Chapter Three
~ Radulf ~
I glanced around to make sure no one was watching and then darted across the open ground between me and the vehicle. When I reached it, I squatted down and flicked out my claws.
I silently snickered as I stuck all five claws into one of the back tires. The hiss at the sudden loss of air was instant and very gratifying.
I punctured the front tire, too, before darting around the side of the house to where the kitchen door was located. As I approached the door, I could hear raucous laughter coming from inside the house.
It wasn't Ajag.
When I reached the backdoor, I moved to one side and peeked through the kitchen window. Due to the wall separating the kitchen from the rest of the house, I couldn't see anything, but I smelled at least three strange smells.
And Sy was right. They were human.
That made things a little easier in the fact that I was stronger and could fight them if needed. It also made things harder because I couldn't shift. I'd have to fight them in my two-legged form.
I was angry enough to do it.
How dare someone come onto the ranch, scare Sy, and hurt Ajag. This was our home. I might have told Ze'ev that I didn't intend to stick around for long, but for now, this was my home, too.
And that length of time I intended to stick around might be a little longer than I'd originally planned. The ranch had suddenly become a much more interesting.
I squeezed the door handle and slowly turned it before pushing the door open. The voices grew louder, but they didn't grow closer. I stepped inside and then pulled the door closed just as slowly as I had opened it.
Once the door was closed, I quickly moved over to the wall next to the fridge and the exit out of the kitchen. I angled my head just a little so I could better hear what the intruders were saying, and when I did, rage blew through me like a wildfire.
"How much longer is he going to be?" one man asked. "I want my turn."
"Just hold your horses," a different man said. "Bill will be done when he's done."
"He's taking fucking forever."
Someone laughed.
"Yeah, I bet the little bitch is a fighter."
I clenched my hands, wanting to wrap them around the necks of both men.
When they stopped talking, I peeked around the corner to see what they were doing. I frowned when I saw both men standing in front of Ze'ev and Jackson's bedroom door, their ears pressed to the hard wood door.
"Why isn't he making any noise? Do you think Bill knocked him out?"
"Naw, Bill likes them to fight."
I knew as soon as I started across the living room, they would see me. I also knew that Ze'ev and Lu were coming in from different directions. I just didn't think I had time to wait. Whatever was going on with Ajag in that bedroom, it wasn't good.
And I had a pretty good idea what it was.
It only enraged me more.
I took a deep breath and then raced around the corner and across the living room as fast as I could go, and that was pretty damn fast. I was a dire wolf after all.
I reached the two men just as I heard a loud crash from the other side of the door. They didn't even have time to bring up their fists to defend themselves before I was on them.
I punched the first guy. He hadn't even hit the floor before I punched the other guy and watched him fall. They weren't out, but they were feeling it.
I didn't have time to make sure they were unconscious. I had to get through that door and get to Ajag.
I turned and rammed my shoulder and the side of my body into the hard wooden door. If it wasn't for the lock breaking and the door flying open, I probably would have broken something.
When I stepped inside, it took a mere second to take in the horrendous scene before me. Ajag was pressed up against the headboard, clutching his torn shirt to his bruised and beaten body.
And he had bruises all over. His face, his chest, his arms.
They were everywhere.
I thought he had looked bad when we had originally found him, and he had been on death's door, but this was even worse. It came with a vivid flash of fear in his dull blue eyes.
I growled as I turned to the only one that could have been responsible for that fear, the man pinned to the floor under Ze'ev's knee. My hands clenched again as I took a step forward.
I didn't care if he was human and I was a wolf.
I was going to kill him.
"Rad, see to Ajag," Ze'ev ordered.
I'd only been his beta for like a second, and yet everything within me compelled me to follow that order, and not just simply because my alpha had given it.
I needed to make sure Ajag was okay as much as I needed to kill the man that had attacked him.
When I turned back to the bed and took a step, I hesitated. Ajag was staring at the man under Ze'ev's knee, but I wasn't sure he was seeing anything. He seemed to be kind of staring off into space.
I approached him slowly. "Ajag?"
Nothing.
I called out his name a little louder. This time, Ajag slowly turned to look at me. When he didn't freak out, I moved closer and then sat down on the edge of the bed.
"Hey, how are you?"
"I'm fine."
I would have believed that if there had been any inflection in his voice at all, but there was nothing. After what he had just gone through, there should have been something.
When I saw him shiver, I reached down and grabbed the throw blanket draped over the end of the bed. I stood, shook the blanket out, and then carefully wrapped it around Ajag.
His shirt was torn to shreds, but his pants were still in place. That was something at least. It wasn't going to take the horror of what had happened to him away, but it could have been much worse.
"Can I sit with you?"
Ajag nodded.
Instead of just sitting down next to Ajag, I reached over and picked him up, scooted against the headboard, and then settled him on my lap. I pulled the edges of the throw blanket around him and then pressed his head down to my chest.
My anger hadn't abated simply because the guy that had attacked him was down on the floor, but my wolf was more interested in making sure Ajag was okay, and so was I.
I wanted the sour scent saturating his skin gone and the only way to do that was to make sure Ajag felt safe.
This was all I could think of.
"Sy is safe," I said in a low tone. "He's with Jackson and Gunner. He did exactly what you told him to and he ran and hid. Once I found him, I alerted Ze'ev and we came to get you." I swallowed tightly. "I'm sorry we were late."
This never should have happened to him. He was supposed to be safe here on the ranch. We had promised him he would be safe here.
We had failed epically.
"Rad."
I glanced up to see Ze'ev standing beside the bed. My eyes shot to the man he'd had pinned to the floor a few moments before, but Lu was leading the guy out of the room.
I hadn't even realized Lu was there until that moment.
"I need to talk to Ajag and find out what happened." Ze'ev grimaced as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. "We're going to have to call the authorities because these idiots are human. We can't take care of them our way."
I curled my upper lip back when I growled. Our way was much simpler. If you broke shifter law, you paid the consequences based on your crime. It was as simple as that.
Human law let people off on technicalities.
"Why can't we just call the shifter council?" I asked. "Ajag is a shifter after all."
Made sense to me.
"We can, but then I would have to tell them about Ajag and Sy, and I don't want to do that."
For some reason I didn't understand, I agreed with Ze'ev.
"We could just kill them," I suggested eagerly.
"We could, but then people might come looking for them, and we really can't have that. It would just be easier to call the human authorities and have these idiots thrown in jail."
I snorted with disgust. "I should have killed them when I came into the house."
Would have made my life easier.
"I need to talk to Ajag."
I frowned, confused. "So, talk to him."
Ze'ev was standing right there, not ten feet away.
"I'd like to, but your claws are out and you have Ajag wrapped up like a burrito. I'm worried I might get my throat ripped out if I get too close."
Oh.
"Well, don't get too close then."
I concentrated on retracting my claws before lifting my hand and pulling back the edge of the blanket so I could see Ajag's face. His eyes were closed, but I knew he was awake. The grip he had on my shirt had just tightened.
"Hey, you okay to talk to Ze'ev?"
Ajag's eyelids fluttered open. He stared up at me for the longest moment before asking, "Will you stay with me?"
"I won't move from your side." My smile was strained, but there. That was something at least. "Promise."
"Okay."
I helped Ajag sit up, but kept my arms wrapped around him. Besides the fact that he didn't seem to mind, I doubted there was a force on earth that could have made me let him go right now.
Ze'ev didn't come closer except to sit on the end of the bed. His gaze was very earnest as he stared at Ajag. "Lu has the three men that attacked you tied up and under guard out in the other room. They won't hurt you ever again, Ajag, but I need to know what happened. What did they do?"
"Sy and I were leaving," Ajag began, "but the front door crashed in before we reached it and those three guys came in. I told Sy to run and hide and started throwing things at them."
My jaw clenched when Ajag started talking, but I wasn't sure if it was from the knowledge he had been trying to leave with Sy or from what had happened to him.
I had known he planned to run at the first opportunity, but actually hearing that he was leaving made me want to chain the man down so he couldn't step foot outside this house.
Didn't he understand how dangerous it was out in the world and how much safer he was here on the ranch? It was a great place for Sy to grow up, too, especially since he was surrounded by other wolves, strong wolves.
"One of them, that man you had pinned to the floor, dragged me in here and started...started..."
"I get it," Ze'ev said. "Did they say anything?"
Ajag's brow furrowed as if he was trying to remember. "They kept calling me Jackson. I think they thought I was him."
Ze'ev stiffened. "They thought you were Jackson?"
Ajag nodded.
"You two don't even look alike."
This was true. Ajag was much sexier. Well, in my opinion at least. His soulful cobalt blue eyes and that stunning sunlight blond hair?
Simply gorgeous.
"I think they were only supposed to rough me...I mean rough Jackson up. When they broke in, they started laughing and breaking things. One of them grabbed me and started to hit me, but that other guy, the one that dragged me in here, he said not to hit me too hard because he had plans for me."
The furrow on Ajag's face deepened, pulling his eyebrows down over his eyes and leaving them in the shadows. "He said something about what he had planned to do to me would stop me once and for all and it would get them a bonus." Ajag glanced up at Ze'ev. "Do you know what he was talking about?"
"Maybe," Ze'ev admitted. "Considering the men that attacked you were human, it's reasonable to assume whoever hired them was also human. If that's the case, and with what you said about them calling you Jackson, I suspect I might know who that is."
My eyes narrowed as my rage went up a notch. "Who?"
Ze'ev snorted. "Who do you think?"
I knew a few humans, but only three that would even know who Jackson was. One was his cousin Harrison, but he was under the watchful eye of his mate Khal, the beta of Ze'ev's birth pack. I doubted Khal would let him do something like this.
That left Jackson's other two cousins. "Emma and William."
Ze'ev tapped the end of his nose. "Bingo."
"Any way to prove that?"
"Not at the moment, but I'll get word to Khal and ask him to talk to Harrison. Maybe he'll know. I'll also tell the authorities when they come out to arrest these guys. If they want to avoid doing time behind bars for the rest of their lives, maybe one of them will talk."
Every muscle in my body locked up when Ajag whimpered and turned to bury his face in my chest. "They need to die for what they did. That's the wolf way."
"Except they are not wolves," Ze'ev said. "That means we have to let the human law handle this."
I was not a fan of this plan.