Chapter 6 Six
Six
Caine
Asshole One: five-eight, maybe five-nine. Crooked nose, at least two breaks. Shit-brown eyes. Old scars pitting his face like potholes. Idiotic neck tattoo, a cartoon bird flipping the bird.
Asshole Two: closer to five-ten. Bald head, shaved. A shallow trough of a scar running down the length of one cheek. Missing half his left ring finger.
Asshole Three: not a hair taller than five-four but a sharp shot with a pistol. He was the one who’d clipped Brooks on the way out the back. Curly blond hair, shaggy, held back with dark beanie. Voice like a fucking buzzsaw.
Six assholes in all. I stared out the back window of the van, memorizing every one of their fucking faces. Every faded scar, every cawing laugh, every missing tooth and oily hairstyle and shitty tattoo. Because one day, I’d be out of these chains, and I was gonna kill them.
My feet and hands were cuffed together, looped through a chain that was bolted to the floor of the van.
On the bench across from me, so was Lin.
He had bruises over his face and body, and dried blood from cuts and scrapes across his torso.
I probably had more than a few of my own.
My left eye, at least, was swollen almost completely shut.
“He got out,” Lin muttered again. Dark strands of his straight black hair fell over his eyes, those cast downward. “That’s why we can’t feel him.”
My heart stuttered at the reminder that Brooks was too far away to feel in the bond. He had to be too far away. The car was gone. They’d clipped him, but he’d made it out. And made it to Brea and Taryn, and they were on their way somewhere, anywhere. They were safe.
That was all that mattered.
I nodded, sending what support I could back to Lin in the bond. “Yeah,” I replied. “He’s just too far.”
We’d been locked in this van for days. They had to be sweeping the area, looking for Taryn.
They wouldn’t find her. The cave I’d sent them to was almost six miles away and fucking near impossible to find if you didn’t know it was there.
So long as the women stayed out of sight, kept their scents under control, they’d be fine until Brooks found them and got them out.
And once these asshats realized they couldn’t find her, they’d either kill us, or fuck up enough so we could get free. Then I’d kill every one of them for even thinking of taking my omega.
For now, I’d observe. Memorize. Plan. Fantasize.
I was so fucking tired.
I leaned my head against the side of the van and shut my eyes.
I thought about Taryn then. How her eyes shone, the way the corners crinkled when she was trying not to grin.
How smooth her scent got when she was excited.
The look on her face the first time she sank down on my cock.
The way my goddamn world stopped spinning and my vision narrowed to her.
I’d enjoyed sex before. Didn’t crave it often, but still, whenever the desire to fuck arose—sporadic as it was—it had been enjoyable enough.
With Brooks and Lin, even more so. I never felt the earth-shattering passion they shared between them, but it had been enough to feel the echoes of it through the bond.
The closeness with them was what I craved more than physical pleasure.
Making love to Taryn, tending her through her heat…my world hadn’t shattered. Its entire orbit had shifted. It spun around Taryn. We all did. Planets around her, our sun.
Maybe I dozed. I could practically feel her hair between my fingers. I could almost smell her thick toffee and rich cream scent. Her warmth under my hand and around my cock.
“No.”
It was a whisper, a plea. A real voice, not a dreamed one. My eyes snapped open to see Lin, face fallen, staring out the back window. I followed his gaze.
Asshole Number Four was turning the corner, Taryn’s arm clutched in one hand. She was so pale, so much smaller than when we’d last seen her. Mud and bits of blood were smeared over her entire body. Hair a mess. T-shirt filthy.
He raised his hand and the guys all let out a cheer. They’d been reconvening here over the last few hours. We knew why now.
She stumbled along after him, barely keeping her feet as he sauntered closer to our van. My inner alpha, already agitated, leapt to the surface. With a snarl, I threw myself toward the back doors, my body jolted back by the chains. Crimson bled in from the edges of my vision.
“Motherfuckers!” I shouted as I pulled at my chains hard enough to rock the van. “Fucking end you!”
Through the window, Taryn ground to a halt, fighting against Asshole Number Four. “Caine?” she called out, trying to pull toward our van.
“Hey!” Lin was up now, closer to the back and able to bang on the window. “Taryn!”
“Lin! Caine!” she yelled out as her captor dragged her to the van next to ours. “Brea!” She struggled against the beta thug, who tossed her into the back of the nearby van.
I couldn’t calm. I couldn’t sit. Even with Taryn out of sight, likely locked up the same way we were in the neighboring van.
I’d break every goddamn finger that touched her. Before sawing them off. Shove them down the bastards' throats. Make them choke.
“Caine!” Lin yelled. “Caine, breathe!”
Couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t see.
Omega in trouble.
Omega hurt. Omega hungry. Omega nearby and I wasn’t holding her.
“Caine, fuck, fight it!”
Yes, fight. Fight the assholes who touched my omega.
Wrists ached from pulling. Ankles too. Didn’t care. Would pull until I was free.
“Stop!”
Strong bark. I froze. Stopped pulling. Stopped yelling. Stopped breathing. Heart couldn’t stop beating though. Beat so fast. Like a sprinting wolf. Sprinting for omega.
“Sit.”
My legs bent. Cold metal under my ass. Eye throbbing. Hands shaking.
Can’t stop. Can’t sit. Omega needs me.
“Breathe.”
I inhaled against my will, and my nostrils burned with the smell of acidic blackberry and rancid honey. Lin. My head alpha. My best friend and packmate.
Fuck. Lin needed Human Caine.
With everything I had, I pushed my alpha down. Panting, sweating, I met Lin’s eye, only for the vision of him to blur as tears rose to mine. “They can’t have her,” I said, my words thick.
“They won’t,” he replied, steel in his voice. Ice in his eyes.
But they did. Our omega was at the mercy of half a dozen guns-for-hire, on her way to being at the mercy of a corrupt research corporation who’d use her up and discard her without a care.
Just the thought had my alpha nudging within me for control. I grunted, wrestling him down.
“She didn’t call Brooks’ name,” Lin whispered. “She called Brea’s, but not Brooks’.”
My hands shook in the shackles before me as I fought to suppress the feral alpha inside. Did that mean Brooks was safe, but Brea wasn’t?
What the fuck had happened out there the last three days?
The passenger door opened, and a hand came through the slot separating the cargo—us—from the driver. It let loose a canister leaking gray smoke. It retreated and the door shut again.
Fuck, my eyes and throat were burning in just seconds. We tried our best to cover our mouths and noses, but we stood no chance.
Red faded from my vision, replaced with black. As I slumped in my seat, I made sure to call each of the four most important faces to mind.
Strong Brea. Smiling Brooks. Serene Lin. My sweet Taryn.
We were gonna make it out. We were gonna be pack. And when we did, I would skewer every damn person who’d tried to stop us.
I woke before Lin. No telling how long we’d been out, but the moving road outside the back windows was black, so hours at least. Maybe longer.
My head throbbed like a motherfucker, somehow at once feeling fuzzy and agonizingly sharp behind my eyes. My stomach roiled, but no telling if that was from the knockout gas or the twists and turns as we drove on.
And on.
And on.
A ribbon of pink glowed just over the back horizon when we finally entered a city. Not Farendale. New Gilden, maybe? Or Serenity Falls? Hard to tell in the dark outskirts.
It was the weirdest sensation, strapped in the back of the windowless van, swaying with the vehicle’s motion, mine and my pack’s lives hanging in the balance—all the while, even the few other cars we passed at this hour reminded me that everyone else was just…
living theirs. Someone’s brakes squealed as we slowed and stopped.
Engines revved right as we got moving again.
The muffled sounds of a radio escaped through someone's open window.
Maybe the person in the next car over was on their way to a job they hated, cranking up the music to give them the strength to go in at all.
Or maybe they were excited, on their way to the airport to go on a trip they’d been planning for ages.
Whatever they were doing, they were basically right next to me—six feet away, some sheets of metal and glass separating us.
How many times had I moved through the world, blissfully unaware that six feet away from me, someone’s life was in shambles?
Lin stirred as we made our way to an underground parking entrance. We paused a moment before pulling through. A security gate lowered behind us as we pulled into the sparsely occupied lot. We went down a level, two levels. No openings to the outside, a dank gray cavern.
Finally, we pulled to a stop and the engine cut. Lin groaned as he sat up, cradling his head, and I moved as close to the back window as I could, but I couldn’t see anything. Our captors rounded the back of the van, standing and blocking the view.
In the small openings around their heads, I could see more people approaching. One of those figures had a deep voice, muffled through the doors but clear otherwise. “You were expected days ago.”
“Yeah, well,” one of our captors said, and I heard the click of another set of van doors opening, “the little rabbit was a tough catch.”
Taryn.
I wrestled my alpha down even as I searched the air for a hint of her scent. Was she scared? Hurt?
Dead?
No. Wouldn’t be dead. The lab wouldn’t pay for a dead omega.
My stomach threatened to revolt again.
“Her heat’s passed,” the dispassionate voice said. “My men will see you paid the appropriate amount.”
“Thing is, we caught a few more rabbits we thought you may be interested in.”
Then our van’s doors opened wide, and her bitter scent punched me in the face. I lunged for the opening, desperate to get to her, but my shackles held me back again.
Before us stood an older beta male, thin, with gray hair and a melted-looking frown. He wore a white lab coat and held a clipboard as he looked over the tops of his thick glasses at us. His eyes flicked to our captor. “And why would you think that?”
“Gotta think three rabbits is better than one,” Asshole Number One piped up. “Plus, you know an omega will do anything for her alphas. Gotta figure that opens up new…ah…options for you.”
My blood wasn’t hot. It wasn’t boiling. It was pure molten lava beneath my skin.
White Coat walked to the right side, out of my range of vision. “She only has one bond bite,” he said. The thought of him touching her, looking at Brea’s mark on her neck, had me growling. “Only one of them is her alpha, at most.”
They continued to talk and negotiate back and forth, like the three of us weren’t sitting here, with beating hearts and working minds. Like we were cuts of meat in a market stall.
“Breathe, Caine,” Lin whispered soft enough only I could hear it. But I couldn’t obey.
This was everything we’d been running from. Everything we’d been fighting against. And it was right here. If we entered this building—if Taryn entered this building—we’d never come out.
World went red.