Chapter 18
GUNNAR
That fucker hurt Sebastian, his own son. I'd never understood how family members could turn their backs on one another, but now, with our twins growing inside me, every paternal instinct kicked in. I would kill Ivan Paska, if it was the last thing I did.
"Whatever you do, don't hurt the omega. Our life support systems aren't equipped to handle his sped-up metabolism."
That was good to know. Not only did they want me alive to birth our pups, but they also didn't want to hurt me. Well, I wanted to hurt them.
The armed guards had their sights trained on me, but they wouldn't take the shots.
I loped in close to the first, using his body as a shield from the other three.
Wolves were infamous for pack tactics and for knocking their victims prone, at least according to my favorite role-playing game.
Was that true in real life? We were about to find out.
I circled around the men, keeping one of them between me and the others as much as I could.
Finally, I was between them and the door.
Slamming my flank against the thick metal, I managed to push it shut.
I couldn't turn the crank without my hands, but any other guards would be foolhardy to open the door after the noise we were about to make.
I leaped at the nearest guard, knocking her to the floor.
At the first slash of my claws across her neck, she screamed.
The sound soon became a weird bubbling in her throat as blood poured from her wounds.
I circled back to gain more speed, this time tackling a guard in the chest and taking him down hard.
He hit the back of his head on the marble tile floor.
From the way his arms flopped to the ground on either side, I'd knocked him out cold.
The last two guards tried to flank me, so I grabbed the unconscious one by the throat and pulled him backward, my warning growls mixing with his warm blood as it trailed over my gums.
The turning of the crank drew the guards' attention. I bit down hard on the unconscious guard's neck, making sure he would never wake up. Then, I followed the noise.
The sight at the door filled me with glee. Sebastian had shifted back into a man. He cranked the wheel shut to prevent more guards from entering.
"You've already lost," Ivan said. "Locking yourself in here with us won't change anything. You're still outnumbered three to two, and you're weak."
Sebastian leaned against the heavy door, his grip on the circular handle all that held him up. "Fuck you," was all he could muster before sliding to the floor in a heap.
While the remaining guards were still distracted, I jumped them, bouncing from the one's hip to the other's shoulders and taking them both down face-first, their guns skittering out of reach.
Biting the back of the neck had worked well the first time.
I did it again, shaking my head furiously until I heard a sickening crack.
Then, I hopped to the next one, careful to avoid the pools of blood spreading across the floor.
The second guard was already on his hands and knees, crawling toward his assault rifle.
He reached for the shoulder strap, but I got there first, snatching it up in my mouth and circling to toss it over my shoulder.
The weapon fired several bullets upon landing, shattering the glass walls of our cages.
"That'll cost you, omega freak," Ivan shouted.
The man behind me grabbed my back foot and twisted, taking me down hard as the tendon snapped. A sound I'd never heard before gurgled from my throat, and Sebastian stirred.
I turned on the man, snapping my teeth in his face and pulling my bum leg behind me until I could finally latch onto his throat.
The man punched me on the snout and shoulders, trying to dissuade me, but I had only one objective: kill these motherfuckers.
They'd imprisoned us and threatened our lives and those of our unborn pups.
Not a single one of them would leave alive.
I exhaled, forcing the rushing blood from my mouth as I shook him from side to side. Finally, his neck broke and I let him go.
I heard a scrape behind me before pain exploded in my flank. The healing tendon snapped again, and I howled in pain.
"Stop this!" Ivan held the gun in both hands.
He'd swung it like a baseball bat to hit me where it hurt, and now he aimed it at Sebastian.
"Today's lab results show that the omega's bloodline is stronger than ours.
We could breed him with a human, and his pups would still be shifters.
" Ivan shook his head in mock sadness. "That means we don't need you anymore, Sebastian. "
"I need you!"
Sebastian stayed where he had slumped against the door. If my internal screaming couldn't wake him, he would never know that his own father held a rifle to his head.
I limped back a step, testing my bum leg.
It wasn't healing as fast as I'd hoped. Something was out of place, and each step brought a sharp burst of pain followed by heat and burning.
Rushing him was out of the question. My irregular gate made stealth impossible on the stone floor.
Thankfully, Ivan wasn't paying any attention to me as I closed the distance between us.
When he finally looked down, my teeth were mere inches from his calf.
He jerked away, but I caught his pant leg, yanking on it and bringing him down onto his back. The gun discharged into the ceiling, and then toward the back wall. The popping sounds were overloud in the echoing lab.
Suddenly, Sebastian stood over me, his fists balled. With a raised kick, he knocked the weapon from his dad's hands, sending it skidding across the floor once more. Then he collapsed on his side, panting.
"Do it," Sebastian said through our link. "End this."
I spit out the finely tailored wool and stalked my prey, my back right leg still not cooperating.
It didn't matter. Ivan Paska had hurt us for the last time.
With him gone, we would end this imprisonment, the experiments, and the daily threats on our lives.
The world would be a better place without him in it.
A growl caught my attention, and suddenly Sebastian was beside me, wolf jaws clamped around his dad's right arm. The man held a utility knife with the same paint scheme as the rifle. He must have broken it loose from the weapon before Sebastian kicked it away.
Sebastian was magnificent in his wolf form, and he seemed to have more energy. He ravaged Ivan's arm until the bone poked through his skin and blood poured onto the white floor.
While it would have taken longer to let my former idol bleed out from the grievous wound, I wanted him dead.
Clamping my teeth around Ivan's neck, I bit down, snapping through arteries, veins, and tendons until enamel met bone.
With a hard wrench, I snapped his neck and kept pulling until it came free from the rest of his body.
"I think I'm gonna be sick." In his human form, Sebastian dry-heaved a few feet away, in a spot somehow still clean after I'd tracked blood from body to body.
I spit out my gruesome souvenir and padded over to him, rubbing my good flank against his shoulder and accidentally painting him with blood. The sight made my head reel, and I fell onto my wounded side, my breaths too shallow to give me any relief.
"It's okay, Gunnar. It's going to be okay."
I shook my head. I wasn't ready to be a dad, but our babies were coming. The lower back pain I'd felt all day returned with a vengeance, even as my injured flank healed from sharp pain to a dull ache. I whined and placed my front paw on his foot.
He petted the top of my head. "Can you shift?"
I whined.
"You'll feel better."
"The babies are coming. I can't have them here. We need to leave."
A clank at the door startled us both. Sebastian slid through some blood as he crossed the lab.
My back leg burned with each step, but I made it to the wall behind him, where the gigantic door would shield us from view long enough to surprise the new arrivals.
Sebastian crouched on his knees, and fur rolled his skin under from ears to tail.
His wolf was bigger than mine, but after all the times we'd raced each other over the snow, I knew I was faster.
"I feel better now," he said. "Shifting helped me heal. I could eat a whole caribou, though. Or a bison."
Shifting would heal my leg, but my wolf was afraid. I was still in labor, and some unknown danger was at the door.
The crank swiveled, and my whole body tensed, ready to pounce on the new arrivals. With a metallic clank, the lock opened and the door swung toward us.
"Fuck me, is that Ivan?" A familiar voice echoed off the walls. "What the fuck were they doing down here?"
"I knew he had them in a secret lab." Dr. Amber Monroe's alto soothed my beast. "I fucking knew it."
Her boot heels clacked against the stone as she approached my enclosure, and then Sebastian's with the blown-out walls. Something on Dr. Bunting's computer screen caught her attention. "Gunnar's pregnant."
"Gunnar? That little slip of a thing?"
Sebastian's growl was the only warning Lonnie had before he was knocked prone on the floor with the giant wolf standing over him.
Amber screamed, and screamed again when Sebastian partially shifted, keeping only his tail, ears, and giant claws.
He twisted his wrist, and the sharp points dug further into Lonnie's tactical suit.
"Seb, is that you? Get off me, man. We're here to rescue you."
My mate's high laughter echoed off the remaining glass. "You're four months and five dead people too late."
"Yeah, well you still owe me a birthday party, asshole," Lonnie answered. When he pushed up off the floor, Sebastian let him up. "We did our share of cleaning house. Three dead guards and a couple dead scientists upstairs, too. Nothing like this, though."
"I'm so sorry," Amber said. "You've been here since we lost contact with you?"
"I guess?" Sebastian sank to the floor beside Lonnie and released his wolf until he looked human again. "I don't even know where 'here' is."
I crawled up behind Sebastian with my belly brushing the ground, careful not to alarm him when I placed my head in his lap.
He rubbed the fur between my ears. I wanted to curl up in his lap and lick him until I'd claimed every inch of his body.
It was so comforting to feel him beside me after so many months separated by glass.
"We're in the dead zone around Chernobyl." Lonnie glanced at Amber. "That's why it took us so long to get to you. It took us three months to find you, and another for Amber to develop an antidote for the radiation sickness."
"No guarantee it'll work," she said. "Is that Gunnar?"
"Way to change the subject from the horrible deaths we might experience in a few hours." Lonnie rolled his eyes, but then his gaze settled on me. "He really is pregnant, huh."
Sebastian spoke for me. "Our wolves say the babies are coming." With each stroke of his hand over my fur, I relaxed a little more, which only made my cramps worse. He gripped his side, like he had sympathy pains. "We need to get out of here."
Amber nodded. "Let's move. His body will protect the pups from the radiation. Once they're born, it'll be harder to tell, and I don't want to test my serum on … babies?"
"They'll be wolves, too," Sebastian said. "Won't that protect them?"
"I'm not taking any chances. You said babies?" Amber repeated.
"Twins," he confirmed, stroking his hand down my side again. My flank still burned from where Ivan had jabbed me with the butt of his assault rifle.
Amber noticed my flinch and kneeled beside me. "Is he hurt?"
"We heal fast," Sebastian said. "Let's go."
Sebastian's wolf called to mine, and I lifted my head from his lap. He squirmed into a squat and shifted back into his wolf.
"Well, that helps," Lonnie said. "I wondered where we would find clothes to fit you."
Sebastian growled at his friend, who only laughed. I rubbed along my mate's side, nudging my head against his. My back pain worsened again, and it hadn't been many minutes since it had let up. As far as contractions went, these were nothing, but this was only the beginning.