Wolf Freed

by Sadie Moss

  “Be down in a second,” he said quickly, clearing his throat as he turned his head away from me.

  I hovered in the doorway for a second, torn by indecision. Then I crept forward, stopping a few feet from the bed. Jackson’s body had tensed as I approached, and I was afraid if I got any closer, he’d leap up and make a run for it.

  “Are… are you okay?” I whispered. It was a stupid question—I knew he wasn’t—but I couldn’t think of a better opening line.

  “Yeah.” He shot me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes at all. “Fine.”

  “Well, that’s a lie.”

  He huffed a breath but didn’t disagree. “We should get downstairs. The doc is probably—”

  “Jackson,” I interrupted, before he could brush me off again. “Is this about the… the baby? I understand if you’re upset. It’s so, so much to take in, and this is the worst time to even think about any of this. It was a shock to me too.”

  “When?”

  My brows furrowed as I blinked. “What?”

  Finally, Jackson did look up at me, his amber eyes burning with intensity. “When, Alexis? When was it a shock? Tonight? When Doctor Shepherd told you?”

  Fuck.

  I sank onto the bed a short distance from my mate. “Jackson, I—”

  “You knew, didn’t you?”

  My gaze fell to my hands before following the beam of my flashlight to an abandoned dollhouse against the opposite wall. “Yes.”

  His usually laughing features were tight with pain as he nodded. “Thought so. Were you ever gonna tell us?”

  My head snapped up, and I scooted closer to him on the bed. “Of course I was! I was just waiting for the right time—”

  A disbelieving expression crossed his face. “The right time? Alexis, the right time for news like that is as soon as you know it. We’re your mates. And none of us ever thought—I mean, this shouldn’t even be possible.”

  “I know. I just—”

  “We’re going to be a family.” A jumble of emotions flashed behind his eyes as he said the word. “And none of us knew.”

  My heart squeezed with pain. I wished I could explain to him why I hadn’t told them, but it was hard for me to articulate even now. Every time I thought about that little black speck on my ultrasound, hope and fear clashed like opposing armies inside my chest. And fear kept winning.

  “I’m sorry, Jackson. I’m so sorry.”

  He reached a hand out to squeeze my knee, gifting me with another smile that wasn’t real. I could see him trying not to be hurt, trying not to be angry, but it wasn’t working.

  “It doesn’t matter. We know now.” He shrugged. “I’m gonna go… help the guys.”

  With that, he stood and left the room, crossing through the flashlight beam and making the light flicker. I gazed after him, biting my lip so hard it hurt.

  I’d learned already that although Jackson chose to infuse his life with as much optimism and joy as possible, it didn’t make him immune to pain. And I hated that I had hurt him. He was usually the most easygoing of my mates, so I wasn’t quite sure why, out of all of them, he was the one having the hardest time with this.

  Our conversation by the lake that night he had promised me “stupid fun” filtered through my mind, and my hand moved unconsciously to cover my lower belly.

  Jackson had told me he daydreamed of a future with me and his pack mates, a normal life where we had a house and friends, where we were settled down and not constantly on the run. He hadn’t ever mentioned kids in that vision of the future—and why would he, when none of us thought that was possible?

  But when I thought about what he’d said, what he had described…

  It sounded a hell of a lot like a family.

  My heart ached. Maybe that’s why my keeping the baby a secret had upset him so badly. Because of how much he wanted this.

  Footsteps pounded on the stairs, and a moment later, Jackson appeared in the doorway again, his hands braced on the frame.

  I stood quickly, my heart leaping in my chest, searching for the words I still wasn’t ready to say. “Jackson, I—”

  “You need to come downstairs.” He shook his head, his expression hard. “Val’s on the phone. It’s not good.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  His words were like a fire under my ass, and before he’d even finished speaking, I was on my feet. I followed him down the stairs, my flashlight beam bouncing over the walls as we raced down them as fast as we could without falling.

  When we reached the kitchen, my other three mates and Carl were bent over the table, the burner phone between them.

  Val’s voice sounded tinny and strange as it poured from the shitty speaker on the old phone.

  “We lost one in the fight, and two more to their wolf forms. We’re trying to keep them with us, hoping they’ll come back, but tensions are so high right now, I’m not holding my breath. For shifters that walk the line, stress makes it that much harder to control their wolves.”

  “Fight?” Breathing heavily, I latched onto that first piece of information, resting my palms on the table and leaning over so my head was closer to the phone. My mates met my eyes with concerned glances. “What fight?”

  “Two Strand hunters found us.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not sure how. But there are dozens of ways they could’ve tracked us down, really.” She paused, then added, “You’ve done the best you can, Alexis. We all have. But you said it yourself. Nowhere is truly safe.”

  “Damn it.” Self-recrimination burned in my gut. “Where are the hunters now?”

  “Dead. We managed to draw them out of the hotel, so no humans got caught in the fight, and none witnessed it either. But we’re still leaving. Hunters are like fucking ants. One shows up at your picnic and you can sure as fuck bet there’ll be others.”

  “Good. Okay.”

  “Any word on where the shifters were all shipped? We need to get moving, and the pack needs a damn purpose. I’m afraid we’re going to lose more to their wolves if we don’t do something soon.”

  My throat tightened, my body fighting against the answer I didn’t want to give. That we had no information to share yet.

  “No.” Noah spoke for me, his gray-blue gaze meeting mine. “But we have Doctor Shepherd. We have files from Strand. We’ll find something, and we’ll get it to you as soon as we can.”

  There was a beat of silence while Val processed that. Then she said, “Show that fucker what we’re made of. And call me when you know something.”

  The line went dead, her words echoing in the small kitchen.

  Rhys ran a hand through his black curls before pounding his fist against the table, making the phone jump. “Fuck!”

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Noah said reasonably, always the one to keep his calm. “We still know exactly what we need to do, and it’s the same thing we came here for. We just need to—work faster.”

  “Yeah, I’ll work faster.”

  The words were barely out of my dark-haired mate’s mouth before he was up and heading for the basement stairs. We all followed him down, pouring into the dimly lit, unfinished room behind him as he made a beeline for Doctor Shepherd.

  Molly and Sariah parted to make way for him, stepping backward as he loomed over the bound man, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.

  “Hey! Wake up, doc! We’ve got some goddamn questions for you.”

  At first, I regretted the mens’ decision to dose Doctor Shepherd with the sedative he’d intended to give me. As he slowly roused himself under Rhys’s watchful eye, the man was so loopy he was completely unintelligible. He slurred responses to questions we asked him, shaking his head listlessly back and forth and muttering to himself.

  But as he finally began to come out from under the effects of the drug, I found myself wishing we had more of it. Drugged Doctor Shepherd had been loopy and incomprehensible, but sober Doctor Shepherd was stone-faced and unbending, staring back at us
with a hard sneer and refusing to answer any questions.

  We threatened him, but he called our bluff almost immediately—and I saw something shift in his expression when he realized we wouldn’t kill him. We needed him too badly. Armed with that knowledge, he glared spitefully back at us from his one good eye. If he’d been able to move his hands, I was sure he would’ve crossed his arms over his chest in defiance.

  After an hour or so of working on him with no luck, Rhys kicked everyone out of the room so he could try alone. I knew exactly what that meant, and my heart wept for the little piece of Rhys’s soul that would be sacrificed in our hunt for answers. But if that was what it took to get answers from Doctor Shepherd, we didn’t have a choice.

  The world needed healers, but it needed fighters too.

  In the kitchen, the rest of us pored over the files we’d taken from Doctor Shepherd’s office—and seeing what was written in them made me feel much less guilty about what was happening below us.

  They detailed experiments Doctor Shepherd had personally performed on subjects, dating back to before the beginnings of the Shifter Initiative. I didn’t know medicine well enough to understand what a lot of it meant, but Molly interpreted as best she could.

  “He was using different dosages and types of drugs to try to control the human body’s response to having its DNA altered so drastically like that,” she said, peering down at one of the files. “He’s got dozens of different ‘recipes’ he tried—all for different drugs mixed with the same base compound. This serum he calls ‘the Source’. What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means this guy is fucking crazy,” Carl muttered, his fingers flying over the keys of one of his laptops before he shifted his focus back to Doctor Shepherd’s computer. He’d been trying to hack his way past the computer’s security with no luck so far.

  “Nils said it was a gift from the gods.” I scrubbed my hands over my face, pushing back the brown strands of hair that fell into my eyes. “Doctor Shepherd said the same damn thing. But fuck if I know what that means.”

  Molly lifted her gaze from the paper in front of her, her blue-green eyes narrowing. “A gift from the gods…? You mean, not science.”

  “Oh shit.” Carl chuckled under his breath, still typing madly away. “You’re speaking her language now.”

  His girlfriend had a mild fascination with the occult and strange, unexplained phenomena. It was part of what had made her so accepting of the fact that we were shifters, beings who were part human, part wolf. She’d seen us shift with her own eyes, sure, but there were plenty of people who still would’ve insisted it couldn’t be real.

  Exactly like part of me was doing now as I contemplated the idea that it wasn’t just science that had turned me and my mates into shifters.

  But if not science, then what?

  Magic?

  Godly powers?

  “You know ancient civilizations used to think the movement of the stars across the sky was because of magic, right?” Molly asked, interrupting my thoughts. Sariah leaned forward with an interested expression. “Now we look at them, and we know exactly why they appear to move—we can even chart and predict where they’ll move.”

  “Yeah? So what are you saying?” Noah shook his head, pacing around the side of the table.

  There were only four chairs available, and one of them was broken. West, Sariah, and Carl sat while the rest of us stood. My mate had offered me the seat, but I was too jittery to stay still.

  “I’m saying science we don’t understand yet might as well be magic. It doesn’t matter what we call it, it just is.” Molly shook her head, looking down at the files in her hands again.

  Heavy steps coming up the basement stairs drew my attention, and I turned to see Rhys walk through the open doorway into the kitchen.

  My heart leapt hopefully, diving right back down to my toes again as I took in the expression on his face. “Anything?”

  He shook his head. “No.” Leaning against the bare counter along one wall, he rubbed at his shoulder with one hand. “Fuck. You were right about him being a fucking cult leader, West. Except unlike most cult leaders, this guy actually believes his own damn hype. He won’t say shit, and what he does say makes no sense.”

  I glanced down at the papers and computers spread all over the table, at my friends and loved ones combing through it all for information. Then I stiffened my spine. “Let me try.”

  West’s eyes widened, and he reached for my hand. “Scrubs, no. If Rhys couldn’t beat it out of him, you—”

  “I’m not gonna try to beat it out of him.” I squeezed his hand, chuckling darkly. I hated that my mate had the stomach for that, but I didn’t. And if Doctor Shepherd was so determined to protect his precious Source, torture wouldn’t work—at least not without doing things none of us could take back. “I just want to talk to him.”

  The room was silent for a beat, then West sighed and nodded. “Fine.”

  He started to push his chair back, but I raised my free hand, stopping him. “Alone.”

  “What—?”

  “No way—”

  “Are you fucking kidding—”

  My mates all spoke over each other at once. I stepped away from West, shaking my head. “I’ll be okay. I need to do this. He’s tied up; he can’t hurt me.”

  “Scrubs,” West said, his voice heavy. “You and I both know he doesn’t have to be able to touch you to hurt you.”

  I paused, biting my lip. He was right. The damage Strand had done to all of us was as much psychological as physical. And those wounds could be just as deep.

  But if he could hurt me that way, I could hurt him too.

  “I have to,” I repeated, stepping toward the door. “I won’t be long.”

  Rhys growled under his breath, a pained, protective sound, but I slipped out of the room without looking back. If I dwelled too long on their worry for me, I would lose my nerve entirely.

  And I needed all the courage I could muster to face the monster in the basement.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The stairs creaked as I stepped down them lightly, bracing myself for what I would find at the bottom. Rhys had been down there for a while, and although we hadn’t heard many noises filtering up to the kitchen, that didn’t necessarily mean much.

  Doctor Shepherd sat where I’d last seen him, tied to a chair in the middle of the room. The side of his face was a little more swollen, and his lip was cracked, but I couldn’t find much more evidence of violence on him than that.

  I paused mid-step, bracing my hand against the wall as a wave of love for my mate washed over me. Rhys might be a fighter, but even he had his limits. I was grateful he hadn’t done worse to this man—that he wasn’t the type of person who could.

  But that meant I had to be the one to end this. To pry out the information we needed before we lost our pack entirely.

  Doctor Shepherd looked up as I entered, his face twisting in faint surprise. I was sure he’d been expecting Rhys again, or maybe West.

  “Alexis.”

  I stopped several feet away from him, unable to force myself to move any closer. My arms itched to wrap themselves around my body, to provide some kind of shield, a barrier, but I kept them locked firmly at my sides. “Did you give me that name?”

  His brows drew together. “What?”

  “The name Alexis. Did you give it to me? Did McGowan give it to me? Or did my real parents?”

  Doctor Shepherd squinted his one good eye, shaking his head like he couldn’t understand why I was asking the question. “The men Strand bought you from told me that was your name. I don’t know who gave it to you.”

  I dipped my chin, absorbing that piece of information and trying to hide the hole it ripped in my heart. Turning away for a moment, I dragged another chair over from the corner, setting it a few feet from Doctor Shepherd before I took a seat.

  “You know how strange it is not to remember the first eleven years of your life?” I asked softly. “I use
d to think I remembered bits and pieces, but they couldn’t have been right. They were memories of the life you told me I had lived—of being sick all the time, of all those ER visits, of my ‘mother’ when she was younger. But none of it was real. It was a lie, just like the next ten years after that.”

  He sighed, shifting in his chair. Molly and Sariah had wrapped gauze around his ear, but spots of red were soaking through. “If you’re looking for an apology, kiddo, you’re out of luck.” His bloodshot eyes blazed with a fervor I was beginning to recognize. I’d seen flashes of it when I was his patient at Strand, but I’d always mistaken it as his passion for healing, for medicine. I’d been wrong. “I’m not sorry about anything I did, because look what came of it. Look where we are.”

  I scoffed. “What, with you tied up in a basement at my mercy? My mates all upstairs chomping at the bit to kill you?”

  His condescending, thin-lipped smile appeared again. “You’re not going to kill me, Alexis. You know it, and I know it. If you were, you would’ve let that black-haired bruiser do it already.”

  “Then you need to make yourself useful, Doctor Shepherd,” I said in a hard voice. “Because to be honest, keeping you alive is just as much of a risk as killing you.”

  Ignoring the threat in my words, he smiled wider. “You’ve changed so much since you left the facility, Alexis. I can’t believe I ever worried you wouldn’t be strong enough to survive the shift.”

  The pride in his voice made my skin crawl more than any threat or harsh word ever could have. After all this time, after everything I’d done, he still looked at me with wonder in his eyes. If I’d needed any more proof the man was crazy, that would definitely do it.

  I cleared my throat, pulling my shoulders back. “Doctor Shepherd, where is the Source?”

  “Alexis.” He blew out a breath, like an annoyed parent whose kid wouldn’t stop asking for the same damn toy over and over. “I already told you, I’m not going to say anything. Please, just stop.”