Chapter 2
Rex
I walk through the transformed warehouse doing my best not to smile.
I can hear the various shuffles and whispers of a pack of young wolves who should know better than to be doing any of this.
The commotion upstairs has already rippled through them.
Unspoken communication is a phenomenon in wolf packs.
They won’t know the details of what occurred, but they can certainly already feel the general outline.
All eyes are on me as I leave. The same creatures who barely roused when I walked in are on high alert as I leave. The gossip mill is winding up.
They’ll say that I was thrown out, and perhaps I should feel diminished by the interaction, but I saw the shakes at the end of those guns, and I saw the caliber of the boys holding them.
I could have quite easily dominated every single soul in that room in my wolf form.
I chose not to, because I did not meet my mate to immediately lose her to a shootout.
She is not going anywhere.
As I step out the front door, I see the gleam of a barrel on the building diagonal. I came here alone, but apparently the pack did not allow that. Fescue, in particular, did not allow that. I imagine he sent them after me within a minute of my leaving.
I smile to myself. Sometimes I give myself the illusion of being an independent man, but the truth is, I am as bound to this pack as I am to air. Nothing I do happens independently of them.
An alpha is never truly alone.
I’d bet they converged on the location just as I did, coming from myriad places to make it seem more natural for anyone keeping lookout. I don’t think the Runaway place has lookouts. I think this place has digital surveillance, and a few boys more interested in playing video games.
It does make the fact that I was just held up at gunpoint a little more spicy. Suffice to say, if even one of those boys had fired their guns, all of them would have been dropped immediately.
My men showed great restraint, probably because they’d just gotten done watching me bare Nicky’s ass and whip it with my belt.
Those little fuckers have no idea how collectively lucky they got today.
They were much more convincing when they were numbers on a spreadsheet and emails in an inbox.
There was an air of respectability to them.
Runaway packs form from time to time. They usually turn feral and have to be dealt with, but this lot are going to be handled differently.
I hold my chuckle until I get into my car, where the tinted windows hide my amusement from the world. There my smile broadens.
I know one thing for sure as I drive away from the warehouse. I am going to have that girl beneath me, impaled on my cock, writhing and begging and screaming my name before the next full moon.
* * *
“You’re smiling,” Fescue says when he greets me at the door. “I take it you’ve dealt with the matter and will be returning to the reserve?”
“No,” I say, letting him take my coat. “I’m going to be in the city for a while, I think.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. The reserve will be there when I am ready for it again.”
Fescue tries not to look pleased, and fails.
“You seem to be in an inordinately good mood, sir.”
“I met my mate today, Fescue. The pack will finally be able to stop harassing me for pups.”
He raises a brow. “Where is she?”
“Oh, she half-stabbed me, and then her pack pulled guns on me, so she’s back there, probably gloating to herself.”
“Ah. Is it not practice to claim one’s mate immediately?”
“In the middle of a nouveau corporate office in full view of her pack? I think I can do better than that.”
I smile to myself. The next time my mate and I face one another, things will go very differently.
“You sent guards after me,” I say.
“Yes,” he says plainly. He could deny it, but what would be the point of that.
“Very good,” I say. “Give them a bonus for not shooting any of those upstart little shits who were practically begging for a bullet.”
* * *
Nicky
It’s been thirty minutes since that infuriating man left my office, and I am unsettled. There are a lot of decisions yet to be made. Decisions like what the hell I’m going to do now that I know he’s out there.
Rex fucking Regent just came into my place of business and spanked me like I was, well, not like a little girl. He spanked me like a full-grown woman, a female he wanted to mate. He whipped my ass like he owned it, and I know that deep down he already thinks he does.
I’ve been humiliated. Everybody knows what happened to me. The building is full of a low-level hum of unrest that won’t be resolved until I resolve it, and I don’t know how the fuck to do that.
I’m still trying to think, which remains hard to do with my ass continuing to be so sensitive. I’m leaning over my desk, because sitting down would make for an uncomfortable experience. My mind tells me I can work through this if I just get enough information.
One of the first things I did once he left was get the footage pulled and downloaded to my personal cyberdeck.
I don’t use a laptop. Laptops are for people who like being surveilled by the corporate interests they bought them from.
My device is handmade, standalone, and fits inside a pink and purple briefcase that used to house outfits for dolls sometime in the nineties.
The keyboard is built into one half, and the screen is on the top, so when you open the case, you have access to everything.
When it’s closed, it looks like either a toy or some old school memorabilia.
I have stickers on the outside, including one in pink and yellow that says Girls Can Do Anything.
I’ve covered the ‘anything’ with another sticker that says Crimes.
I was right about how well the scene was captured by various security cameras in this room.
I have three angles on the whole encounter.
The way he walked in before I knew he was there…
he already had command of the room then.
That man is ten thousand percent old school alpha.
He’s not actually as old as all that, but there’s a good fifteen years between us, and it shows.
I can’t stop watching the footage. The way he grabs me, swings me around, puts me over my own desk.
It’s like he’s done it a thousand times before.
He’s so fucking strong and agile. I remember how it felt to be in his hands, to have all control taken from me.
It felt terrifying and relieving all at the same time.
It has been a very, very long time since anybody was big enough to handle me that way.
“Make sure this is deleted,” I say to Tom, who pulled it for me, and who has been hanging around the gaming machines since, trying not to get in my way even mentally.
He’s one of the technicians here. Pretty much everyone in our pack is proficient in one skill or another.
It’s how we make most of our money. It’s how we’re undermining Rex Regent’s many companies.
Tom’s tall, thin, and wearing a t-shirt that should have been changed two days ago. He smells like the inside of a sock drawer. Nice guy, but absolutely feral feet.
“Make sure nobody ever sees this. I’ll keep a copy on my deck, but I don’t want it on anything else.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he smiles. He hides the smile when I make eye contact.
“It wasn’t funny,” I insist.
“No. It wasn’t funny. It was…”
“Shut up, Tom,” I say.
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeats. He’s from the south and he has proper manners. I like that about him. A lot of my pack are rowdy. Hell, so am I.
I close the deck, snap the locks closed. It won’t open without my fingerprint, so I feel like it is safe.
I go downstairs where the pack are milling about the place. I can’t hide from them forever. I don’t want to hide from them at all.
There’s a hint of panic in the air, and for good reason. We just got an in-person visit from Rex Regent, and it didn’t exactly go well. We’re all aware of the capacity for reprisals. And I am damn sure he is not going to let any of what just happened go.
“We knew that the Regent pack would make their presence known here eventually,” I say. I just start talking. I don’t bother calling anyone to order. I am in charge here. I might not be a typical, traditional alpha, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to command a room.
“We’ve been in negotiations with them for a while. They want us to merge with them. They want to take all of our pack, everybody in it, everything we’ve worked for, and fold it into their conglomerate. When we founded this pack, we agreed to live free. Has that changed for anyone?”
There’s a brief pause as my wolves look around at one another.
“No!” The first shout is loud, and is joined by a resounding chorus not long after.
They get very rowdy about that refusal, just as I knew they would.
None of us are interested in being dominated.
We all know firsthand what it is to be discarded by a hierarchy that doesn’t see us as worth keeping, let alone protecting.
This group, the one we made for ourselves, is the only thing most of us trust.
“Rex Regent is out of his fucking mind if he thinks he can absorb us like any other company,” I say. “We’re built different. We value freedom. We think we’re all important, no matter who we are. And no matter what, nobody gets left behind.”
Another round of cheers and such go up. The mood is lifting, and that is a good thing for the pack.
Behind the mask I’m wearing, though, the truth is I have never been so scared in my fucking life.
I keep seeing the expression on Rex’s face when my security detail confronted him.
For a second, he thought about killing them all.
I don’t know why he decided not to, but I’m glad he showed restraint.
He is dangerous. To them, and to me. He is programmed with a system that says his desire for me equals ownership of me. He is definitely going to try to mate me sooner rather than later, and when that happens, I am not sure I am going to be able to resist.
I look for my guard. They haven’t gone far.
Maybe they’re not as slick as the Regent suits, who spent their afternoon crawling around on nearby roofs, so the lookouts tell me, but they’re good in their own way.
We’re adapted for our environment. Even when we seem stupid, sloppy, too young, too casual, there’s reasons for all of it.
Still, I’ve got them to put the guns away, and to put some decent clothes on. We’re going to have to make a move shortly, and I don’t want us looking like we just evacuated in the middle of the night. Their fashion was giving unexpected fire alarm.
“Don’t worry, boss,” Cal says. “We’ve got this.”
I cannot begin to state how much we do not got this, but being a good leader means not freaking out even when that’s clearly the best and maybe even only option.
“We just pulled weapons on Rex Regent,” I remind him.
“He was touching you.”
“He was,” I agree. “But we just started a hot war with him. Before this, it was all paperwork. Now there’s been weapons. He’s not going to just let that go.”
“Nah,” Sam grins. “He ran off with his tail between his legs. He isn’t shit. He’s old, and he’s used to being in charge. He’s gotten soft. But we’re here now and we’re not going to back down.”
Cal, Simon, and Sam spend the next twenty minutes hyping themselves up and talking shit about Regent. I get why they’re doing that. They walked in with guns and he walked out. They think they’ve intimidated him into retreat.
I saw something different in his eyes. I felt something else in his energy.
Nobody here frightens him. He didn’t give a damn about those guns.
The reason he didn’t react is because they weren’t really a threat.
If he’d wanted to, he could have shifted and probably taken the damage from those bullets without even noticing it.
“No,” I say eventually.
“No, what, boss?” The boys look at me.
“No, he’s not soft. He let us get away with that shit. He’s going to be back. I can guarantee it. We’re all staying somewhere else tonight. Hey. Laura. Do you still have a key to that loft?”
“I think so,” she says, lifting her head from her phone to tap her pocket.
“Good. Tell everyone we’re heading there.”
Laura is my secretary, though that’s a strong word for what she does, and kind of not really all that accurate.
She’s more like my 2IC. I trust her with absolutely everything.
Laura keeps things running smoothly, basically.
She knows more about the way things work here than I do.
She’s also got access to a very cool loft in a building downtown that used to be used as a content farm house.
It’s a second location that definitely doesn’t belong to Regent, and that’s why I want to go there. I need to escape him. I need to get myself to a place where he cannot find me no matter how hard he looks.
“Sleepover, everyone!” I call the command out, and we all start heading out.
“Don’t all just head straight there! They might be watching. Everyone go get a meal, go to the movies, go do some work. Make sure you’re not being followed. We’ll catch up with each other later!”