Chapter 2
Jason
Fuck.
It’s like watching dominoes fall, except these aren’t harmless little blocks.
These are Eustace bikes. Eight of them, slamming into each other in a snarling, metal-on-metal chain reaction.
My stomach drops as the last bike tips, the whole line collapsing like the universe just decided to fuck us personally.
“Oh shit!” Beauford exclaims, folding in on himself, his big hands disappearing into those wild brown curls that refuse to behave for anyone but me.
I learned to tame that mess when we were kids.
I braided it, twisted it, shoved it back with spit and hope just so he could see out of his damn eyes.
Seeing him yank at it now makes me glad I’m not the one who has to get the knots out of it anymore.
Beauford, fondly known as Beau or Buff depending on the day or mood, is built like someone crossed a linebacker with a grizzly bear, then gave him the emotional age of a golden retriever.
His shirts never fit right. His shoulders are too broad for anything short of XXXL, and his face is way too honest to ever hide a lie.
Which is how we keep landing in shit like this.
Well, that and the reddish umber of his skin and the slightly darker freckles he inherited from his light-skinned mother.
It gives him the whole innocent, yet protective thing he’s got going for him, which makes the girls drop their clothes like they’re allergic to staying dressed.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” he repeats, each word hitting like a punch to my spine.
Shit doesn’t even begin to cover it. It feels like a whole damn sewage plant just detonated over our heads. The stench, the panic, the you’re-so-fucked-you-can-taste-it-in-your-teeth kind of disaster.
This isn’t a small screw up. This is the kind of mistake that gets wolves buried in unmarked ground. Hell, no one would even know we’d died. No graves. No markers. Just three ghosts no one ever claimed.
“I’m so dead.” Froggy—Freddie, if we’re being official—comes to stand next to us.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the disaster we’ve just triggered when the world explodes.
A fireball punches the air behind us, the force slamming into my back so hard, my vision whites out.
Heat sears my skin, smoke claws down my throat, and shrapnel bites into me before I even register moving.
Then I’m airborne. I have no control, no breath, until a wall catches me like a fist, and my teeth rattle loud inside my skull.
Shapes go flying with me—wolves, bodies. Others scatter like spooked birds. Ash and debris pour down in choking waves, thick enough that every inhale feels like sucking in grit and punishment.
I blink through the smoke, searching for Buff and Froggy, but they’re already mid-shift, bodies tearing and reshaping as they sprint into the forest. Froggy vaults ahead in a long, frog-like bound—three guesses where he got his nickname—and Buff thunders after him like their asses are literally on fire.
Which, in Buff’s case, kind of is. The air reeks of scorched fur—his scorched fur—and a thin wisp of smoke curls off his deep brown coat like he’s still smoldering.
My eyes are so screwed from the blast that the reddish flecks in his fur look like embers, like he’s about to go up in flames again.
“Shift and fucking run!” Freddie’s thought-speak slices through my shock like a blade to the spine.
Instinct slams into me, and I move before he’s even finished speaking.
My bones crack loudly, brutally, too fast to brace for but painless. The exhilaration masks everything. Joints tear apart and snap back together, nerves sparking as fur erupts under my skin. And then, God, then the world slams into focus.
My vision sharpens until every leaf has a hundred shades of green, each one edged in perfect clarity. Every scent fractures into layers. The obvious ones: smoke, wet earth, fur. Then the deeper tier, the one humans register but never understand.
Pheromones.
Hormones.
That intimate, unmistakable “someone” scent people describe like poetry but can never name. The scent that tells you danger is up ahead long before you see it, or that something is wrong in a smile that shows too many teeth.
Then there’s the last layer. The one you only smell when you’re a heartbeat from violence. Adrenaline sparking like lightning on dry grass. Fear, sour and heavy like old sweat and sulfur. Irritation, sharp as cooling coals. Death. Ah, death; acrid, metallic, a taste more than a smell.
The emotions no one ever wants a wolf to scent. The emotions people are terrified you’ll notice. The emotions soaked in shame.
I smell the fear coming off Froggy; the exhilaration, warm and spicy like incense, coming off Buff.
Buff is na?ve. And what he lacks in intellect, he more than makes up for in other ways.
He brings levity to our pack along with soul that both Freddie and I lack.
Maybe it’s because he was much younger than we were when we were kicked out of the pack, so he’s less jaded in a sense.
But I wouldn’t have him any other way. Even if sometimes I worry about his Power Rangers obsession.
But overriding the smoke, the fear, the blood, is the stench of my own failure. It hangs thick in the air, sweet and suffocating, clinging to every breath like poison dressed up as perfume.
It hits the back of my throat, makes it hard to swallow, hard to breathe.
This is on me.
I should’ve done better by them. For them. And that claws at my insides harder than any enemy ever has.
I drag my focus down. Away from the panic, away from the guilt, and into the rhythm of my paws pounding the earth. The moment I surrender fully to my wolf, something electric snaps through me.
For a heartbeat, I’m alive.
Not the safe, steady kind of alive… No, the wild, reckless, razor’s-edge kind. The kind of alive a creature feels in the split second before something bigger rips its throat out.
And God help me, I lean into it.
I crave it.
My wolf surges up, a tidal pull in my muscles, begging me to turn. To fight. To tear into the wolves closing in. Not out of hope, but out of something older and uglier.
Because we’ve been running our whole lives. We’ve been running since we were kids. Running from packs, from hunger, from being unwanted.
And some part of my wolf, of me, is done running. Even if fighting means dying on our feet instead of sprinting toward another temporary escape.
When the virus took all three of our mothers in the same season, the pack didn’t hesitate. Three cubs became too much to carry. Three male cubs—unclaimed, hungry, and growing—became a problem. Too little food. Too little patience. And God forbid anything threaten the alpha’s precious line.
So, they did the simplest, ugliest thing a pack can do. They exiled us from our birth pack—cut our names from the rolls, stripped us of land and protection, and told the world we were no longer theirs. Every thread tying us to home, to safety, to identity snapped.
Cut clean like a limb you pretend isn’t yours anymore.
One moment we were theirs, the next we were nothing.
I was nine, Freddie was eight, and Buff… Buff, he was only five. They cast us out before we even understood what living without a pack would actually mean.
At thirty, I should be over it. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. I should’ve built up enough scar tissue by now to smother that old ache that still whispers about belonging like it’s something I could ever have again. I should’ve outgrown the stupid want for a place, for a pack, for a home.
But wanting doesn’t age out. It only sinks deeper.
The snarls behind us, as threatening as they are, hit something soft and stupid in me.
The part of me that still aches for a pack—a real pack.
A place that isn’t temporary or conditional or cruel.
Do I want to be a jerk like pretty much every member of the Eustace pack?
No, I don’t. I just want to be part of something that fights for me and not against me.
Which brings me back to why they are fighting us.
“What the hell did you assholes do now?” The thought tears from my mind, ricochets from each of theirs and hits me in the gut.
“When they chased us, I panicked,” Froggy wheezes in thought-speak, leaping over a twisted branch like a startled deer.
“So you decided to take out Grant’s bike? Grant—Talon’s son? Fantastic. We’re dead. Actually dead.” I dodge a tree trunk as vapor pours out my mouth against the chill from the rain.
“I just pushed it over to make a barrier between us and Attila the Hun. That dude has fists like meat tenderizers, and I’m not letting him ruin this face.
And why are you shouting at me, anyway?” Froggy jerks his white muzzle toward Buff.
“He’s the one who banged the alphas’ daughters! We’re running because of him!”
Froggy’s always had an attitude. He’s smaller than most wolves, has a loud mouth, loud energy—the whole package. What he lacks in size, he overcompensates for with bite. The bastard shifts faster than either of us, and he knows it.
He’s all lean lines and wired muscle. He doesn’t have brute strength like Buff and I do, but he makes up for it in speed and angles with sharp teeth, sharp elbows, sharp everything.
He bares his fangs first and asks questions… well, never.
His fur is a ridiculous snow-white with streaks of gray. It makes him look breakable until you watch him go for someone’s Achilles tendon like a damn landmine with opinions.
He’s twitchy, unpredictable, trigger-happy, and pure adrenaline on legs.
Sometimes his restless energy gets under my skin and makes me twitch too, but I’d trust that jittery little bastard with my life.
“Fuck, Freddy, I told you it was dark! I couldn’t tell which one was which! The alphas are twins, you know. It’s like the daughters are twins too. Thorne’s oldest and Talon’s youngest look so similar,” Buff says. “It’s not like they were wearing damn name tags!”