The Werewolf Society Box Set Page 7

  Heat pooled low in her belly. Lick. Kiss. She forced away the images those words conjured. “You know what I mean. I’m not one of those Guard groupies.”

  “If you were, I wouldn’t be interested in you, and I am interested in you. Very interested, Sarah. And so we’re clear, what happens between us stays between us. I don’t share.”

  The possessiveness of his words rattled her to the core, and aroused her way too much. She had to get away from him or she’d never resist him. And he meant what he’d said, that he would keep what was between them between them. She smelled his honesty, saw it in his eyes. That honesty mattered to her and tempted her to give into her desire.

  He reached up and brushed his knuckles gently down her cheek, his tone softly prodding. “What’s holding you back?”

  “You know how hard it is going to be for me to get hired by the council,” she said. “Being seen as your submissive will make me look too weak for the job.”

  “You are a lot of things to me, things you don’t understand yet, but you aren’t my submissive and I would never ask that of you. At least, not outside the bedroom.”

  Heat pooled between her thighs, the idea of being naked and submissive to him, so tantalizing she barely found her voice. “You’re a wolf, Kole, an alpha in the Guard. We both know it’s your nature.”

  “We have females in the Guard,” he countered.

  “But they aren’t in direct contact with the council nor are they-”

  A knock sounded on the door.

  Mated, she finished silently, rattled at how easily the word came to her mind.

  “I need the phone,” a man shouted. “Hurry up in there.”

  Kole stared at her, unmoving. “When is your shift over?”

  She opened her mouth with the intent to tell him it was none of his business, and somehow, when she’d never had trouble controlling her tongue before now, she found herself saying instead, “Two hours.”

  He closed the small space between them, his hand framing her waist, branding her with his touch. His breath was warm as he leaned down and pressed his lips to her ear. “See you in two hours.” And then he was gone, pushing open the door and stepping into the casino.

  Chapter Two

  With her shift over, Sarah headed toward the employee area to clock out. She hadn’t seen Kole for the entire two hours since he’d left her in the phone booth, but she could feel him nearby, sense his presence and his hunger for her. He would find her. He would have her. And God, that turned her on like nothing ever had. He hadn’t even really touched her yet and she was burning up with need. The kind of need she’d heard spoken of when a wolf found her mate. Exactly why she had to escape Kole and do so now. If she mated with Kole, she’d lose herself to him, and she’d lose credibility as an independent thinker. She’d worked too hard to be a role model for female wolves to let that happen.

  Decision made, Sarah hurried through the process of clocking out, and was about to head to the private VIP elevators that led to a hidden city of The Society when her cell phone buzzed with a text. Sarah glanced at the message from her sister, Dana. I need a ride. I’m at 1010 Nevada Street. Sarah frowned, feeling oddly uneasy. Her sister was off work tonight and had a date with some wolf Sarah had never met. She tried to dial Dana but she didn’t answer. Sarah’s instincts, which were more developed than most wolves her age – a selling point to have her appointed to legal aid for the council – screamed with warning. Something wasn’t right. She tried to dial her sister again. Nothing. No answer.

  Sarah headed for the parking garage and a sense of urgency had her pace at a near run. She was just about to get into her car when a fancy sports car pulled up next to her. The window slid down to reveal Riley Montgomery, one of the wolves on the security team for the casino. “Let me guess. You’re going to pick up your sister.”

  That odd tingling sensation beneath her skin intensified. “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “She texted me and said you weren’t replying.”

  Sarah didn’t know Riley well and she wasn’t aware that her sister did, though Dana had worked at the casino the entire time Sarah had been in college, so it made sense that she would. And since her sister liked dark haired wolves with too many muscles for Sarah’s taste, and Riley was certainly those things, it seemed even more likely.

  “I’ll get her,” Sarah said. “I tried to call her and she didn’t answer.”

  “Hop in,” he said. “I’m going with you. Something about this feels off to me.”

  So very off, Sarah thought, wanting to refuse and wishing Kole would show up. She’d feel a whole lot better bringing him along for the pickup. “All right.”

  She climbed into the passenger side of the car and asked, “Do you have the address?”

  “Got it,” he said lifting his phone and setting it back on his lap. “Remember? She texted me, too.”

  “Right,” she said, but something didn’t sit right.

  They didn’t speak on the short three block ride and she thought he was trying to read her. Like her skill to sense things, she was pretty darn good at masking her emotions. Except with Kole, of course, since lust was a hormonal thing that had a scent she couldn’t control. And she had plenty of lust for the wolf. But she could read Riley and he was edgy, almost nervous, which made her edgy and nervous, certain that getting into this car wasn’t the right move.

  The car stopped in front of a steel warehouse with loading ramps and limited lighting that made her glad for her night vision. “Is this the right address?”

  “Yeah,” he said, glancing at the building. “A little odd for her to be here.”

  “A little?” she asked, her stomach knotting.

  “A lot,” he corrected. “Let’s go in.” He pushed out of the vehicle.

  Sarah dialed her sister and it was still ringing when he pulled open her door. Shouldn’t he be suggesting she stay here and he check things out?

  “Ready?”

  There really wasn’t any answer but ‘yes’ so she got out of the car. “To get my sister and get out of here,” she said. “Yes.”

  He waved her forward. She inhaled and straightened her spine, walking toward the warehouse and now that she was moving she did so quickly, the idea of her sister in this place beginning to freak her out.

  Sarah stopped at the steps, expecting Riley to go first. He didn’t. She walked up the steps and entered the warehouse to stop dead in her tracks as she brought the room into focus., Bile rose in the back of her throat and her heart all but stopped beating. Her parents and her sister were gagged and tied to chairs with four armed wolves standing around them.

  “Welcome to the party,” Riley said, grabbing her from behind, his breath hot on her neck.

  A wolf she recognized as Derek St. John, a known leader within the rebel movement trying to take over the Society, greeted her, his voice dripping with ugly nastiness that defied his dark, good looks. “Hello, Sarah. I’m going to give you a gift. See, your father won’t give me the codes to the casino safe. He says the council will kill him. So I now have his two daughters and his wife. I’m going to kill one of you and rape the others while he watches. Sooner or later, he will either give me the codes, or I’ll kill all of you. Now, here is your gift. You get to decide who gets killed and who gets raped.”

  ***

  Kole cursed. He’d reached the edge of the warehouse too late to stop their entry. Thanks to a couple of pack wolves in a power play, Kole had been seconds shy of reaching Sarah before she’d gotten into the car with Riley, but he’d sensed her worry and her unease. Unwilling to wait on the backup he’d called for the instant Riley had turned into the warehouse district, Kole eyed the broken window above his head and launched himself up to the ledge. He settled silently on the other side of the wall, in a dark hallway, pausing to draw his weapons. His knife was silver and his gun was loaded with the same silver that would kill a wolf if it touched the bloodstream. He crept down the hall toward the entrance of the warehous
e.

  The instant he was inside and he heard the rebel bastard Derek’s familiar voice, he knew this was worse than he’d imagined. He inched his way down the hall, bringing Riley’s back into view, but unable to see the rest of the warehouse and what he was up against.

  “So,” Derek taunted Sarah, his voice pure evil. “You choose. Who do I kill and who do I rape? But wait. Before you answer, remember. Once you’re dead, you don’t come back. Rape, well, you might even enjoy it.”

  “Me,” Sarah said, her voice terse. “Kill me.”

  Kole knew what a loose cannon Derek was and he wasn’t waiting to find out if Derek would shoot Sarah. He threw the poison blade at the back of Riley’s skull, and closed the distance between them so quickly that he’d shoved Sarah behind him before the bastard ever hit the ground.

  “Run!” he shouted at her, drawing a second gun.

  He fired at the wolves and three of the four went down, but that bastard Derek managed to get away. Kole turned, aware that Sarah was still behind him.

  “I have to untie them!” she shouted, but he grabbed her.

  “No,” he said. “They’ll shoot you the minute you’re in the open. “ It was then that his keen, ancient nose sniffed the explosives.

  Chapter Three

  Kole threw Sarah over his shoulder and took off running, hitting the outdoors the same instant the building went up in a massive explosion that threw them both in the air. Somehow he managed to hold onto Sarah and land on his back to absorb the fall. His bones rattled from the impact, but he didn’t let himself pause. He rolled Sarah onto her back and covered her body with his just as fiery pieces of the building came down on top of him.

  Pain ripped through Kole’s back, fire torching his clothes and then his skin before he heard the shouts behind him. He rolled off of Sarah and tore off his jacket, and she was there in an instant, throwing dirt on his back to stop the flames.

  “Be okay,” she was ordering him. “Be okay. God. Please be okay.”

  Kole hurt but he didn’t care. It was the desperation and pain that rolled off of Sarah that was killing him, not the fire. He knew the instant the flames were out and he turned to Sarah and pulled her into his arms.

  “I’m okay,” he promised. “Are you okay?”

  Sirens sounded in the distance. “Yes, I–” She gasped and turned to the building as the implications and horror the explosion hit her. “No! No! No! No!” She started to run and he wrapped his arms around her from behind, halting her progress and molding her back to his front.

  “Let go! Let go, damn it!” She kicked and fought and he held her tight, knowing it was too late, knowing she’d die if she ran into those flames. He wouldn’t let that happen to anyone, especially not her. She mattered to him in ways he couldn’t explain and had been trying to understand for weeks now.

  “Damn you, Kole! Let go!”

  “I can’t do that,” he said, burying his face in her hair, her pain twisting him in knots. “I can’t do that.”

  She stopped fighting and a sob escaped her lips, followed by another. He couldn’t imagine the hurt he’d feel if he lost his parents, how he’d react, and he desperately wanted to turn back time, to make this not be real. She was shaking so hard it scared him. She was going into shock. He sat down and pulled her close, and would have called for Nico, their pack leader, but he never got the chance.

  “I’m here,” Kelvin Ross, the Society’s primary doctor shouted, running towards him with Nico by his side. They both had shoulder length dark hair and were in leather to make a silver blade have to work just a little harder to make contact. Both damn good to see.

  The sirens sounded loudly behind him as Kelvin and Nico knelt beside Kole and Sarah, who was shaking uncontrollably now, curled against him, her face buried in his chest, his t-shirt damp from the outpouring of her tears.

  Kelvin, who was fifty years older than Kole and Nico, pulled a syringe out of his pocket and injected Sarah. She went instantly limp in Kole’s arms. “She’ll be fine,” he promised. “Get her to the ambulance and let me look at your burns.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, glancing behind him to see the ambulance with a Society logo. He scooped Sarah up again, feeling a combination of possessiveness and of a need to protect her. There was something about this woman that the animal in him recognized and yearned for. “But I am riding with her.” His gaze lifted to the building, to the fire that had surely taken the lives of the wolves she loved, and he knew he had to be sure they were gone. “I need to go after her family.”

  Nico narrowed his gaze and nodded, accepted Sarah into his arms. “They’re gone,” Nico said. “You have to know that.”

  Kole didn’t reply. He took off running toward the fire, dreading what he would find, and dreading even more so the moment he had to tell Sarah what he found.

  ***

  Sarah jerked to a sitting position in the back of the ambulance, alone and gasping for air. She could hear voices just outside the door, but neither of the voices were Kole’s. She was cold and shaking and she could feel the drug in her system. But she wasn’t like other wolves. Drugs didn’t work on her. She didn’t know why and she didn’t care. She just had to get to her family. She shoved off the bed and stood on wobbly feet, knowing she had get into that building.

  She stopped at the ambulance door and leaned out to see what was happening. It was then that she saw Kole walking away from the flames. Alone. He was alone. He’d tried to find her family and he’d come back without them. Because they were dead. Dead. They were dead. Everything inside her seemed to turn to ice and shatter. She was shaking harder now but still she jumped down from the truck, glad Nico and whoever he was talking to were around the side of the vehicle, and she started running. She had no idea where she was running, just that she had to run. She had to get away. From this place, this reality, from Kole, who had saved her when she wasn’t even sure she wanted to live right now. God, why had he saved her and let them die? She hurt. She was broken. She ran.

  Eighteen months later...

  Present Day

  Chapter Four

  There was a woman, the country song playing in the crowded Ft. Worth, Texas bar declared. Wasn’t there always? Kole thought, tipping back his beer, and then set it back on the bar. Behind him was a packed dance floor and tables filled with patrons. Even with a few too many rowdy cowboys for his taste, it was still calm in comparison to a normal night at Benedantti, the club the wolves favored inside Paris Hotel and Casino. Past the hotspots VIP doors, there were no humans allowed, and wolves tended to let go a little too much. If they got out of hand, they answered to their Pack Leader. Pack Leader, a title that would soon be Kole’s as Nico had accepted a post with a Special Magical Task force that took fighting the rebels of their kind to a whole new level. A change that brought Kole back to the distraction he had to deal with before he assumed his new role. Back to the woman, to Sarah, who’d haunted his sleep for going on two years now, since she’d disappeared from that ambulance.

  He’d looked for her after she’d disappeared from the ambulance, certain Derek had kidnapped her. All the more reason to hunt Derek with every free moment he had even after the council had declared Sarah dead. He’d never believed she was dead, never considered the possibility.

  Then impossibly, six months ago, Sarah had started calling into the Society to report dead rebel wolf bodies needing cleanup. She’d become a vigilante and now she had the council’s attention, the King’s attention. Not that they were against the rebels destroying the rebels terrorizing innocents and trying to overthrow the government, but she was a wild card who risked exposing them to the humans, and the order was to bring her home for judgment. Kole knew that meant she’d be incarcerated and he wasn’t letting that happen. Not when he’d failed her, when he’d created what she’d become by letting her parents die.

  He’d tracked her here, and it hadn’t been easy. With the help of a little witch he’d once rubbed shoulders with, he’d figured out th
at Sarah had been using some sort of magic to shield her location. And if he could figure it out, so could Derek. Just being in the same building as her, he could almost taste her kiss again, the sweet flavor of her passion.

  Unfortunately, Sarah wasn’t the only wolf he scented in the place. There were four others here that he’d already placed at a corner table, drinking beer and laughing. Young wolves, not more than fifty, who’d been foolish enough to follow the rebel movement, using humans like puppets and pawns, power hungry and blood thirsty. A movement far too many of the elders like himself, those a century or older, and a quarter of a way into their life expectancy, had followed.

  She was close now, behind him, and he had to give her credit for her skill at masking her hunger for vengeance and revenge. Clearly there was a reason why she’d earned her nickname the ‘raven devil’ beyond her hair color she often used wigs to disguise. Her real skill was that she could mask her emotions, her deep desire for revenge, the hate of the rebels, in a way few, even the ancients of their kind well over a century old like himself could do, let alone a wolf as young as she.

  He turned slowly, kicking back a tequila shot for the pure burn down his throat that reminded him he was alive and he wanted to stay that way. It didn’t scar like beating his head against a concrete wall, and wolves needed a whole heck of a lot more than a few shots to get drunk. That’s what he’d felt like searching for Sarah, like beating his head against a wall at every damn dead end.

  He stood up, sensing her movement towards the back of the bar and weaving through the crowd. A woman stopped in front of him, her hands going to his chest.

  “Hi good looking. How about a dance?”

  “Sorry, in a rush,” he said, all too aware that Sarah was quickly moving away from him and stepping around the woman, he quickened his steps. He rounded the hallway towards the bathrooms and cursed at the sight of the exit door shutting. Surely, Sarah wasn’t foolish enough to go outside with a group of rebels alone. But she had been. There was no question about it.