Fated to the Scarred Wolf (The Hunted Omegas #5)

Prologue

Lucien

One day prior to full moon

Dominik Varga was a man of unchecked rage.

The thought was dulled by his fist slamming into my face for what had to have been the hundredth time.

Petró Varga’s shit stain of a cousin had yanked me from the street a few weeks ago and chained me up in his little hidey-hole to question me about Pack Blackwater’s sins.

Hundredth? Maybe thousandth. Although, to give the man credit, he was creative.

He didn’t waste all his punches on my face.

My entire body ached and throbbed, the aftereffects of his diligent attentions when I refused to give him anything useful.

My face was the worst, though, second only to my bloodied hands and feet, which were missing many fingernails and toenails, and all those tiny bones you didn’t think about until they didn’t work anymore because they were broken.

My wolf did his best to heal me between rounds of abuse, but with no medical care and little to no food or water, my energy stores were sorely depleted. Wounds that should have taken minutes to heal were taking hours, days.

I would give my left kidney for a real bed, a plate of hot food, and a shower right now.

But as the fucker in front of me drew a wicked, curved knife from his bag of demented tricks, I knew that was a distant fantasy. He had me squirreled away in a dirt-walled pit, chained in the darkness.

I didn’t know if I was under the Hungarian pack mansion or just in the woods somewhere, because I’d woken up chained underground to the concrete floor, and a metal hook overhead where he looped my handcuffs when he was ready for his next round of torture.

No one but Dominik came here, which meant I had his undivided attention.

I’d tried to shift and escape the first night, but the bastard had used spelled silver cuffs, and any attempts to call my wolf resulted in blackout pain.

I’d tried to grit my teeth and do it anyway after about a week when I realized the pack wasn’t going to find me any time soon, but I’d woken up hours later with intense burns under the cuffs, still fully human.

As the endless days wore on, my chances for escape and revenge grew slimmer, and those revenge fantasies had started to fade along with my energy. Dominik’s torture had become significantly more brutal the more time wore on, and I’d come to realize something.

Dominik Varga was going to kill me.

I was never escaping this pit. He knew it, I knew it, and yet still the motherfucker didn’t have the decency to do it quickly. Somehow, that knowledge didn’t stop me from running my mouth.

The more annoying I am, the quicker he’s going to end it.

“Oh, good,” I slurred around a fat lip and bruised jaw.

“You realized you missed that spot. I wouldn’t have wanted to be too pretty when your arm got tired for the night and you left me to rot.

Petró would be disappointed if his favorite lapdog not only failed to get dirt on the new high alpha, but didn’t even do the job right.

” I spat, the bloody gob landing somewhat adjacent to Dominik’s booted foot.

Damn. I was losing my aim.

Petró didn’t want to get his hands dirty during his campaign to be the new high alpha, so he let his cousin—the new third of the Hungarian pack, since Petró’s father died—do the truly nasty stuff in privacy.

But I still heard him barking at Dominik in angry Hungarian from somewhere up above.

I knew he was the mastermind behind my torture, and in between Dominik’s visits, I envisioned all the ways I’d like to take my anger out on Petró, Dominik…

his entire pack of dogs that leapt to do his evil bidding.

Dominik responded in thickly accented English.

“You’re a masochistic bastard, and I respect that.

” His feral grin sent a chill down my spine.

He was bloodthirsty; that was nothing new in the weeks I’d grown to know him intimately as my torturer.

But something about him was slightly unhinged today, and that was new.

Concerning, perhaps, if I still had the capacity for concern in the muddle of painful fog that always surrounded me now.

But all I had left was sarcasm.

“Are you really his cousin, though? There are some juicy rumors floating around that you’re actually his bastard half brother.”

Dominik scowled and ran a meaty hand over his buzzed head as he circled me where I hung limply from the chains shackling my wrists, his left hand twitching as if it couldn’t wait to get around my throat and shut me up for good.

A shark circling his next meal. My feet were also shackled, but they were window dressing.

I no longer had the energy to kick or fight back.

So there I hung, like sausage on a meat hook for my bloodthirsty butcher.

He’d come well prepared for the job. The table of torture implements was practically bursting with options, over against the wall.

At this point, they were all caked in my dried blood, but that didn’t make them any less effective.

Frankly, I preferred when he used the knives to the hammers. Hammers did a lot of damage quickly. The knives stayed surface level until he got bored and decided to cut deeper.

It wasn’t the first time I’d suffered abuse, and if I lived through it, it probably wouldn’t be the last. My father had beaten into both my mother and me the idea that we were nothing. I couldn’t do anything about that back then either, but I never let the bastard touch my baby sister, Lilly.

Her sweet face swam before my eyes, seventeen and golden, eyes full of twinkling mischief. True pain lanced my chest, the old memories of her more damaging than anything Dominik could do to me.

“I do wonder, would you still be so cocky if you knew it was permanent?” His nearly black eyes lit with unholy excitement that didn’t bode well for me.

And what the fuck did he mean, permanent? Unless he chopped off a limb, I’d heal. And if he did chop off a limb in this hole, I’d bleed out, and his fun would end. I refused to dignify the threat with a response.

He teasingly ran the wicked, rusty blade along the line of my jaw, nicking me a few times in his haste.

“Not the throat, not yet. You see, Petró and I agree that you’ve got information we could use to tear down that murderous prick, Kane.

Like, which bitch is the omega, and how they’re hiding her.

That’s information many would pay handsomely for.

And while you’ve stayed strong so far, there is more to torture than just pain.

Weak men break for pain. Strong men? Strong men have to be mentally broken.

And I’ve been doing some digging into you and your past. It seems the ladies love you.

Fucking two, three bitches a weekend after your council sessions ended, sometimes in the same night? ”

He tutted, as if he were some paragon of morality, while he held a blade to my battered throat. The temptation to lean into the blade’s razor-sharp edge was strong.

I’d had enough pain and suffering to fill a lifetime much longer than mine already. Something stopped me, though.

Maybe I was a masochist.

I leaned a hair closer as I spoke. “I must take after your uncle. Father, whatever. Word on the street is he fucked his own brother’s mate, and that’s how you came to be. How does it feel to be the bastard of the family? No wonder you’re only Petró’s third, even though you’re blood.”

The backhand came hard and swift, making my ears ring and my nose drip blood from the impact.

I just laughed, even though I was too exhausted to lift my head.

He was too easy. Psycho, but predictable. It didn’t matter who a man was, you couldn’t talk bad about his mother without pissing him off.

Dominik yanked me up by a fistful of my matted hair. “For that remark, I will enjoy this.” His ugly mug blurred before my eyes, the leering face of my father looking down at me with disdain instead.

If I could have shaken myself to clear the image, I would have. Even Dominik’s soulless eyes and filthy clothing were better than remembering my father.

He enjoys all this. Always has. The thought was fuzzy as my father/Dominik raised the knife to my face, and it wasn’t until it hovered above my right eye that I realized it was now coated with something black and sticky.

The knife burned hotter than hellfire as it split my skin like a ripe peach, and a scream tore itself from my raw throat as it blazed a trail down my cheek.

Merciful blackness swallowed me, and the pain was no more.

“Luce? You down here?”

I was dreaming again. Though, the splitting pain in my face was still present, as well as a sickly feeling in my guts, like I’d eaten a bucket of live worms and they were trying to crawl out of me in protest. This was a sorry-ass dream.

“Lucien, holy Goddess help us. You look like shit on a stick, man. How long have you been down here?” The voice sounded familiar, but too distant for me to place. Oh well. Dreams were dreams.

I tried to blink, tried to move, but there was nothing left in the tank. Whatever had been on that knife Dominik had used on me had really done a number on my already weakened system. Attempts to rouse my wolf were fruitless, and the first true shot of fear flooded my system.

What had that fucker done to me?

“He’s got you cuffed, but I think I can get them out of the ceiling and floor. The idiot used magic cuffs but regular chains, which is good for us. Hang tight, okay? This is probably going to hurt like a bitch.”

I tried again, but still got no response from my wolf.

With herculean effort, I finally got my good eye open.

A blurry man who smelled familiar stood before me, hands half shifted and fur running up his arms as he gripped the chains attached to my ankles and pulled, veins cording in his neck with the effort as he used his wolf’s strength to separate the links halfway between my ankle and the heavy bolts anchoring them to the bare cement floor.