Chapter 2
Chapter two
Zack
A furious howl rumbles in my throat as I swing from side to side in the back of a van, searching for the threat.
My leash slaps my stomach, dragging faintly on my aching neck.
The full scent of a challenger alpha burns in my nose, making my veins sing in warning.
Not one alpha—an entire pack. With my mates so close, I had no choice but to act.
But the moment I responded, the guards with weapons took me down.
Pain shudders through me, clanging around my head with deafening pressure. I want to destroy them all, but White Mine said no killing.
Not even when my omega is at risk? I don’t know.
The vision of her crumpling on the steps, supported by White Mine and Cal-ee, burns behind my eyes.
Without her in my arms, I’d think she was created from my head.
But the raging feelings burning through my chest remind me she’s real.
I press one hand to my breast, breathing deep. She’s still here inside me; my Red.
I must return to Mine and White Mine. They need me. Belong to me.
I bury my hand deeper into my skin until it leaves marks, searching for two individual threads. They exist deep within, tangled and faint.
No matter how much I work through what happened, I can’t calm down with the scent of dangerous alphas clinging to my skin. My hands are trapped in front of my body, metal loops locked tight like collars around my wrists. A short metal chain dangles between them.
I open my trapped hand, noting a sticky liquid clinging to my fingers. Hesitantly, I lift my arms together and sniff. Foreign alpha scent, full of challenge, burns my nose. I roar in response and throw myself against the wall, desperate to run back to my omega. She’s in danger.
And yet, a strange whisper in my head sends a chill down my arms, making my hair rise. Why didn’t I find the alphas in the crowd? The owners of this unbearable scent weren’t there. It was clearly a challenge, so why didn’t anyone fight back when I accepted?
The cold shock steadies me.
This is like alphas holding objects in their hands and shaping voices into words. Or White Mine’s mysterious magic. It’s something I haven’t learned yet. I lift my hand close to my nose once more, forcing back the instinctive rage—I can do that now, if I try hard.
Enough walks on my leash taught me I don’t have to react wildly to everything. Mine got nervous if I raged. I stare at my stinking hand, listening for her voice. Shh. Stop, Zack. Sit. White Mine would offer me cake pieces that smelled like him.
Cautiously, I sit down on the padded bench seat, bracing myself on the wall. Traces of the scent cling to the metal wherever I touch. The alpha challenge is . . . transferable?
I lurch as the vehicle jerks to a halt, shadows replacing the light pouring through the back window slit. Not wide enough to shove my body through, or I’d already have done it.
The back doors swing open. My first instinct says to bolt through that opening and find my omega, but all I can see are brick walls in every direction.
And a closed doorway ahead. It’s like we’re inside an elevator big enough to fit a few cars, minus the bouncy motion.
Fighting energy quivers through my body, and I tense, holding my position as if an arena gate will slide open before me any second.
Men wearing identical dark blue-black clothing cluster in the opening, watching me warily.
“Come out,” an alpha orders, lacing his words with an oppressive tone designed to force my actions.
My lips peel back with a warning snarl. That kind of weak power doesn’t work on me, and I’m no longer a mindless fighter. “Why?” I grind out.
The man’s bushy eyebrows rise, and a nearby beta whistles. “Well, knock me over with a feather. A feral who can talk. That’s not what we heard.”
I keep my gaze locked on the alpha, who presents slightly more of a danger than anyone else in sight. “Why?” I ask again.
His hands linger near his belt. “Because you attacked the journalists.”
I don’t know what he means by journ-liss, but I know what attack means. I hunch my shoulders protectively. “They attacked me.”
He snorts. “How did anyone attack you?”
I roll his question over in my mind, studying him. I clench one fist, the oily residue slippery in my palm. Holding my hand out, I offer it to him. “With scent.”
The man scoffs. “You can’t attack with just a scent. If anything stinks around here, it’s you.”
I press my teeth together, sealing my lips around my argument. This alpha is not wise and clever like White Mine. He can’t understand me and explain things like my mates.
He puffs out his lips and takes a step closer. “Are you coming out, or do we have to force you again?”
A painful sensation floods through me. I want my pack. I want to understand. For a long time now, I haven’t been alone even once, but now I’m facing strangers and I don’t know what to do—or how long I can keep myself from silencing their infuriating presences.
“Wh-where we go?” I stutter, impulse and training colliding. Heat replaces the chill on my skin, and a trickle of sweat slicks my shoulder blades.
“Into the police cell,” the alpha tells me, pointing to the brick wall behind him.
I freeze. “Cell?” I jump to my feet. “Did I kill law?” I shake my head, more sweat running down my temples. That didn’t sound right. How did White Mine say it? “Break law?” I mutter, searching for words.
“Yes.” The man nods. “You attacked people.”
My heart sinks.
I did, but that’s what I need to do when faced with an alpha challenge.
A thin memory flits through my head of the time I chased the dog, and my mates made me sit on the sidewalk.
They didn’t like my reaction that day either.
I thump my palms into my forehead, making the thin metal chain rattle.
If only I could stop the pain whirling around inside. If only I knew what to do.
“I didn’t kill,” I say between quick breaths. The air inside this closed space feels too thick, and the scent on my fingers makes me rumble with suppressed fury.
The alpha shakes his head. “No, but you attacked. Punching, kicking, and biting are illegal too. Now stop stalling and get out.”
A brilliant light burns through my head.
I broke the law. Am I like the man who put his hands around White Mine’s throat?
I stumble forward and drop the few feet to the concrete floor, my shoes thumping loudly in the quiet.
Car fumes mingle in humid air loaded with body sweat.
I cough, clearing my scent-singed throat.
The man grabs my elbow, and I jerk around, snarling at the touch. His alpha presence rises and he reaches for a black object hanging on his belt. A weapon.
I stand as still as the concrete underfoot as the instincts that kept me alive for years war with what my pack taught me.
Then a fresh flare of pain wells up inside me.
Not pain; distress, and it belongs to my omega and my alpha mate.
If I break more laws, I might never find my way back to them.
Some old part inside me crumbles as I turn my back on the enemy, and my instincts, and walk toward the door.
If I broke the law, then I’ll go back in a cell.
That’s why White Mine was so worried about me in public.
Worried enough to put a collar and leash on me.
The long metal chain with a leather loop still dangles down my chest, swaying with each step.
I shouldn’t have pulled away, no matter how dangerous the threat seemed.
The bruising around my throat where I dragged out of White Mine’s grip is nothing compared to the ache in my chest.
A stranger behind me whispers, “I thought they said he was completely feral? Didn’t expect him to walk himself inside.”
New thoughts swirl in my brain. How do these men know anything about me?
I’ve never met them before. They aren’t the agents who lived in our house and watched me.
I never understood why those non-pack men lived in our den, but I think I know now.
They tried to stop me from attacking. I despised their presence, but so long as I behaved like a person and not a dog, they didn’t come near me.
These ideas and others collide as the men write my name onto paper, take my collar off, scan my fingertips, and lock me in a tiny cell.
Time blurs, and my only connection to the Outside comes from the warmth in my chest tying me to my pack.
The omega presence quietens, finally asleep after the storm of her emotions.
White Mine lingers, his profound grief chilling me to the bone. Of course he’s sad. I foolishly left him to take care of our omega alone when she needs us all.
But the invisible challenger I tried to fend off didn’t take them. Maybe I protected my pack after all. I hum under my breath, head aching again.
A disturbance shatters the quiet, and two men come surging through the door. “Stall him as long as possible so we can get the feral out of here,” one says darkly.
The familiar unpleasant scent that follows the voice has me rising to my feet with a snarl. I know this man.
An alpha with a stony gaze glares through the bars. “Hello again, Zazu. You should feel honored; I crossed the country to be here for this.”
I don’t know his name, but he’s from the prison where I was locked with my fighting brothers, and he chased me and Mine in the truck and put us in that other small cell. The other details are hazy because I was so focused on bonding my omega.
“Zack,” I growl out, vibrating with dislike.
He looks up from a board with a piece of paper on it. “What?”
“My name. Zack.”
He laughs, a harsh sound with none of my pack’s joy in it. “I don’t give a flying fuck what your name is, psycho. All I care about is getting you back in prison where you belong.” His pen squiggles across the page, and then he thrusts the board at the second alpha.
“Get the cuffs on him,” he orders.
I wasn’t planning to fight, but the guard’s menacing aura spooks me. I lash out, snarling. He slams me bodily into the wall, the other alpha locking metal around my wrists again.
A wet trickle runs down my forehead and into my eye, blinding me. With my face smashed against the wall, it’s hard to hear clearly, but I catch the word lawyer.
“He’s so damn persistent,” the prison guard snaps as they drag me from the cell.
Lawyer. Laws. Court. “Cal-ee?” I mutter, something sparking inside me.
White Mine said Cal-ee decided if people go to jail or not. Has he come to decide my fate? Even if he hates me for rejecting him, he knows Red needs me. I crane my head around, searching the room.
Voices rise in a shout behind a closed door. “Where is he?”
Recognition rushes through me. “Cal-ee!” I roar, thrashing again. He’s come. He’s only one room away.
“Shut up,” the guard hisses, dragging me in the opposite direction.
I dig my heels in and push him, protesting with fierce snarls. I must see Cal-ee. He’ll explain this situation to me, and he’ll tell me if my pack mates are okay.
The guard leans back, reaching for his belt. “Fuck this. Clear.”
From the corner of my eye, I register his hand connecting with a black object and arcing toward me.
It touches my skin, and sparkling white sugar blazes through my vision.
A shocking energy takes me captive, short-circuiting my nerves.
I jolt, saliva spilling through my frozen lips as I shake from the force.
For a few moments, nothing exists except the tremendous energy burning me to a crisp, lighting pain in every part of my body. And then it stops.
Just like the time I touched that burning fence.
I gasp for breath, gurgling through the foam in my throat as the familiar alpha snarls and loads me over his shoulder.
“Geez. Settle your britches, McKenna,” the other guard hisses, the words filtering slowly through my sputtering mind.
“I’ll settle when we’re gone,” he snaps back. “This alpha’s going back to prison, no matter what, and I won’t let some hotshot lawyer stop me this time.”
I reach instinctively toward the distant, garbled sound of the lawyer who could save me.
Metal links dangle from my hand again, but I can’t remember what they mean.
A door swings shut behind me with a thump, and then McKenna throws me into the back of a car with a metal mesh between the seats.
He looks down at me, far too many teeth showing in his grin, before slamming the door.