rather than fear.
Blood soaked through the gauze almost immediately. She grabbed more.
The woman from three days ago would have frozen. The woman before me acted without fear.
I looked down at my hands. Sokolov’s blood crusted my knuckles, dark and drying. I could still feel the crunch of his windpipe, the snap of his neck. I should wash them. Should scrub away the evidence of what I had done.
Lena caught my eye as she worked. Her gaze dropped to my hands, took in the blood, the split knuckles, the violence written there. I waited for the flinch. The revulsion.
She reached out and took my hand in hers.
Her fingers were warm against my bloodied skin. She held my gaze as she did it, deliberate, unflinching. The message carried without words: I saw. I know. I’m still here.
Then she returned her attention to Dmitri, and I stood there with her acceptance burning through me like absolution I had not earned.
Viktor pulled me aside.
“This location was clean.” His voice was low, meant only for me. “I swept it myself last month. No one followed us here. No one knew.”
“Someone knew.”
“That’s not possible.” But doubt shadowed his eyes even as he said it. We had both been trained to trust evidence over belief, and the evidence was lying dead outside. “We need to understand how.”
I looked at the bodies we had dragged inside, at Dmitri bleeding on the bunk, at Lena working with hands that should be managing hotel bookings instead of treating combat wounds. Someone had known. Someone had told Max exactly where to find us. The question was who, and how.
“They tracked us somehow,” Viktor said. “We need to sweep everything.”
The next hour passed in methodical silence.
We searched the cabin first, running our hands along every surface, checking for devices too small to see.
Nothing. We checked our weapons, our gear, the clothes we had brought.
Nothing. We checked the vehicle hidden under camouflage netting behind the cabin. Nothing.
Viktor went outside to search the perimeter.
Lena finished bandaging Dmitri’s wound, her movements quiet and efficient.
She worked with quiet efficiency, but her exhaustion bled over into my senses.
She had been up for hours before the attack.
Now she was playing field medic while the smell of blood hung thick in the air.
“He’ll live,” she said quietly. “It missed the organs. But he needs to rest, and we don’t have time for that.”
“We’ll make time.”
She looked at me, her understanding clear. We could not stay. But moving Dmitri too soon could kill him.
Viktor returned with something in his hand. A small device, no larger than a button, its surface dark and unreflective.
His eyes moved to Lena. “Found it sewn into the lining of your bag.”
Her face went pale. Her shock hit me first, then horror, then a cold fury that matched my own.
“Michael.” Her voice was flat. “When he had me in that cabin.”
The memory hit her, and I caught glimpses of it through our connection. Darkness. Disorientation. The sound of someone moving around her, going through her things while she could not move. His hands on her belongings. His breath in the close air.
“I heard him.” Her hands had started to shake. “I couldn’t open my eyes, but I heard him going through my bag. I thought he was just looking. I didn’t think he would…”
She stopped. Took a breath. When she spoke again, her voice was steady.
“He has been tracking us since he had me.”
The implications crashed through my mind. Every safe house we had used, every location we had fled to, every move we had made since her kidnapping. Michael had known it all. Had watched it all. And Michael had passed that information to someone with the resources to act on it.
“Michael can’t find us himself,” Viktor said. “No resources. No contacts in our world. But Max has been looking for us since the kill order.”
The alliance became clear then. An alliance that should have been impossible. The human stalker and the wolf Pakhan, bound together by their mutual targets.
“Michael gives Max our location,” I said. “Max sends enforcers.”
“In exchange for what?” Lena asked.
Viktor’s mouth thinned. “Michael wants you. Max wants Raphael dead. Their interests align.”
“Michael feeds them information, and they do his hunting for him.” Lena’s voice was cold.
“Until now.” I took the tracker from Viktor. Held it up to the light. Such a small thing to cause so much damage. “We just cut their connection.”
I crushed it under my heel. Ground the pieces into the cabin floor until nothing remained but fragments and dust. Michael would lose our signal the moment he checked. He would know we had found it. He would know we were coming for him.
Good. Let him be afraid for once.
“The bunker,” Viktor said. “Underground. No signal in or out. If we move now, we can be there before nightfall.”
“Dmitri can’t—”
“I can.” Dmitri’s voice was rough with pain but determined. He pushed himself to sitting despite Lena’s protest, his hand pressed against the bandage at his side. Blood had already seeped through. “I’ve had worse. We move.”
We packed in minutes, taking only what we needed. Lena gathered her things, her hands pausing over the bag that had betrayed us before she abandoned it entirely. She would carry nothing that Michael had touched.
Outside, the sun had fully risen. The three bodies lay where we had left them, and nothing stirred in me at the sight.
Not satisfaction. Not remorse. Just the grim knowledge that there would be more before this was over.
Max would send more wolves. Michael would find another way to get to Lena.
The alliance between them meant we faced enemies on two fronts.
But they had made a mistake. They had revealed themselves. And now we knew who we were fighting.
Lena stood beside me. Her determination burned through our connection, her refusal to be hunted any longer, her fury steady and sure.
Somewhere in the chaos of the past few days, she had become dangerous.
Not wolf-dangerous, but the kind of dangerous that came from having nothing left to lose and everything left to fight for.
I reached for her hand. Her fingers laced through mine.
“We hunt now,” I said.
She looked up at me, the wolf she had become shining in her eyes. Not literally, but in every way that mattered. The prey had grown teeth.
“Yes,” she said. “We do.”
We shifted and Lena climbed onto my back, heading for the underground bunker that would swallow our signal and hide us from the eyes that had been watching. Michael would lose us. Max would send more enforcers. The game had changed.
But so had we.