12. Ben
TWELVE
BEN
The Never-ending Cycle of Revenge
It all happened too fast. One moment the server was handing Giselle’s purse to me and thanking me for the generous tip, the next my car was speeding away down the street.
What the fuck?
I stood there for maybe half a second, so shocked by the sight that I didn’t know what to do. Of all the things I had expected on my date, a kidnapping situation was not on that list.
But once reality came crashing in and I was able to move, I took off at full speed, ignoring the server’s shouted question about whether she needed to call the cops.
Even though I could move incredibly fast in my human form, it had nothing on my wolf body, and my first instinct was to burst into my bestial half. But I couldn’t do that in a busy street.
I raced to the closest spot where I could shift—an alley down the road. Every single cell in my body felt like it was being attacked as my skin rapidly split and waves of fur and muscle rushed out of the gaps.
Shifting wasn’t a necessarily agonizing process like it was so often portrayed in books and movies, but it wasn’t a breeze either. I’d streamlined a process for it, but nothing about the situation was part of my usual process. My date being kidnapped wasn’t usually a thing.
My human date.
I fell down onto all fours as my limbs extended and reversed their joints.
Cracking, snapping, and the sloughing of flesh filled the space of the alley until, finally, I was fully in my wolf form.
Once I was completely shifted, I recognized a faint scent in the direction my car had taken off in.
In fact, that recognition struck me like a lightning bolt.
Because the person that scent belonged to was supposed to be dead .
Was… was it possible that he was somehow still alive?
No.
It couldn’t be.
Although we shifters had an uncanny healing ability and could recover from stuff many other species could never hope to, I’d ripped out his heart and crushed it in my clawed hand, half-wolf and half-man, as I’d stood over his bleeding body. A wolf couldn’t heal from that .
Yet as impossible as it was supposed to be, I was smelling him. It was a faint scent, barely there, but it called back to an era of my life I thought was so firmly behind me that I knew I wouldn’t—no, couldn’t —lose it.
And so I chased it. I chased it as pure rage flowed through my body. My wolf was livid . It didn’t understand the intricacies of a ghost somehow returning and haunting me when I was trying to move on, but it did know that an enemy was back and threatening someone he was supposed to be protecting.
I wasn’t going to fail again. They had already taken too much from me. I wasn’t about to let them destroy the only connection I’d made since Natalie.
Giselle didn’t deserve what was happening.
It was hard to feel the intense guilt through the rage, as the more primal side of me was at the forefront of our shared mind, but it was still there.
After everything Giselle had gone through, this was the last thing that should have happened to her.
She was still recovering, and I’d put her in danger. How selfish could I be?
I hoped she was okay. I didn’t know if Graves’ disease could have acute complications in situations of high stress, but if I had to put money on it, I’d bet it did. And that thought sent a whirlwind of images through my mind—her passing out, gasping for air, growing cold and gray on the ground.
Fuck, I had to run faster.
I pushed myself harder. My muscles complained, some even snapped only to rapidly heal.
I would pay for that over the next few days, but none of that mattered as long as Giselle was safe.
I didn’t even care if anybody saw my giant wolf running through alleys, across yards, and even main roads.
I was sure there would be news stories and perhaps even a lot of memes about a possible escape from the zoo or a wild animal on the loose, but that was for human Ben to worry about in the morning.
At the moment, all that mattered was getting to Giselle.
Until I got to the highway.
I wondered if I should run right up the overpass. But as much as my wolf screamed that we had to take the most direct path possible, what seemed like a short path sometimes ended up taking more time.
I could run along the shoulder, but there were still quite a few risks to that: being hit by a semi-truck, causing accidents with other vehicles, or being overwhelmed by the fumes from so many vehicles.
Already, the stench of gasoline, diesel, and rubber across the ground was enough to make it quite difficult to keep a hold of the scent I was tracking.
If it weren’t for the fact that it was a scent I’d grown up with, a scent that had been burned so deep into my senses that it followed me occasionally into nightmares, I would have lost it entirely.
With a great deal of effort, I overrode my instincts and darted to the side, cutting into the narrow strip of trees that lined the busy highway.
It wasn’t a straight shot, but at least I had more cover as I progressed from the edge of the city through the suburbs to the more wooded lands beyond.
We were still a ways out from my pack’s ancestral lands, but I was familiar with the area.
Although we’d been careful not to travel too much on other shifters’ territory, there was a space between ours and the city that belonged to no one—too close to the humans, too densely populated for any of us to feel comfortable claiming it as ours.
Would the scent lead me back there? At any other time, that thought might have given me pause, but I couldn’t afford to slow my pace.
As I raced ahead, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly where I was rushing to.
After all, if the scent was from my past, why wouldn’t it lead me back to the place I had once been so proud of and fiercely protective of?
I had sold all of it but our burial grounds, because I couldn’t live there with the echoes of everything I had once held dear.
Focus. Run. The only thing you have to do is run. No thinking.
Right. I was on a mission. Everything else could wait, even the trauma and panic that battled to take center stage of my thoughts.
I didn’t know when the transition happened, but the pheromone trail I was following was no longer the ghost of an echo. It was stronger, tinged with the acrid brimstone of pure hatred. If it was indeed who I thought it was, well, that made sense, didn’t it?
All of this had to be a sign that going on a date had been wrong.
That I shouldn’t be moving on. I was an alpha, and surely my punishment for failing my pack was to live my life in service to my children, but remain alone otherwise.
I didn’t deserve community. Or maybe, somehow, I was still locked in a night terror and I’d never really escaped.
Honestly, I would be fine with that, because it would mean Giselle was okay and not involved in the awful mess that was my life.
Let’s hope it’s that one.
Nose burning, muscles screaming, and my body using all the speed it could possibly muster, I finally picked up on another scent.
Giselle.
But that wasn’t all. There was a strange sound. At first, I didn’t know what it was. It was so rapid and uneven that it sounded like someone shaking a bunch of heavy rocks around in an empty box. But then I recognized it as Giselle’s heartbeat.
That could not be good.
Although I hadn’t exactly been buddy-buddy with humans for most of my life, I had interacted with them enough to have a general idea of what their heartbeat was supposed to sound like.
I was familiar with how they were at rest, how they were when they worked a labor-intensive job—so many of the gigs I worked to keep myself occupied were just that—how they accelerated when they lied, when they were attracted to someone, when they were high, even when they were drunk.
But I had never, and I truly meant never, heard a heartbeat that rapid and violent before.
And Giselle was so slight, too. It was hard not to imagine her heart trying to break through her ribcage. God, I had really fucked up, hadn’t I? Surely, no one could survive something like that for long, and Giselle wasn’t in the best of health.
She just had to hold on a little longer. Just another minute, then I would spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
Not that she’d ever want to see me again.
It didn’t even cross my mind that I was about to expose the existence of our species to her. I could now hear two heartbeats, and the smell of the beta that had betrayed me filled the air.
After what felt like an eternity, I burst through the trees and was greeted by none other than the wolf form of one Charles French, the man who had led the attack that wiped out my pack.
I snarled, but that word wasn’t enough to describe the sound I made. It was wild. It was full of so much pain and rage that it physically hurt. It was vengeance that I thought I had already wrought.
“ You! ” was all I managed to get out in shifter-speak, the way many of our kind communicated in animal form. It wasn’t always language, often consisting of more abstract ideas and flashes of images, but I knew without a doubt that any wolf within a two-mile radius heard the exclamation.
“Benjamin Poynter! ” the other wolf howled back, and it was like someone had dunked a bucket of ice water over my head.
Because that wasn’t the voice of my beta.