Chapter 33 Wolves in the Gale
Jules POV
The steel screamed below me before I hit the third stair.
I’d been running for the shelter when the sound came through the concrete, through the walls, and through the soles of my boots.
Metal shrieked across frozen rails and turned my stomach.
I gripped the pry bar and took the rest of the stairwell at a dead sprint, hitting the lower landing with a jolt I felt in my knees.
Emergency floods threw pale light across the narrow passage connecting the service bay’s foundation to the reinforced room beneath the office.
Bette had the shelter door sealed. Hank and Arvid were inside with her.
But the sound wasn’t coming from behind that door.
It was coming from above. From outside. From the lane that ran between the hauled boats and the office wall, where the ramp fed down from the upper cradles to the dock level.
I turned left instead of right and shouldered open the exterior access door at the passage’s end. Snow hit me full in the face. Wind screamed off Superior and drove wet flakes sideways through the gap between buildings, blinding me for a moment before I got my bearings.
The workboat was already moving.
One of the big hauled boats Nora had secured before sunset had broken loose from its severed cables and was sliding down the iced ramp on its steel cradle, picking up speed.
The ramp angled toward the lower lane. Toward the office foundation.
Toward the reinforced room where Bette and the other Pine Harbor wolves sat behind a locked door that would hold against men but not against several tons of boat and steel gathering speed on ice.
I didn’t think. Thinking takes time, and I had maybe six seconds.
The empty cradle sat ten feet to my left, chocked against the lane’s far rail.
It was the spare Nora kept positioned for overflow hauls.
It held no boat, only a steel frame on wheels.
I hit the manual brake lever with the heel of my pry bar, knocked the wheel chock loose with my boot, and threw my weight against the frame.
The cradle lurched, rolled, and swung across the lane on its rail just as the loaded workboat reached the bottom of the ramp.
The collision sounded like a car wreck. Steel met steel with a force that shook the ground beneath my feet, and the empty cradle buckled and jammed sideways, absorbing the workboat’s momentum and wedging the two frames across the lane short of the office wall.
The loaded cradle’s frame bent inward. The workboat’s hull cracked along its waterline with a sound like splitting wood.
But the mass stopped. The impact reached the shelter wall behind me as a deep thud, nothing more.
One entrance to the lower lane was now blocked solid by crumpled steel and a canted hull. The access door behind me stayed clear.
I ducked back through it and hammered on the shelter door with the flat of my hand. “Hank. You good?”
His voice came through the steel, muffled but steady. “Felt it. Arvid and I have the door.”
“Stay sealed. Don’t open for anyone but me or Wade.”
“Got it.”
I shoved back outside and turned toward the open end of the lane.
Snow whipped past the gap between buildings, and beyond it I could see the faint orange glow of the emergency floods still burning in the service bay above.
Nora was up there. Wade was up there. Everything I had chosen to love in this life was above me in the dark, and the man who’d come to destroy it was already in the yard.
I ran.
? ? ?
I came up through the exterior stairwell into the yard and saw them the same moment they saw me.
Conrad’s wolves poured out of the tree line southeast of the service lane, shifting as they moved.
The snow swallowed details, but I counted five shapes, then six, with more behind them, all dark against the white ground.
Jackets and shirts tore as bodies wrenched and fur split through skin.
One man had his boots off before he dropped to all fours and the change took him.
They came fast. Faster than men should move across ice and frozen gravel, because they weren’t men anymore. They were wolves with a single order, and the order was Nora.
Wade met the first one near the dock chain rack.
Even from forty yards away, through driving snow and the dim reach of the emergency floods, I could make out Wade’s massive wolf, heavy through the chest and shoulders.
He hit the lead attacker broadside and drove him into the chain rack hard enough to rattle the steel.
The smaller wolf yelped, scrambled, went down.
But the footing was wrong. Ice had glazed the dock lane since the snow started, and Wade’s weight worked against him.
His rear paws skidded when he tried to pivot, and that half second of lost traction was all the second wolf needed.
It came in from Wade’s left, from behind the overturned fish crates Nora had stacked against the wall, and sank its teeth into Wade’s side just below the ribs.
Wade’s snarl carried over the wind.
I was already pulling my shirt over my head. Wet snow stung my bare skin as I kicked off my boots and stripped, dropping everything beside the stairwell housing. Then I shifted.
Bones and muscle wrenched into new shapes, and it hurt as much as ever.
My wolf rose through the pain, eager and furious, and the world snapped into sharp focus.
I smelled Wade’s blood, Conrad’s pine sap and gun oil, and Rafe’s cold stone and desperation.
Beneath them all, I caught Nora’s warm engine oil and wildflowers.
I went over the chain rack.
The wolf on Wade’s ribs didn’t hear me coming.
I hit his right rear leg at the hock and tore sideways, ripping through tendon and fur.
He released Wade with a shriek and spun to face me, but I was already moving, circling behind the rack to get between him and Wade’s exposed flank.
Wade shook the blood from his fur and bared his teeth at the first attacker, who was still down and struggling.
We stood shoulder to shoulder for two breaths before the yard erupted around us.
More of them. Three coming around the north side of the building, where Rafe had been watching.
Two more from the dock end, cutting off the path to the water.
They worked in pairs, driving us away from the service bay, herding us into the open yard where the ice and the numbers would finish what Conrad’s strategy had started.
I caught a flash of black fur in the snow to my left.
Rafe. He’d shifted somewhere near the bay door and was moving fast, low, following a scent line that led away from our fight and toward the service bay’s open entrance.
He ran past two enforcers without engaging and they let him go, which told me everything.
They’d been told to keep Wade and me busy. Rafe wasn’t their assignment.
Nora was.
Through the open bay doors, in the pale wash of the emergency floods, I saw her.
She’d shifted. Her work clothes lay shredded on the concrete near the generator panel, and her auburn wolf darted between the hoists and lift housings.
She was smaller and faster than the enforcers chasing her, and her knowledge of the bay kept them from cornering her.
She ducked beneath the raised truck on the main lift, slipped between the hydraulic cylinders, and snapped at a big gray wolf too wide through the shoulders to follow her under the frame.
He lunged and hit the lift housing face-first, and Nora slashed his muzzle as he recoiled.
She was holding them. She was actually holding them alone in the bay, bleeding from a cut along her left ear where one of them had gotten close.
My wolf wanted to tear through every body between us and reach her, and the man underneath wanted the same thing, and neither of us could get there because two more enforcers were circling our position and Wade was losing blood from the bite along his ribs.
Then Conrad came out of the storm.
He’d waited. That was the thing I would remember afterward, the thing that made me understand what kind of man we were fighting.
He hadn’t charged in with his wolves. He hadn’t led the attack.
He’d stood in the tree line and watched his enforcers work, watched them cut the cables and crash the boats and draw the defenders out of position, and he’d waited until Nora committed.
She drove the gray wolf away from the lift with a snarl that echoed off the bay walls. For three seconds her back was to the open bay door. For three seconds she was exposed and focused on the retreating wolf.
Conrad hit her from the side.
His wolf was bigger than I’d expected, iron-gray and heavy, and he didn’t go for the throat.
He went for the leg. His jaws closed on Nora’s right rear thigh and wrenched.
The woman I loved screamed. The sound was short and sharp, cut off when her body hit the wet concrete and slid across the floor into the base of the workbench.
I lunged for the bay door and an enforcer met me halfway, driving his shoulder into my chest and sending us both tumbling across the icy ground.
I got my teeth into his scruff and tore, tasted blood and dirty fur, but another wolf hit me from behind and I went down hard, my lip splitting against my own teeth.
In the snow beside the bay door, Rafe collapsed.
He’d been running at a full sprint, ears flat and black fur streaked with wet snow, heading straight for the bay where Conrad stood over Nora. Then his rear legs buckled, his front legs folded, and he crashed into the snow.
The bond. The goddamn bond.
I understood it even as I fought to get free of the wolf pinning my shoulders.
The pain from the bite to Nora’s thigh and her impact with the concrete had traveled through the open rejection bond and overwhelmed Rafe.
It held him to the frozen ground while his father advanced on the woman he’d hurt, abandoned, and come back to protect.
Wade was still on his feet, but he was twenty yards away, bleeding and surrounded.
His snarls carried over the crashes of bodies against metal and the wet sound of jaws meeting fur.
The two enforcers only meant to pin me down in the snow and keep me from reaching the bay door while Conrad finished what he’d come to do.
I twisted and caught one wolf’s foreleg in my teeth, bit down until I felt bone flex, and he yelped and pulled free.
The other drove his weight onto my spine.
My ribs creaked. Snow filled my nostrils and I couldn’t breathe for a second, two, and through the open bay door I watched Conrad’s iron-gray wolf circle the workbench where Nora lay.
She was trying to stand. Her right rear leg wouldn’t hold.
The thigh was torn deep enough that dark blood pooled on the concrete beneath her, but she got her front legs under her and bared her teeth at the wolf that outweighed her by eighty pounds.
Her auburn fur was matted and wet, her ears flat, her eyes blazing in the emergency floods’ pale light.
She looked like the smallest, fiercest thing I had ever seen, and I loved her so much in that moment it hurt.
Rafe was still down. His body shook in the snow, his black fur trembling, his legs making weak cycling motions. The pain flooding through the bond held him flat. His eyes stayed open and wild, locked on the bay door, but his body would not answer.
Conrad stood between them.
The wolf who had ordered his men to seize Nora, cast out his own son, and driven through a gale to end what he could not control lowered his head and walked toward her with slow, deliberate steps.
I threw the enforcer off my back with a heave that sent pain through my shoulder, rolled to my feet, and charged the bay door.
A third wolf intercepted me at the threshold.
He was fresh, uninjured, and faster than I was.
His teeth caught my shoulder and spun me into the doorframe.
Pain flared, and I went down in the snow.
Through the opening, I saw Nora braced against the workbench, her torn leg trailing blood across the floor. Conrad was only steps away.
I got up, but the wolf hit me again. Behind me, Wade had finally broken free and was coming, his heavy paws striking the ice. He was hurt and slow, and the enforcers were regrouping between us and the bay.
In the snow, Rafe’s legs stopped cycling. His eyes stayed locked on Conrad as his father advanced toward Nora. Rafe’s whine rose toward a howl and carried over the wind.
Conrad reached the workbench. Nora snarled at him from the floor, blood on her teeth, her torn leg useless beneath her.
And I could not get through.