Annabella
Chapter twenty-nine
My eyes did a sweep of the clearing. Eight enforcers in a loose semicircle.
And three of them I knew. Parker, still wearing that stupid gold trophy ring from school.
Melissa, who’d grown into her looks and wore her enforcer leathers like she’d been born in them.
She probably didn’t even remember holding my shoulders down.
Probably hadn’t thought about it once. Matt, reeking of cigarettes even from here.
All three of them had watched and laughed when Lucas snapped my arm.
Ten years older, and they were still standing behind Lucas Fallow, still following orders.
Tara, Lucas’ mate, stepped forward, her manicured hand resting on Lucas’s arm.
She’d aged well; the same button nose, the same calculating eyes, but sharper now.
“We heard you were in the Kennel. That must have been so traumatic for you. All those terrible criminals.”
“Cut the shit, Tara.” I took a step forward, positioning myself between my family and the Ashridge wolves. My wolf pressed against my skin, eager. Ready. We’d spent too many years running from these assholes. “You want something. Say it.”
Behind me, I heard Ellie’s small voice: “Bella?”
“It’s okay, monkey,” I said without turning around. “Stay with Aunt Jo.”
Aunt Jo was already moving, pulling Uncle Fred and Mom back through the doorway.
Lucas’s smile widened. “Still so mouthy. I thought prison might have taught you some manners. Some respect.” He tilted his head, studying me. “But I suppose you can’t teach an abomination to be anything other than what it is.”
“Sure you can,” Sam said as he stepped up beside me. “Took you from garden-variety bully to Alpha bully. That’s growth. Not much, but hey—baby steps.”
Lucas’s face darkened, and his nostrils flared, as his attention shifted past me, and I felt the exact moment his wolf registered Sam as a threat; a flicker of surprise, quickly smothered, as instinct overrode ego.
“And who the fuck is he?”
“The friend,” Sam said pleasantly.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“And yet here we are.”
Ten wolves. Two of us. And I was running on four hours of sleep, a body Thomas hadn’t cleared for anything beyond walking, and the kind of cold fury that came from learning your whole life had been a lie.
Not ideal odds. But I’d worked with worse.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “We’re leaving. All of us. You’re going to step aside.”
Lucas laughed. “That’s adorable. You show up on my territory, no notice, no respect, and you think you get to make demands?
” His eyes swept past me to the cabin. “You owe me, Annabella. Four years of protection payments, and the thirty percent increase we discussed was before you showed up here with company.”
“I’m not paying you another cent.”
His expression hardened. “Then your family stays. Under my terms.”
Sam moved. Not dramatically, just a rebalancing of weight that put him between Lucas’s line of sight and the porch steps. His body was loose, controlled. But I could feel it through the bond, a low, steady thrum of readiness that said his wolf was very close to the surface and wanted this fight.
Lucas’s eyes tracked the movement. His enforcers adjusted too, squaring up, spreading wider, sizing Sam up the way wolves assessed an unknown threat. They didn’t know what they were looking at yet. They would.
“This isn’t your business,” Lucas said to Sam, an edge creeping into his voice.
“Actually it is. I’m Sam Shaw, and Annabella’s my mate.”
The clearing went quiet. Lucas stared at Sam like he’d announced the sky was green. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“Your mate.” His eyes flicked to me, then back to Sam. “Her. The half-breed.” He actually laughed. “You’re telling me a Shaw—from Three Rivers—mated with… you?”
Something shifted in Sam’s body. Nothing visible.
Nothing I could point to. But every wolf in that clearing felt it: the temperature dropping, the air thinning.
The bond flooded with something dark and absolute, and I knew then that either Sam or Lucas wasn’t going to make it out of this clearing alive.
“Oh, this is priceless.” Tara’s laugh was that same tinkling sound that had once made me feel small and stupid.
It just sounded hollow now. Performative.
“The witch-bitch thinks she’s found a real wolf to play house with.
How long before he figures out what everyone else already knows?
That you’re nothing, Annabella. You were nothing when you were crawling around in the dirt picking up pieces of your school project, nothing when you left here, tail between your legs, and you’re nothing now. ”
Fuck them. Fuck all of them.
“You’ve tolerated my family these past few years because I lined your greedy pockets,” I said. “I kept Lucas’s pockets lined, and you looked the other way. But I’m done paying. Done begging. Done pretending either of you has any power over me.”
Lucas took a step forward. “You forget where you are, half-breed. This is my territory. My Pack. My rules.”
“No,” I said simply.
Lucas’s expression darkened. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. No.” Something fierce and wild was building in my chest. It wasn’t panic, it wasn’t fear, but power.
The kind that had been suppressed for so long it had turned corrosive.
The kind that finally, finally had somewhere to go.
“We’re leaving. All of us. And you’re going to let us walk away. ”
“She told me about you, you know.” Sam looked almost relaxed as he took another step forward.
“Broke a thirteen-year-old girl’s arm while your friends held her down.
Now, I’ve taken down rogue Alphas, feral wolves, Council targets, but a grown-ass man who gets off on snapping a kid’s bones?
” He shook his head slowly. “That’s not an Alpha.
That’s just a coward with a Pack to hide behind. ”
Lucas had gone very still. Sam had just called him a coward in front of his own Pack. For an Alpha, there was no coming back from that. Not with words.
“Take them down,” Lucas ordered. “Now.”
Parker moved first. Predictable—he’d always been the one who charged in without thinking, all bulk and ego. He came at Sam, leading with that trophy ring like a knuckleduster, his weight already committed to the swing.
Sam dropped beneath it, a controlled fall that turned into a sweep, his leg scything Parker’s ankles out from under him.
Parker’s momentum did the rest. He went airborne for a full second before the porch railing caught him across the spine.
Wood splintered. He crumpled into the wreckage and stayed down, wheezing.
Two enforcers came at me from the left, fast, coordinated, one high and one low.
Classic Pack pincer. I’d drilled against the same formation with Duke a hundred times.
I threw up a barrier—silver-green light shooting out from my palms—and felt the cost immediately.
A hot spike behind my eyes, a tremor running through my forearms. Thomas’s voice in my head: “Two weeks minimum before I clear you for anything beyond walking, eating, and sleeping.”
Sorry, Thomas.
The barrier held, but barely. Not the wall of force I wanted.
More like a hard shove that sent them stumbling back three steps instead of ten.
The high one recovered fast. Melissa. She came in low this time, shifting her center of gravity the way wolves did when they went for the hamstrings, that instinctive crouch before a lunge.
I let her commit to it. Waited until she was mid-spring, weight forward, committed, and then pivoted.
Her own speed carried her past me, and I caught her with a sharp elbow between the shoulder blades as she went by.
She hit the dirt face-first, skidding through pine needles, and I stamped down on the back of her knee before she could roll.
She howled and grabbed for my ankle. I twisted free and put distance between us.
Pain lanced up my side. The stab wounds Thomas had debrided, not fully healed, splitting open with every hard movement. I shoved it down. Pain could happen later.
Matt circled wide, trying to get behind me. Reeking of cigarettes and adrenaline. He was bigger than Melissa, slower, but his movements took on that jerky, muscular quality of a wolf fighting a Shift. He feinted left, lunged right.
I jammed my forearm under his chin and drove upward, snapping his head back. Then hooked my foot behind his ankle and shoved. He went down heavy, cracking the back of his skull against an exposed tree root with a sound that made my teeth ache.
He didn’t get up.
I spun to find Sam.
He’d pulled four of them into the open ground beyond the porch.
No wasted motion, no flash. Just Sam, and four men who were about to learn what it meant to be in his way.
The first one swung at him. Sam caught the arm, stepped through, and hyperextended the elbow over his own shoulder.
The joint gave with a wet pop. He screamed, but Sam was already moving, using his staggering body as a shield against the next enforcer, who’d tried to flank him.
The enforcer pulled up short to avoid his own Packmate, and Sam exploded through the gap, a spinning heel kick that connected with his temple and sent him pinwheeling into the dirt.
Two more rushed him simultaneously, one from each side.
Sam pivoted toward the one on his left—the more committed charge—and drove a palm strike into his sternum that stopped him dead.
Before the wolf had finished folding, Sam had already reversed, catching the second attacker’s wrist and wrenching him forward, off-balance, straight into a knee that connected with his ribs.
Something cracked. The first wolf tried to rise and Sam put him back down with a sharp kick to the jaw that snapped his head sideways.
Neither moved after that.
One of the enforcers—Davis, I think—scrambled to his feet, looked at Sam, looked at his Packmates scattered across the clearing, and bolted for the tree-line.
Smart.
That left Lucas and Tara.