Chapter 16 Teeth at the Boatyard
Wade POV
The trucks stopped twenty feet from the service bay, engines idling, and my wolf counted them before I did.
Three wolves rode in the first truck and four in the second.
I could smell them through the open windows, copper and aggression and the sharp edge of wolves running on adrenaline rather than authority.
They were young and strong, the kind Conrad Sutherland would send when he wanted muscle and obedience in the same package.
Jules reached my side. Through the pack’s mind link, I felt Hank and Arvid responding to my call, Hank closer, already moving from the storage shed where he’d been stacking tarps.
Bette was in the office. I sent her a single pulse: stay inside, lock the door.
She answered with acknowledgment and the click of a deadbolt.
The driver’s door of the lead truck opened.
A man stepped out, tall and lean with close-cropped blond hair and the kind of deliberate posture that said enforcer before he opened his mouth.
Two more climbed out behind him, and four emerged from the second truck.
All seven were men wearing the casual, loose-fitting clothes wolves wore when they expected to shift.
That made seven against my pack. Rafe, sick and swaying, was in no condition to help.
“Alpha Karlsson.” The blond one spoke first. His tone carried the bored formality of someone delivering a message he didn’t write. “Alpha Sutherland sends his regards. We’re here to collect Nora Keane and escort her to Copper Point territory so the bond matter can be resolved.”
“You’re on my land without permission,” I said. “Turn around.”
“Respect intended, Alpha. But our orders come from Conrad Sutherland, and the woman belongs to Copper Point by treaty.”
“She doesn’t belong to anyone. And you weren’t invited. Leave.”
The blond enforcer’s gaze moved past me to Nora, standing beside the service bay with engine grease on her hands.
His eyes tracked to Rafe, on his feet beside the shipping crate, gaunt and unsteady.
I watched him take in his Alpha’s sick heir, the rejected mate, and the stray pack’s Alpha standing between them.
“Rafe,” the enforcer said. “Your father wants this finished.”
Rafe straightened. The effort left his legs unsteady, but his voice carried the force of inherited command. “I didn’t ask for backup, Lyle. Stand down and go home.”
“Orders don’t come from you on this one.” Lyle didn’t even look at Rafe when he said it. His attention stayed on Nora. “Miss Keane. You can walk to the truck, or we can help you get there. Either way, Alpha Sutherland expects you at Copper Point by morning.”
Nora stayed exactly where she’d been standing when she told Rafe no, and I loved her for it. She looked at Lyle the way she looked at a stripped bolt: something in her way that needed removing.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said.
Lyle took a step forward. His packmates fanned out behind him, spreading into flanking positions between the boat cradles and the service lane. They’d done this before.
“Last time,” I said. I dropped my voice. “You are on Pine Harbor territory. You were not invited. You have no authority here. If you touch anyone on my land, you answer for it.”
Lyle looked at me like a problem to manage.
His hand closed around Nora’s wrist.
Nora moved before any of her self-appointed protectors could.
She grabbed the rolling mechanic’s stool with her free hand and drove it hard into Lyle’s knees.
The metal frame caught him across both kneecaps, buckling his legs, and she wrenched her wrist free in the same motion.
Before he could recover, she lunged for the air horn mounted on the bay’s support column and pulled the cord.
The blast ripped across the boatyard. Every gull within a quarter mile scattered. The sound carried out over the water and up toward town, and anyone working in the yard or the surrounding lots would know to clear out.
Toivo’s crew near the boat ramp dropped their lines and moved. A civilian truck at the far end of the lot reversed and pulled away. In three seconds, Nora had emptied the working lanes of everyone who didn’t belong in what was about to happen.
Lyle’s face changed. The bored formality burned away and what was underneath it showed: a wolf who’d been told to bring someone back and didn’t care about the method. He yanked his shirt over his head, kicked off his boots, and shifted.
The change hit him fast. His body cracked and reshaped, bones grinding into new positions, muscles tearing and reforming around a frame that was no longer human. His remaining clothes split, and a gray wolf with a dark muzzle stood where a man had been, teeth bared, hackles raised.
The others followed. Six more bodies dropped to all fours as fur and muscle replaced skin and fabric. Shredded clothing scattered across the gravel. The sound of seven wolves shifting at once was wet and violent. Bone and cartilage popped one after another.
I pulled my jacket off. Unbuttoned my flannel. Kicked my boots clear.
Then I let the shift take me.
It hurt. It always hurt. My body broke apart and rebuilt itself in an instant, ribs expanding, spine curving, hands becoming paws. Pain and power flooded through me in equal measure.
The boatyard smelled different as a wolf. Fuel and metal sharpened. Lake water deepened into layers: cold surface, warmer undercurrent, the mineral taste of the rocky bottom. And the Copper Point wolves stank of aggression, with fear leaking underneath the bravado.
The biggest one came at me between two boat cradles, dark brown, heavy through the chest, and built for impact. He was fast, but I was heavier, and I had fought on this ground before. I let him commit, dropped my left shoulder, and took his bite on my foreleg.
His teeth sank in deep. Pain shot up my foreleg to my shoulder. But his jaws were locked on my leg, his head was down, and his throat was open.
I twisted my body hard and used my weight to flip him.
He hit the gravel on his back, scrambling, and I came down on top of him with my jaws closing around his throat.
I held him there without tightening my bite.
The pressure said yield or die, and his wolf understood it first. He went still beneath me, chest heaving, eyes rolling white.
Jules had already moved. Through the link, I felt him circling left through the service bay, using the hanging chains and the narrow lane between stored equipment to cut off a gray-and-white wolf that was trying to flank toward Nora.
Jules hit the wolf from the side at full speed, driving it into a stack of empty fish crates that collapsed in a crash of wood and rope.
The gray-and-white yelped, scrambled free, and Jules was on it before it could regain its footing, his teeth finding the back of its neck and bearing down.
Nora.
I caught glimpses of her past the boat cradle from where I held the brown wolf pinned. Through our bond, I felt her fury and focus. She had trained to fight, and she was done with being grabbed.
She tore off her work shirt, kicked free of her boots, shoved her jeans down and shifted beside the service bay.
Her wolf was smaller than the enforcers but faster, built lean like her human body, auburn fur dark with the rain that had started falling.
One of the larger Copper Point wolves charged her, outweighing her by forty or fifty pounds, and Nora didn’t try to match him.
She dove under the utility trailer parked alongside the bay, sliding through the gap beneath its frame where the bigger wolf couldn’t follow.
He tried. His shoulders jammed against the trailer’s undercarriage, claws scraping gravel, and Nora came out the other side, spun, and tore into his exposed flank before he could pull free.
The wolf howled. Blood sprayed across the trailer’s rusted fender.
Hank arrived from the storage side of the yard with Arvid half a step behind.
They weren’t big wolves, but they were Pine Harbor wolves.
They guarded each other’s flanks and communicated through the link without words.
Hank drove a smaller enforcer away from the boat ramp, and Arvid cut off another one trying to get behind Jules.
Rafe stood in the middle of it in human form, shaking with sickness and fury as he screamed at wolves who couldn’t answer him.
“Stop! Goddammit, stop! My father ordered an escort, not an attack! Stand down!”
Nobody listened. His authority had been overridden by his father’s orders, and every enforcer on the ground knew it.
The brown wolf under my jaws tried to twist free.
I bore down harder and felt his breath wheeze against my grip.
My torn foreleg screamed with every pulse, blood running hot through my fur and dripping onto the gravel.
The wound was deep. I could feel the edges of it pulling apart with each movement.
Then a rangy charcoal wolf with a torn ear broke from the scrum near the service bay. Faster than the others, he ran straight toward Nora while she was still engaged with the wolf at the trailer.
I couldn’t release the brown wolf without losing the pin. Jules was locked with his own opponent. Hank was too far.
Rafe shifted.
The sound of it was brutal. His sick, starved body cracked and reformed, clothes shredding off a frame that shouldn’t have had the strength to shift, and a black-furred wolf with pale blue eyes threw himself into the path of the charging enforcer.
The charcoal wolf’s jaws closed on Rafe’s shoulder instead of reaching Nora, and the impact drove both wolves into the side of a boat cradle with a crash that rattled the steel frame.
Rafe went down. The bite had torn deep into his right shoulder, and his blood hit the gravel in a spreading pool that steamed in the cold air. But the enforcer had lost momentum. He released Rafe and tried to regroup, and by then I’d made my decision.
I let the brown wolf up. He scrambled away, coughing, his fight gone.
I crossed the distance to Lyle in three bounds and hit him broadside, driving him into the stacked tire rack at the end of the service lane.
Tires toppled and rolled. Lyle yelped, tried to find his footing on the shifting rubber, and I gave him nowhere to go, my jaws snapping at his face every time he tried to rise.
When he stopped fighting to get up, I backed off and let him stagger toward the trucks.
Jules forced his opponent back toward the trucks. Hank and Arvid closed in from the sides. The Copper Point wolves had lost every open angle. One by one, they broke off and retreated toward their vehicles, tails low, their willingness to keep fighting draining by the second.
Nora stood over Rafe.
Her auburn wolf planted herself between his bleeding body and the retreating enforcers, teeth bared in a threat that needed no translation.
Rafe lay on his side in the gravel, his black fur matted with blood, his breathing shallow and fast. His wolf’s eyes found Nora’s, and through my own bond with her, I felt something pass between them.
The lead enforcer shifted back beside the trucks. Lyle was bleeding from his mouth and favoring his ribs. He stood naked and panting in the drizzle, one hand braced on the truck’s fender, and his eyes found mine across the yard.
I shifted back. The change hurt worse this time, my torn foreleg becoming a torn forearm that bled freely down my wrist and dripped from my fingers. I stood bare and bleeding in my own boatyard and held his gaze.
“You came onto my land,” I said. My voice was low and raw from the shift. “You put hands on a wolf under my protection. You shifted first. You attacked my packmates. Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you where you stand.”
Lyle spat blood onto the gravel. His remaining packmates were shifting back, limping, holding wounds. Not one of them met my gaze.
“Conrad Sutherland will end this bond,” Lyle said. “Whether the girl accepts the rejection or not. If she won’t come to Copper Point, Copper Point comes to her. I’m repeating my Alpha’s promise.”
“Get off my land.”
“We’re going.” He pulled the truck door open. Blood smeared the handle. “But this isn’t finished. Conrad doesn’t lose.”
Lyle climbed into the cab. His wolves piled into the trucks, some still bleeding, while two supported a third between them. Doors slammed. The trucks reversed down the boatyard road, and I watched them until they turned onto the shore road and disappeared behind the tree line.
Cold October rain came down harder, stinging the open wound on my forearm and running pink down the gravel toward the boat ramp.
Jules shifted back beside me. He had a cut above his left eye that bled into his hair and a bruise forming along his jaw, but he was standing steady and his eyes were clear.
“Everyone accounted for?” I asked.
“Hank’s got a bite on his hip. Arvid’s limping but walking. Bette stayed locked in the office.” Jules looked past me to where Nora still stood in wolf form over Rafe’s body. “She’s not hurt. I saw her moving clean.”
I followed his gaze. Nora’s auburn wolf hadn’t moved. Whatever else Rafe had done, throwing himself between her and those teeth had been immediate.
Jules moved to her left while Hank and Arvid took her right and rear, their bodies turned toward the road. My pack closed around her without waiting for an order through the link because the threat had retreated, not disappeared.
Rafe was bleeding badly. The shoulder wound pulsed with each breath, dark blood soaking the gravel beneath him. His pale blue wolf eyes were glazing with shock and pain. He needed help now.
I walked across the yard, naked and bleeding, and crouched beside Nora. She turned her head to look at me, and what I saw in her wolf’s eyes was tangled with anger and concern.
“We need to get him inside,” I said quietly. “He’s losing blood.”
Nora looked at Rafe for a long moment. Then she stepped aside.
Rafe’s wolf shuddered. His bones began to change beneath blood-soaked fur, the shift dragging a broken sound from his throat before it left him human and naked on the gravel. The bite had torn through his right shoulder, and fresh blood welled between his fingers when he tried to cover it.
He watched the road where the trucks had vanished. “He sent them.”
He could argue later about whether Conrad had ordered the attack itself. He could no longer deny whose command had brought seven enforcers onto my land to take Nora by force.
Hank and Arvid shifted back and helped me carry Rafe toward the pack house.
Jules went ahead to clear the kitchen table and find clean towels.
Bette emerged from the office with a first-aid kit, calm and grim.
She had seen wounded wolves before. Nora stayed at our side in wolf form, her wet fur streaked with someone else’s blood and her gaze fixed on the road behind us.