Pack Baby for the Bratva (Pack Baby #2)

Prologue - Maeve

Prague - Nine months earlier

I was standing in a Prague alleyway at ten o'clock at night with a steak knife in my trembling hand, slick running down my thighs, and a brain that was so hazy that I had forgotten what I was supposed to do. Hazy enough for my legs to shake.

I’d waited in the dark with my back pressed against the cold stone wall while I listened for the footsteps to echo at the mouth of the alleyway. And then three shadows filled the narrow entrance, cutting off the amber glow of the street behind them.

Three alphas stared at me as the knife in my hand shook. With them came the scent.

It was gorgeous yet I’d never smelled anything like it before. It rolled in the air and into my veins. Warm and dark at the edges. Rich. Sweet. It was everything at once.

“Fuck!” I hissed under my breath as they blocked me from the safety of the street.

The plan had been elegant. One very hot blonde wig, a white coat, too much make-up, but now my plan was ruined.

The tallest one stepped forward first. His hazel eyes caught what little light the alley offered and held it. He moved with slow, deliberate steps, taking up the last gap I had to escape. He had sandy-blond hair. A scar above the right eye and a second one tracing his jaw, pale against tanned skin.

He said nothing but he stared at me as though I had two heads or perhaps it was because I still held the knife raised in front of me.

Then the scent hit me again. It was caramel, champagne and something darker. Storm-light, maybe. It threaded through the alleyway and straight into my bloodstream like it was mine.

The knife shook in my hand.

The ache in my body that I had been carrying for weeks like an infected wound, now flared so violently that my vision blurred.

I need to kill the ache.

The second man stepped up behind the first. Black hair. Pale blue eyes, the color of the sky when it’s about to snow, and something about the line of his shoulders. He looked powerful, dangerous. He stood like everyone around him always waited for instructions.

The third man filled the far side of the alley entrance without appearing to move at all.

Dark brown hair, deep blue eyes and nostrils that flared like a bull about to run.

He was bearded and broad in the chest. He said nothing but he looked at me the way a man looks at something he intends to have.

The knife was getting very heavy.

"You need to leave," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only win I could claim the entire evening. "I have a job to do. Get out of here."

"Put the weapon down, malen'kaya." The bearded one's voice was a low, gravelled command that landed somewhere between my ribs and my better judgment. "You’re in no condition to stab anyone."

I groaned. Humiliating as much as it was, but he was right.

I was in absolutely no condition to stab anyone.

The pain that normally wracked my body now turned into an ache in the last thirty seconds.

Not just an ache but a rolling, disorienting wave of heat that had nothing to do with the cold Prague night.

And my knees were still wobbly, making me look like I had too much to drink at the bar this evening.

"You don't understand—" The knife slipped from my hand, clattering against the cobblestones.

I looked down at it as the sound echoed in the narrow space.

“Fuck!” I looked up. The three men looked at me. There was a very long second in which I processed the profound gap between who I had been three hours ago and who I apparently was now.

I dropped to my knees… but large hands lifted me onto my feet again. “Leave it.”

“I need…”

“Leave it,” he growled.

Hot, wet slick rushed down my thighs at the sound of his command. What the hell was happening to me? I didn’t come here for this.

I pressed both palms flat against the tallest man's chest and pushed. He was built like a wall. Hard muscle, height, and heat.

He chose, for reasons I wasn't going to spend time analyzing, to step aside.

I ran.

***

My hotel room was on the main road, two blocks away. I reached it without looking behind me. Now to get to the fourth floor.

I didn’t remember the lift or the door closing behind me. I remembered throwing the chain lock with hands that were vibrating so hard I wouldn’t need to put the batteries in my dildo.

I kicked off the red heels as I pulled on the blonde wig and threw it to the floor. Then I dragged off my clothes because it might have been snowing outside but the room was too warm.

I turned the thermostat down as far as it went.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed with my palms flat on my thighs and breathed through my nose and told myself that this was the same pain I had for three years.

It wasn’t anything different. It was a phantom ache and that phantom aches, by definition, were not real, and therefore I was fine, this was manageable, and I was a woman in control of her own biology.

My body found this hilarious and proceeded to act like a burst pipe.

I groaned as the heat crested. I curled into a ball making a sound I would be taking to my grave.

This was the worst pain I'd ever endured. Worse than when my ex-alpha claimed me even though I was never his. Worse than when I had his claim dissolved. Worse than the pain I had endured since that day.

I had been told that the pain wasn’t real, by a medical doctor, no doubt an alpha himself. He told me that the pain I was enduring was a fake pain that I should resist. That sometimes the nervous system held onto things longer than the body did. That it would fade.

It was not fading. It was getting worse. Much worse. The pain was sliding between my legs.

I pressed my face into the hotel pillow and tried to think about something calming. But all I could think about was the three faces in an alleyway, and my knife clattering onto the cold floor.

My heat climbed another degree. I was about to combust.

I gave up on calming thoughts and leaned over the bed, dug my hand in my bag and pulled out a dildo.

I had to try other things.

I opened my legs and used it on myself, desperate for any friction to dull the fire, but it did absolutely nothing. The cold silicone felt like a cruel joke compared to the phantom heat pulsing through my veins.

"I need a knot," I cried out as I lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, damp with exertion, and still aching.

The room smelled wrong. Too neutral. Too clean. Too much like an absence of something I left in that alleyway.

“No. No. No! You do not—”

Someone knocked at the door.

I blinked at the ceiling then at the door.

I’d ordered room service before the bar, before the alley, before my entire plan went sideways and left me lying in my underwear, alone in a foreign city, in a body that had apparently decided tonight was the night to betray me completely.

Dinner. Right. Maybe that was all I needed.

I pulled on the silk robe. I smoothed my hair, which was a sweaty mess, but my whole body was just as bad.

I opened the door.

It wasn't room service. It was the three men from the alley who stood in the corridor.

No suits now. All their jackets were gone, ties gone, sleeves rolled back.

They were larger without the shadow of the alley making them distant and theoretical.

Up close, the scent of them hit the open doorway like a wave breaking over a seawall.

And I stood in the way and was pushed backward by the force of it.

I planted my palm on the door frame as their champagne, caramel and something darker at the edges slipped into the room.

My other hand tightened on the door handle.

"Do you need some assistance, malen'kaya?" the bearded one asked. His voice was the same. Patient, low, unhurried, yet certain. His eyes dropped to my skin, to the flush across my collarbone, to the hand that was gripping the door frame.

"I can help myself," I said.

The words came out impressively confident.

The tallest one inhaled, very slowly, and said nothing.

"My body. It's just my body playing tricks on—"

Another wave of heat tore through me so efficiently that the rest of the sentence simply ceased to exist.

The three men looked at me.

I looked at them.

The silk robe clung to my sweaty body.

"Tell us what you need," the dark-haired one said, quiet and entirely focused.

I’d been alone for a very long time, and I’d been running for longer than that. I’d learned to need nothing I couldn't provide myself, to ask for nothing I couldn't afford, to want nothing that required someone else to give it.

"I need," I said, and my voice broke on the second word, which was frankly embarrassing, "for the ache to go away."

The tallest one's eyes went completely dark.

He stepped forward, one hand reaching toward me, catching me before the door frame couldn’t hold me any longer. He whispered something in Russian against my hair as took me to the bed.

I wanted to tell them I didn’t need alphas in my life. The truth was, there was only one I wanted gone.