Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
MIKAEL
I t took a full three days to track Kasher to a house just off the coast. They hit Nice, then went north, to a chateau we were able to view when Nadya hacked into a satellite. The images were grainy and difficult to see. Even with our vision, and her ability to enhance the shots, I couldn’t tell one person from another. The only thing we got was a figure on all fours with glowing yellow eyes.
An Alpha. An Alpha crawling like a beast.
It was almost too much for me, but I tucked my rage deep inside me to use when I got there and got that monster alone.
“From what I can tell,” Nadya said as I was preparing my second leg of the journey, “they’ve settled in for the long haul. I’ve got a tracker on Alexei, so I’ll be able to tell if he’s on the move, but I don’t think he’s going to be leaving the States with his current bid for president.”
I grit my teeth and nodded. “If I can get my hands on his father, that’s good enough.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, but she held back whatever she wanted to say. “The plane is going to get you about an hour out, and I have a car waiting for you. There’s money and supplies in the back, but you’ll be better off if you don’t stay anywhere public. There’s been some rising anti-Wolf sentiment in France, and we can’t take the risk of you getting detained by some uppity hotel manager.”
It was nothing less than I expected. “I planned to rough it.”
“Kor sent me a message saying you’ll need to lie low until he can secure transport back for you and Danyal. When you get him out, head here,” she pushed a small sheet of paper toward me, and I glanced down to see coordinates written in light pencil. “They’re caves. They’re not the most comfortable, and it’ll be difficult for him to heal if he’s in the same state his brother was in, but they were used during the rebellion about six years ago. The Wolves there have been keeping a lot of them stocked for…well…”
“Days like this?” I asked.
Her eyes turned a little sad and frustrated. “I’m so tired of this, Mikael.”
“I know.” I wanted to reach for her and offer her physical comfort—and maybe take some for myself, but I didn’t want to cross that line or tempt her to cross it. “I’ll do everything in my power to help end this. And I don’t know what Kor has up his sleeve, but I know it’s big.”
Nadya drummed her nails on the table, then let out a sigh. “I’ll be heading for Corland in about two weeks if I’m lucky enough to get this all decrypted. And if not…”
“Go anyway,” Mikael said firmly. “Information or not, we need you safe.”
Nadya stared at me a long while, then offered the ghost of a grin. “Kor said the same thing.”
“I know it’s not ideal. Nowhere is right now, but we’re better together.” I pushed up from the table and headed toward the room. “I owe you for this, by the way.”
“Repay me by making him happy. By being able to find happiness after everything we lost,” she said, and the sincerity in her voice almost brought me to my knees.
I left in the dead of night. I shifted, then Nadya strapped my bag to my back, and I ran for miles, until my strength had nearly depleted. But eventually I found the tiny airfield and the plane waiting for me. It would make a single stop before our destination, and I had no other choice but to trust Nadya’s contact to get me where I needed to go.
I shifted behind an old, dilapidated bathroom, then dressed in the clothes she left before creeping toward the plane. There was a man—human, which startled me—waiting by one of the wheels, a cigarette pinched between his teeth. He was massive—as large as any Alpha I had ever known—with broad shoulders and huge hands. He eyed me carefully, then crushed the burning embers of his smoke under his boot and took a few steps forward.
“Do you speak Spanish?” he asked me in his mother tongue.
I let out a small breath and couldn’t help but smile. My mother, whose entire family had come from Spain, spoke it with me every single day she was alive, and it was something like a visceral relief to use it. “I do.”
He nodded, then gestured for me to step back, and he grabbed a set of short rolling stairs and shoved them toward the door. I was surprised at his strength and at the way he held himself. He was almost like a Wolf, though he had no outward indication of being anything other than human.
But there was something off about him—the way he moved gave off a strength he shouldn’t possess. I took a deep inhale, but his scent gave away nothing. I saw him look over his shoulder though, and I swore he had a knowing grin on his face as he wrenched the door open and headed inside.
The plane was small, but I could tell it was powerful. It had a small seating area for passengers, and he popped open a small bin just as the lights flickered on. They reflected in his rich black hair, which was tied in a messy knot at the back of his head, and he looked at me with his mahogany eyes.
“Do you know how to fly?”
I laughed. “I know how to do a lot of things, but Wolves weren’t exactly welcomed in flight school. We barely managed to put together a land army strong enough to defend ourselves.”
He hummed softly but didn’t argue as I stowed my bag. “You can sit up front with me unless you need some sleep.”
I probably did, but there was no way that was happening now. Eventually my exhaustion would catch up with me, but it was easier for me to lean into the adrenaline rush and slide into the passenger seat as he got going.
Flying really was new for me. Wolves had been banned from it for so long, and it wasn’t in our nature to be above the ground, so my nerves were shot. We strapped in, and I put on a headset, and it felt like no time at all before we’d rocketed into the air. My heart threatened to beat out of my chest, and I closed my eyes, not brave enough to look though the curved window.
I could hear him laughing in the mic, but I allowed the mocking moment. For all that I had been a soldier with blood on my hands and a kill list longer than I could ever repent for, I felt like a young pup too afraid to leave his mother’s knee.
I took a deeper breath, then glanced over at him, and he winked before removing his headset and dropping it onto a hook. I followed suit, then straightened my shoulders and rolled them back. “Do you get used to it?”
He shrugged. “I do, but I’m in the air more than I’m on the ground. How many times have you been up?”
“Once. Right now,” I answered. “I don’t think any Wolves managed to get an effective air force off the ground…so to speak.”
His eyes widened a fraction, then he let out a sigh and cursed thoroughly with words my mother most definitely didn’t use with me. “My family had a policy not to get involved with the war, but I never agreed with it. It shouldn’t have happened.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that from humans—the sympathizers who wanted to do more but never put in the effort. I don’t know if they thought it would make me feel any better, but it never did. Still, I wasn’t about to say anything to the man keeping us in the air and alive.
“Nadya never gave me your name,” I said. “Was that on purpose?”
He looked at me out of the side of his eye, then nodded. “She didn’t give me yours either, güey. It’s probably safer. But if it helps, you can call me Eduardo.”
“Which isn’t even close to your real name, is it?” I asked, and he laughed. Sitting back, I rolled my eyes toward the roof of the plane and let out a breath. “Mikael. And that is my name, but there’s no point in hiding it. What I’m about to do—it won’t matter who knows.”
“Nadya made that very clear. I’m impressed.”
“By being reckless and stupid?” I shot back.
He lifted a brow. “If that’s what you want to call it, I won’t argue. But I think you and I know it’s a lot more than that.”
I didn’t bother arguing with him. In most ways, he was right—even if I was too. We would have won the war—in the end—by our recklessness and abandon. By our willingness to throw ourselves head-first into battle and sacrifice our last breath for victory.
This was no different, other than I was throwing myself on the proverbial sword for a single Wolf instead of many.
“Is he your mate?” Eduardo asked after a few more minutes of silence.
I leaned back and stared at the clouds ahead—like a sea of white blocking the thousands of miles below us. “I think so. I was mated before, but he died back before the First War. He was an early casualty.”
“An Omega?”
I glanced at him carefully. He must have known a lot about how Wolves existed if he was close enough for Nadya to trust him, but it was still uncomfortable to discuss this with a human as though he understood what it was like. “He was smart,” I said instead of answering him. “He was beautiful and sharp in all the right ways. He would have done so many good things.”
“And then the humans came,” he said quietly, almost with pain, which made me wonder how his own people had hurt him. He turned his dark eyes on me. “I won’t be able to stay and help you. You know that, right?”
I laughed, unable to help myself. “I wasn’t expecting it, and I don’t need it. I have one objective, and that’s to get my Omega out of whatever shithole they’re keeping him in. The rest—it’ll fall when it falls.”
It sounded cruel even to my ears, condemning whoever else Kasher had with him to their continued fate. But Danyal was my mission, and I meant to succeed with both of us alive and on our way to safety before the week was out.
He gave me a nod, then turned back to the skyline. “You should get some sleep, Mikael. We have a long way to go, and your journey is just beginning.”