Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
"Old trick," Leo said. "Fool a wolf shifter into thinking there's game in the area by setting a trap and spraying it down with rabbit urine or deer feces."
"Now what do we do?" Samara asked. "There's probably more of them."
"Want me to spring it?" Leo asked. "And any others in the area?"
Kellen rocked back and forth as he thought. "I don't want you to get hurt."
"I appreciate the consideration, but you know me better than that."
"Yeah, I do." Kellen stood up.
"Should we shift?" Stephen asked. "We'll have a better chance of sniffing out the traps."
"No." Leo shook his head as he followed Kellen and stood up, branch still in hand. "Now that we know what to look for, aside from the smell, we can better see the trap from this angle rather than lower to the ground."
Kellen reached back, grabbing Samara's hand again.
"Okay. The mansion is straight ahead, and the terrain doesn't change much between here and the backyard.
I think if you and Stephen can find any traps in front of us and no further than fifty feet from the sides, we should be okay. What do you two think?"
"Sounds good to me." Leo bent down, swinging the branch forward. "Cover your ears."
He meant her, but covering her ears meant she had to let go of Kellen's hand.
She did as asked anyway. Despite doing so, she could still hear the sharp snap of the branch, when Leo poked the trap.
Kellen took her hand back. "Stay by my side.
We're going to walk a straight line, but if you see any sort of indentation in the ground, say something. "
She nodded as Kellen took a step around the sprung trap, then another, then another. As he walked, he turned his head from side to side, his eyes wide as he searched the ground from the left to right, his nose flared while he checked for more scents meant to throw them off.
For the first time since she escaped, Samara wished for the preternatural senses of her wolf shadow.
They would be helpful in the moment. When she had inhaled as a wolf shifter, all the smells from the compound assaulted her at once—the food from the kitchen, the rotting meat from the garbage, the bathroom, the wet grass outside.
It was gross and she hadn’t been able to make it go away.
Still, now it might be worth the trade off if it meant not getting her foot shattered by stepping into a wolf trap.
Maybe.
Kellen kept her pressed close to him as they slowly walked forward.
In the background she heard one, two, three loud cracks of wolf traps snapping shut.
If Leo or Stephen got caught in the traps, she would hurt for them just as much as she would for Kellen.
In less than two days, those two had made quite an impression on her.
The genuine concern between the three reminded her that bringing her into their brotherhood would change the dynamics of their group.
Could she live knowing that everything for the three brothers would change because of her?
Leo and Stephen were Kellen's family and had been for almost a century and a half.
He'd known her for only a week. For whatever reason wolf shadows needed each other, but he wouldn't commit if her shadow was anything other than an omega.
What a tangled mess she'd dropped herself into.
Another two wolf traps set off in the background almost simultaneously, but after what felt like hours, the trees cleared and the ruins of the Riverstone Pack's home, Josiah's prison for her, stood in front of them.
She couldn't suppress a shudder. It was so powerful that she had to wrap her arms around herself.
"Shhhhhh," Kellen whispered in her ear. "It's okay. There's no one here who's going to hurt you."
If only she had his confidence. At that moment, Stephen and Leo came to stand next to them. "All the traps have been sprung."
Kellen dropped his backpack and started to loosen his clothes, removing his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt.
"Let’s all get ready to shift. If anyone shows up here, we're all shifting.
" He wasn't stripping down, but she guessed loose clothing made it easier to change shape. "Leo, do you have the keys—"
Leo handed him the keys to the van before he finished the sentence.
"Stephen did you—"
"The tank is full."
Kellen handed her the keys to the van. "Samara, you'll have one job if things go south: Run back to the motel and don't look back no matter what you hear. From there, take the van and get yourself somewhere safe. Stay on the back roads and just don't stop until the tank is empty."
God, she hoped it wouldn't come to that, but she nodded her understanding, because she was pretty useless otherwise.
"All right, let's go."
She grabbed onto Kellen again as he started across the unkempt lawn toward the mansion.
Even though it was little more than a husk of what it once was, she couldn't help but take just a little satisfaction knowing she caused all of this.
Josiah might not be dead, but losing the safety of his house—and it was just a house to him, not a home—had to be enraging for someone who lashed out at whatever was in reach when things didn't go according to his plan.
The debris on the ground made walking almost as hazardous as the woods. Random bits of wood and stone and brick crunched under her boots, making her thankful Kellen thought to buy them for her.
When they reached the edge of the outer east wall, they stopped.
"What should we look for?" Leo asked.
All three of them looked toward her for an answer.
Feeling more pressure than she needed right now, Samara looked at the ruins.
Okay, time to put all the little pieces of information she'd been ignoring together and pray for a clue.
"I think we should look for a safe. If Josiah had secrets, he wouldn't keep them out in the open.
He probably had a safe in his office. Something that wouldn't have burned.
I know his office was on the second floor, but I never went in there. "
"Then we'll look for anything that might have been a desk." Leo took a tentative step into the rubble.
Kellen motioned Stephen and Leo to follow him. “Let's go."
They stuck together as they walked and sometimes crawled through the ruins, their clothes turning black with soot. Ignoring the empty garage, they focused on the west side, where it looked like the second and third floors had fallen on top of the first.
"This looks like the remnants of a desk." Leo pulled what appeared to be a drawer. The wood fell apart in his hand. Pieces of smoke-damaged paper appeared slid out and onto the ground, but Stephen dove and caught them before they got too filthy to read.
"I'll keep these so we can look at them later." He tucked them into the inner pocket of his jacket. "I see another one here..."
"I got them," Leo replied.
While they continued to take apart the desk, Kellen worked his way around, trying to keep steady on the flooring that tilted on its side, pulling Samara with him.
"If you were a safe, where would you hide?" he whispered, even though there was no one around to hear.
Suppressing a cough that tickled her throat the farther into the wreckage they climbed, she could only think about what she'd seen in the movies. "Aren't they usually covered by a painting or behind a bookshelf or something?"
"I can't see Josiah having any kind of appreciation for artwork or literature." Kellen started to pull at a plank that fell loose from a bearing wall that managed to survive the flames.
"Yeah, neither can I," she agreed.
"Where did he keep you when you were here?"
"I honestly don't remember. I was drugged and unconscious through a lot of it.
I don't remember when they unchained me and removed me from the cage.
I just woke up in a room with um, your mother.
She just pointed to a pile of clothing and told me to get dressed and said I was to carry out a set of responsibilities every day or there would be consequences. "
"Do you know why you were drugged?"
"That's the confusing part. Whatever he was doing with me, he was doing while I was unconscious.
When I was in the cage, I would wake up hours later, sometimes with welts on my body, other times with shallow cuts.
There was even one time I could see the bruising from what looked like needle marks in my arm.
He made sure I had edible food, a couple of buckets of water—one to drink and one to wash, but after I shifted that first time, he looked—I don't know, almost disappointed.
As if my wolf shadow hadn't been what he was expecting. It didn’t satisfy him.
I expected him to go into a rage and beat the living hell out of me.
I'd hear him doing it to others through the walls, so I can't imagine why he didn't hit me.
Instead, I was drugged, pulled out of the cage, given some clothing, and put to work in the house. "
"Doing what?"
"Cleaning, cooking, fetching things for the rest of the pack. I expected to be raped by all of them, but that didn't happen. Taunt me, yes. Shove me around, of course. Stuff you would expect in the hallways of a high school, but nothing worse than that."
"He wasn't done with you but keeping you in the cage might have been inconvenient for whatever it was he was doing.
" Kellen motioned her back down the plank.
Once back on the firmer first floor, he sat down on the ground, and she followed him.
She tried to rub off some of the soot from her hands onto her jeans, but that only made things worse.
"I'm lost," Kellen confessed. "If we can't find anything here that can give us a clue, then I don't know what to do about any of this."
Even though she wanted to forget her imprisonment, Samara forced herself to review every second she could remember. "You've told me from the beginning that the only way two wolf shadows will accept each other is if they are both of the same status: omega and omega, beta and beta."
Kellen looked down at his lap. "Yes. That's correct."
She could already feel his regret over giving into their mutual desire last night.
It hurt like a needle slammed into her gut, but she had to push past that for the moment.
He had to hear what she had to say. "Then the only reason I can think of for the Riverstone Pack to not try to molest me beyond pushing and insults is because my wolf shadow was an alpha. "
The lump in her throat tightened as she watched Kellen wince at her words.
He rocked back and forth for a moment. "I think you're right.
If Josiah knew you were an alpha, but never told you, then there wouldn't be any way for you to know unless one of the other wolves told you.
None of them would dare say anything without Josiah's permission. "
"And there's no way you can have two alphas in one pack, I assume."
He tilted his head to the side. "You can't have two alphas in one pack who aren't spouses.
That's asking for a perpetual civil war within a pack with the alphas constantly challenging each other to dominance fights.
Even if those fights are regulated and not to the death, I just can't see a pack surviving in that kind of atmosphere. "
Another thought pinged. "So, it doesn't have to be a male and a female alpha? It can be two males or two female alphas so long as they're married?”
"Leo's more in touch with what happens in other packs than I am. He has a whole network of contacts across the west, stretching from Calgary to Santa Ana. He's mentioned a couple of packs that have same-sex alphas. I don't know the details, but you could ask him after we're done here."
Now he was back to brooding and deliberately not looking at her. Frankly, she wasn't feeling much better. It would have been better not to tell him of her suspicions. After all, she had no proof. Kellen, however, wasn't stupid. He would have come to the same conclusion on his own.
"Hey, Kel?" Stephen called from below. "I think we found something."
By the time she and Kellen made their way back to where the displaced desk was, Leo was on Stephen's shoulders as he poked at what was left of the flooring of the second floor that hadn't fallen through.
"What the hell are you two doing?" Kellen pulled her back when she tried to get closer to see what was up, literally. "You don't know what's above your head. What if it's something—"
Even as he said it, the rest of the roof fell. Only their quick reflexes saved them from getting crushed under a heavy chunk of metal that almost landed on their heads.
"Damn it! You two are going to be the death of me." She'd never seen Kellen look so angry. Not just angry but scared as hell. She suspected if she wasn't there, he'd have said a lot more.
"Well, at least we found the safe." It was the only thing she could say that might get the murderous look off Kellen's face. "Now we just have to figure out how to open it."
"I have some equipment in the van that could help with that." Stephen coughed again.
"It's too bulky to drag through the woods." Clearly, she was Captain Obvious today. "One of us should go back, get the van, and bring it here. We could either drag the safe into the van or just crack the combination here."
"Or you could ask me what the combination is."
That voice.
The four of them whirled around in unison. The housekeeper leaned against what used to be a doorframe to the front of the mansion.
Kellen's mother was alive and had a rifle pointed right at her son.