Chapter 8 #2
“Sorry,” I told him. “I know this isn’t your fight. And I also understand that I’m not your favorite person right now. Still, if you could tell me where you think this Lash might have taken Felicity, I’d be eternally grateful.”
For a long moment, the alpha simply glared down at me with hard eyes and an even harder frown. Then he crossed his arms over his massive chest and drew in a deep breath. “No.”
No?
Maybe I hadn’t been clear.
“I don’t need you to come with me,” I said, gripping Chuck’s gun tight as I rose back up to my feet. “I’m just asking you to point me in the right direction.”
“And I’m telling you no,” he shot back.
What did he want? For me to grovel at his feet? Fine. I wasn’t above that. For Felicity, I wasn’t above anything.
“Please,” I said. “I’m begging you. Just give me a clue, a cardinal direction, anything, and I’ll disappear. I’ll never bother you again. I promise.”
“Because you’ll be dead,” the alpha said flatly, his mossy gaze boring into mine.
Yeah, more than likely. Between the wolves and the ferus, I knew that my chances of walking out of the Wilds alive were slim. But right now, I was still breathing, so I had to keep going.
“That’s not your problem,” I tried to assure him.
But my words only made his glower grow darker.
He let Felicity’s phone drop from his hand, and I watched it bounce across the clearing. Damn, this guy really didn’t care about personal property, did he?
“Tell me, kirre. If by some miracle you find your friend alive with Lash, what’s your plan?”
My plan?
“I…I have a gun.”
Sure, I didn’t have much luck with it before, but now I knew to forget about chest shots. When I found the son of a bitch who’d taken Felicity, I’d aim for his head instead.
But the alpha apparently didn’t like that plan.
In a flash of movement, his hand shot out, curling around my wrist. He knew exactly how much pressure to use on the ligaments to make my fingers pop open.
A little cry of despair rushed from my lips as the revolver fell from my hand. He caught the weapon and immediately flung it right back into the forest. I turned and watched it disappear into the darkness, far enough away that I’d never be able find it.
“You prick!” I shouted, no longer caring if it was a bad idea to scream at an alpha. “That was my only way of defending myself.”
“The weapon that couldn’t even scare away the wolves?” Still holding tight to my wrist, he started to move, pulling me behind him. “You’re safer without it. One look at that thing and Lash would have laughed in your face—right before he ripped out your heart.”
“Not if I drilled four holes in his head first.” The alpha didn’t respond. He didn’t even cast a glance over his shoulder. He just kept striding through the woods. I had scramble to keep up. “Where the hell are we going?”
He didn’t answer.
But I wasn’t in the mood to be ignored. So I kicked at his heels.
That got his attention. The alpha spun around, snarling, “What?”
My stomach flipped over like a pancake.
Okay, maybe that was a mistake. But it was too late now. I was already too deep in this mess to back out now.
“I asked you a question.” Even though my voice was as shaky as it had ever been, I somehow managed to keep my head held high. “Where are you taking me?”
“Back to the Wall.” His tone was as cold and hard as the rocks lining the stream next to us.
“No.” I shook my head and tried to pull free from his grasp, but his hold on me was merciless. All I could do was writhe and struggle at the end of his grip like a fish on a line. “I’m not leaving. Not until I find Felicity.”
“I already told you.” He let out an exasperated huff. “Your friend’s as good as dead.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” he insisted. “Just accept it and go back where you belong.”
Fuck that.
Blame the overload of fear or panic or the heaping helping of trauma that had been shoved down my throat over the last couple of days, but in that moment, something inside of me snapped.
For the first time in my life, I was done with being told where I did and didn’t belong. Of what I could and couldn’t do. How I was allowed to live and how I deserved to die.
And I sure as hell wasn’t about to accept the idea that I should give up on the only person who had ever stood by me. Especially not just because some overgrown wild man who I only knew from dreams didn’t want to deal with me.
“Let me go.” Digging my heels into the dirt and locking my knees, I stood my ground…for all of three seconds, until the alpha kept right on walking, dragging me behind him like a plow.
“Enough!” he shouted after we’d cut a trough nearly twenty feet long. Then, grumbling a string of curses under his breath, he spun around to pierce me with a withering stare. “I’ve made up my mind. Nothing can change it. You’re going back over the Wall.”
“The hell I am,” I shot back. “That’s not your choice to make.”
A strange kind of fire lit up in his green eyes at my words. One that somehow managed to draw me closer and push me back at the same time. His voice dipped down low.
“Yes, it is,” he said with utter conviction. “And I think deep down inside you know that’s true.”
“Stop.” Tilting my chin up defiantly, I stared him straight in the eye. “Unless you’re saying that you’ll help me find Felicity, I don’t want to hear it.”
Throwing his words back in his face felt far too good.
But unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last long.
Because no matter how fierce and rebellious I felt in the moment, the alpha was still bigger and stronger than me in every way that mattered.
One sharp tug on my arm was enough to send me flying through the air toward him. And the second I thudded against his chest, he effortlessly hoisted me up over his shoulder and started carrying me like a sack of potting soil.
It didn’t matter how hard I punched his back or kicked his chest; he didn’t even flinch. Screaming in his ear didn’t do any good either. Apparently, to him, I was barely more troublesome than a mosquito buzzing in his ear.
Although this particular mosquito had a large vocabulary of curse words, and during our march through the forest, I made sure to shout them all.
“You son of a bitch!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “If you don’t let me go right now, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Don’t care.” That turned out to be his default response to all my toothless threats and taunts.
I’ll hate you forever.
Don’t care.
I’ll cut off your balls and stuff them down your throat.
Don’t care.
It went on like this for a couple of minutes as he bulldozed through the Wilds, until another voice interrupted us.
“Um…Kyre?”
My ears perked up at the sound of a woman’s voice carrying through the trees. Even though I desperately wanted it to be Felicity, I knew it wasn’t. This voice was higher and softer…and utterly unfamiliar.
At least to me.
Every one of the alpha’s muscles tensed up as he turned to the left toward the sound.
Unfortunately, with my head draped over his back, I couldn’t see the woman’s face. But it turned out I didn’t have to.
“Hannah,” my dream alpha said her name. Hannah? As in Hannah Carter, the photographer? “What are you doing out here alone?”
“She’s not alone,” a gravelly, hyper-masculine voice rang out. Another alpha, no doubt. At the sound of another threat, my body froze up in fear again. “We heard loud bangs and shouting. We came out to investigate.”
“Right,” my alpha said, his body still growing more and more tense with every passing second. “My apologies. I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t realize I was so close to your—.”
“Yeah, whatever,” the woman broke in before he could finish. “How about you put that poor woman down?”
His wide shoulders rose and fell in a long sigh underneath my belly.
“I can’t do that, Hannah.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t trust her not to run off.”
“Is she a prisoner?”
“No,” he answered. “But I did find her trespassing, so I’m taking her back to the Wall.”
“Trespassing?” The woman sounded skeptical. “Why in the world would a kirre woman willingly come to the Wilds? Let me talk to her.”
He shook his head so hard I felt the movement from his shoulder. “That’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because I need to get her back to her world as soon as possible. She’s not safe here,” he insisted. “But I promise to come back once the sun is up and tell you everything.”
Clearly, that wasn’t good enough for the woman.
“What do you mean she’s not safe?” she demanded. “What happened to her?”
At this point, my dream alpha’s whole body was practically vibrating with impatience. But strangely, he didn’t snap or roar at the lady. Not like he had with me.
“Hannah,” he started, his tone tense but still measured. “I can’t answer your questions. Not here. Not now.”
“Fine,” the woman clipped, her own annoyance on full display. “Then we’ll all go back to the house. And once we’re there, you can put that poor girl down, and tell us what the hell is going on.”