16. Chapter 16
Jace was behind the wheel now. Rhys had moved to shotgun when they'd regrouped at the north county turnoff, phone already at his ear. Freya was in the back, the blond wig in her pocket, her laptop open on her knees.
The SUV came south on the two-lane at ninety.
Another Blackridge vehicle was somewhere behind them.
Jace could feel Theo through the phone in a way that was more faith than information at this distance.
The bond in his chest had its own compass and the compass wasn't pointing at the road anymore.
It was pointing west, at a pace that wasn't their SUV's and wasn't slowing.
The phone in the console rang.
Jace punched the button before the tone had finished.
“Where is she?”
“Thornwood took her. Ambush at the pharmacy lot. Kira and Brennan are giving chase, trying to find somebody to make talk.”
Jace closed his eyes for one second against the steering wheel with the SUV doing ninety and didn't close his eyes for two.
He wanted to kill every person in a two-hundred-mile radius who had ever thought of laying a hand on his mate, and the want was sitting behind his teeth in a shape he was going to have to keep there while he got her back.
He opened his eyes.
“They're headed west. Bond's pulling me that direction. Call Theo. I want every available fighter headed west. Now.”
A beat of dead air on the other end. Declan's voice had been running the sentences of a ranked wolf reporting to his alpha up until now. Now there was a hesitation in it. The hesitation of a wolf who was carrying a piece of pack-business and didn't know where his alpha wanted him to be.
“I've got Tyler's medicine.”
“Get it to him. Fast. Then get up with the group. We're getting Maren back. Now.”
“Understood.”
Jace's foot was already back on the gas before Rhys lowered the phone.
“Alpha. Something else.”
“Go.”
“Kira got a text right before. Unknown number. Said it's a trap.”
Jace went through the math of that in a single breath.
Somebody on the inside had known about the pharmacy stop in enough detail to warn off the team.
That was either Thornwood leaking an inside line to keep Kira alive for reasons he couldn't guess, or somebody in Blackridge had known the route and talked.
His voice went cold.
“We have a mole.”
“Or Thornwood does.”
“Kira?”
“I don't think so. But—” Declan's voice did the thing it did when Declan was covering a shrug. “I'll look.”
Jace's reply was guttural. His wolf dangerously close to the surface.
“Find out.”
“Alpha.”
The line stayed open a half-second, the way Declan's lines always stayed open a half-second when a ranked wolf wasn't sure he'd been released, and then it closed.
Jace punched the phone's off button so hard the plastic cracked under his thumb.
Thornwood moved on his mate.
There had been an uneasy truce between Blackridge and Thornwood as long as he could remember. Garrett always probing the southern timber line, always angling for council pressure, always pushing at the edges but never crossing a real line.
Until today.
Today Thornwood had put a tide of men on his mate and two of his ranked on a gravel lot in Cedar Junction and handed her to Brock Bastian.
Every man who had played a part in touching her was dead. Jace didn't have to decide it. The sentence was already in his chest.
“Rhys.”
“Alpha.”
“Find out where they'd take her that's west. Every abandoned warehouse, transfer bay, and off-grid property within fifty miles. I want a short list in five minutes.”
Rhys nodded once from the shotgun seat and picked up his phone to make calls.
“Freya.”
“Alpha.”
“Everything we don't already know about Kira. Bring it to me before we pull up.”
“On it.”
Freya's fingers had already started on the keys.
In the back seat the air went quiet. The ranked wolves knew the alpha's wolf was close to the surface and the man running him was still deciding if he'd let it come all the way up.
The bond in his chest pulled hard and steady. It was pointing him off the two-lane into the county grid. He didn't need a map to know which exit.
He took the next county turnoff heading west.
Three minutes later Rhys tipped his phone toward his shoulder without lowering it.
“Two candidates. Abandoned warehouse on county fifteen, three miles west of town.
Closed refrigerated-goods warehouse off the spur road six miles further out.
Fifteen has the loading bay that would take a truck transport and it's the closer match to your bond-compass. Six-mile's on deck if we're wrong.”
“Fifteen.”
“Alpha.”
Freya didn't lift her eyes from the laptop.
“Kira. Contracted trainer, not pack. Two referrals from Eli's Cascadia contacts.
Lone wolf since her pack folded four years ago.
No record in any Thornwood database we've bought. One Seattle arrest file from three years back, bar fight, charges dropped. Bank accounts clean. She reads clean from here.”
“Keep looking.”
“Alpha.”
The warehouse came up ahead on the county fifteen like a gray box set down on a gravel turnout. Two black SUVs at the front. A third backing up to the loading dock at the side, tail lights on.
Jace was peeling off his shirt and his jeans as his boots hit the frozen grass by the road.
His wolf was already pushing up through him in the way his wolf had only pushed twice before in his life.
Once in the alpha challenge with his father, and once barely two weeks ago, when a Thornwood wolf had lifted a hand to Maren in a parking lot.
He let it come.
The shift was fast. The wolf came through him with thirty years of restraint behind it and hit the ground already at a sprint.
He covered the block in nine seconds.
The bay door of the warehouse was a steel roll-up. He hit it at the center of his shoulder at a full run with the weight of a 150-pound dark-honey wolf and the door folded inward with the scream of metal giving.
Inside was a concrete floor. A pillar. Her.
And between him and her were three men who didn't have time to turn all the way around.
Ten steps from the pillar to the loading dock. Cliff was walking at her pace. He wasn't hurrying. He didn't need to.
Her wrists were still zip-tied. She had her feet under her. Her boots were still on.
Halfway to the dock, on the concrete, where the roll-up had been left part-way up when the driver came in, there was a section of galvanized pipe leaning against the wall about the length of her forearm.
Somebody had used it to brace something once and had forgotten it.
It was the kind of thing that lived at the edges of working buildings because nobody looked at the edges of working buildings.
She had been looking at pipes like that ever since she had been running. Tire iron in her bag. Bat in the corner of her apartment. The world gave you what it gave you and you learned to see what you could make of it.
She started toward it without changing the shape of her walk.
Cliff wasn't looking at her wrists. His grip was on her upper arm. The man at the door was watching it.
She stopped six inches from the pipe and the stop was small enough Cliff didn't process it as a stop until his weight was going forward one quarter pace.
That was the quarter pace she'd been trained for.
She went low the way Jace had shown her to go low in the yard on Day 10. Weight under her center, knees bent, head down, a hip turn that took her out from under Cliff's grip on her arm.
The bond between her ribs went hot for half a second. Jace, closer than he had been but not in the building yet. Running. She had to give him another minute.
Cliff's grip came off her.
She brought her cuffed hands up over her head as she went under his grip and slammed them down to her hip with everything her shoulders had. The zip tie cracked once and gave. Her wrists came apart at her sides.
She hooked the pipe with her boot, kicked it up into the air, caught it in both hands.
And came around.
Came around with the pipe in both hands and everything she had left in her shoulders. Caught Cliff at the temple with the end of it in a one-in-a-thousand swing that landed clean. Cliff turned his head a half-beat late because he'd been going for his own knife instead of her.
Cliff dropped.
He dropped straight down. Knees. Hip. Shoulder. Temple on the concrete.
Two more.
The one at the man-door came at her. He'd been ten feet further than Cliff had been and ten feet was ten feet.
He reached her in the time it took her to get the pipe back up to the level of her chest. He came in at her middle.
She headbutted him on the way in. Nose not forehead, between the eyebrows or at the nose.
Jace's training-yard voice ran through her head, a voice she would have laughed for if she'd had the air.
She caught the man on the nose and felt the bone give under her forehead the way she'd felt Jace's forehead not give.
The man roared into his palms and went two steps back.
The driver was behind her.
She turned to find him already coming. He was bigger than Cliff and he wasn't slow. He got an arm around her from behind before she'd gotten the pipe back up, and the other arm around her chest to pin her arms to her sides, and his weight lifted her onto her toes.
The pipe was still with her. She didn't have the angle to use it. Would have used it anyway. Would have worked a wrist.
Didn't have to.
The sound was the sound a sheet of steel made when somebody put a freight train through it. Shriek and tear. The man's arms went so tight around her that her shoulder did a thing she would feel for a week.
The driver turned her toward the door without meaning to.
A wolf came through where the door had been.
She had seen Jace in wolf form once, in a clearing in the sun, four days in. That wolf had been the wolf of a man showing his mate what he was. He moved slowly and held himself motionless so she could look.