by Penny Alley
“Fuck you,” she snarled, but it was a useless defiance, nullified by the shakiness of her breathing and the tears that just kept falling. She couldn’t stop them. They fell even when she closed her eyes to block out his face. They fell faster when he shook her head to make her open them again. After the first few times, hard as she tried, she lost the strength to raise her arms high enough to wipe them all away.
Careful not to pinch her hair, Deacon rolled the window up. “Don’t worry. The drug is wearing off. By midnight you’ll likely be moving so well, I’ll have no choice but to bind you just so I can survive until morning. Such is the price I’m willing to pay for love.”
The guard waved to his companions and within seconds, the barred gate clicked, rattled, and finally raised up, clearing the way for the car to enter the well-manicured property of the Alpha Deacon. They rolled up the well-lit driveway to the house. Though not a mansion by any chevolak’s standards, it was nicer than any place Neoma had ever seen. Two stories, grand picture windows all along the front, and white Grecian pillars stood sentry on a porch built of gray-mottled stone. Before they had parked at the closed door of a two-car garage, two figures filed out of the house: Joela first, followed by her older brother, Jax, a sloppily-applied volka cast on his right arm held immobile against his chest via an adjustable shoulder sling. Neither looked happy to see their father. They were less so when they saw her.
“Home sweet home,” Deacon drawled sarcastically. “Dry your eyes, child. I find tears enchanting under the right circumstances, but those two will rip you to pieces if they see them.”
Neoma didn’t care. She tried to hold onto her anger. It should have been easy; all she kept hearing was those high-pitched puppy yelps as Scotty had bolted into the brush, but the longer she stared at him, the more those cries began to meld with other sounds, screams that had haunted her for five very long years.
“Why?” she finally broke, shaking her head as he beckoned Joela and Jax to the car. “I’d have done anything you wanted.” Her voice cracked. “You know I would have. Anything. You only had to let Scotty go.”
“The son of a traitor is nothing more than future betrayal waiting to grow up. Even you should know that.” Pulling his handkerchief from his coat pocket, he folded it to find a corner not so deeply stained with Marcus’s blood and wiped the tears from her face. “Plus, I never could quite bring myself to like the boy. He was always…staring. I hated that, but yours is a mothering heart and no doubt blind to such childish faults. You may never forgive what I’ve done, but that’s all right. I’ll give you other children; strong-willed sons and daughters worthy of us both. Nothing brings a woman to obedience faster than the needy suckle of a newborn pup.”
His smile softened, but it wasn’t sympathy that she saw in those terrible eyes of his.
“I hate you,” she whispered, but only once. After that, her uncooperative body fell into his shoulder as she screamed, “I hate you!”
From the front seat, Detric and Alaric waited in silence and watched her.
Taking her collapse as if it were a cry for comfort, Deacon wrapped his arms around her. He tutted and stroked her hair. “Such passion,” he admired, his smile unchanged. “I know I shouldn’t indulge it, but a paternal heart, you see, is every bit as tender as a maternal one.”
Her whole body shuddered when he pressed a kiss upon her brow and then, reaching behind her to open the car door, dumped her out. It wasn’t a gentle landing, but he didn’t let her drop either. Rather, he guided her down, his grip on her arms arresting her fall until she was crumpled on the blacktop, her arms and legs folding in on top of her, the roughness of the pavement scuffling her back and hip when Deacon let go and gravity took over, rolling her slightly onto her side.
Her shoulders shook, jerking her against the ground as she alternately sucked air and wept, braying out her loss while Deacon stepped over her.
“Joela.” He beckoned his frowning daughter closer. “Help your new stepmother inside. Be gentle,” he cautioned. “If I find so much as a cut on her, I’ll know who’s to blame.” He left her there, a crumpled doll of no further interest to him. Summoning his son’s attention with a snap of his fingers, Deacon headed inside. “Come, boy. I’m done being patient. Had I known stealing in and out of Hollow Hills would be so easy, we’d not still be swimming in this cesspool of chevolak. Summon my top lieutenants. I want everyone in the drawing room within the hour. We have an invasion to plan and my new Claiming to celebrate.”
The look Jax gave her before he followed his father inside was only half as poisonous as Joela’s.
“Don’t touch me,” Neoma hissed, unable to roll over. Unable to do anything but lie in that useless heap half under the car.
“As if I want to,” Joela bit back, her blue eyes snapping fire and every bit as helpless to avoid it as Neoma. They glared at one another until Alaric leaned out far enough to see where Neoma’s legs were in relation to the tires.
While Detric unlocked the garage door, he said, “You want to move her, or would you rather explain to the Alpha how you left her lying where I could run over her?”
Hands on her hips, Joela frowned at him, and then back at her. At first it seemed she might simply walk away and leave her. But with a blink and a bitter growl, she bent and seized Neoma’s arms, heaving her up onto feet that refused to work and legs that wouldn’t hold her.
“Stop making this difficult,” Joela snapped, but in the end, she did exactly as Neoma had done, every day of her life right up until now: She did as she’d been told.
* * * * *
“We are wasting time,” Gabe muttered, lying on his belly in rusted out center of what had once been a shopping cart return. Like much of the parking lot, in the years since this long-abandoned strip mall had said goodbye to its last customer, creeping ivy vines had spread from the landscaping islands in search of anything they could climb.
“We should wait a few hours,” Sebastian said, lying between Gabe and Colton. It was drizzling, making everything just that much more miserable, but while other buildings around the compound offered at least a little more shelter, this was the only one that wasn’t bathed in lights.
He’d forgotten how ugly cities were—there weren’t many trees, fewer gardens, and virtually nothing in the way of flowers. Everywhere he looked, the ground was blanketed in cracked blocks of uneven concrete, and everything from the pavement to the sky stank, including the rain. He was glad he’d left Scotty with Ian, parked a little ways off the mountain highway down a little dirty road where, hopefully, no one would find them. He was safer there, Gabe tried to tell himself, but not by much. He wouldn’t really be safe again until Gabe got him back into Neoma’s arms.
And her back into his.
“Fuck waiting,” Gabe growled, trying hard not to breathe too deeply. The ivy around his particular cart pole smelled like cat piss, and there were ants crawling up his arm and into his shirt. “If she was your Bride, you wouldn’t—”
“If she was my Bride,” Sebastian snapped back, “I’d wait. Deacon’s not an idiot. He’s got walls around both the compound and his house. Lights every twenty feet, motion-sensing cameras every thirty, and armed patrols crisscrossing every ten minutes. If we go in now, it really will be suicide.”
“Then don’t come!” Swatting ants off his arm, Gabe fought to control his rising frustration, but it was impossible. He wasn’t blind, and Sebastian wasn’t wrong. Deacon’s compound was every bit as awful as Neoma had described. A militarized city within a city, it consumed five city blocks—houses, apartments, laundromat and commissary, one grocery store and one gas station—all of it surrounded by high prison walls topped with razor wire. They’d scouted the perimeter twice now, but the only entrance in or out was through the guard shack across the street. What the chevolak thought of their anti-social neighbors he had no idea, but it was a wonder he hadn’t already seen it on the news, surrounded by FBI and SWAT teams and smoking from teargas and flames.
/> He had to get in there. He had to get Neoma out.
“You’re an idiot, so I know it’s hard, but just try for a minute to think this through.” Leaves rustled as Sebastian pointed through the rusted bars. “Judging by grandeur and the fact there are three men standing watch in the driveway, I’d say that house located in the middle of that whole mess is Deacon’s. That would make all those smaller ones flanking it, his lieutenants’. Now, that’s a barrack; that’s where we’ll find his infantry and the rest are probably civilian apartments. Think,” Sebastian said again, clapping his hand onto Gabe’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. How he managed to make that gesture both consoling and condescending, Gabe didn’t know, but he had exactly two seconds to remove his hand or lose it at the shoulder.
“It’s not yet midnight,” Sebastian said. “More than half the windows are lit, so most of his people are still awake. We need to wait. Give them a chance to fuck and get tired. Drink and get drunk. Sleep and get disoriented. Then, when the time is right, we’ll go in.”
There were a lot of lights on in Deacon’s compound. Gabe stared until the multitude of windows began to blur together and his eyes hurt from trying to focus on so much at once. Rain dripped from his hair onto his forehead, and then further down his face. He wiped at it impatiently before someone could mistake the moisture for tears.
“How long do you think?” Colton asked, brushing distractedly at something crawling on his neck.
Considering the gate, Sebastian said, “Three a.m. Everyone who isn’t on sentry duty will be sound asleep by then, and everyone who is will be dozing and bored. Three a.m. That’s when we’ll hit them.”
Gabe laughed. He kept it soft, but lack of volume made it no less angry. “I am not going to sit here for four hours, doing butt-thump nothing.”
“Did I say we’re going to do nothing? No, I did not.” Sebastian gestured to his brother, crouched a short distance away behind a time-weathered and vacant shopping sign.
Giving Colton and Gabe the same guarded frown, Angus nevertheless pulled out the black duffel bag he’d taken from the truck before they’d abandoned it several blocks back, on a well-lit street, directly across from the police station. The police station was so covered in graffiti, no one had any illusions that the Subaru would still be there when it came time to beat a hasty retreat.
Placing the bag on the ground where everyone could see it, Angus unzipped and displayed the contents.
“Is that dynamite?” Colton asked, incredulously.
Gabe didn’t bother trying to sound half that calm. “You had that crap in the car with my boy the whole time?”
“Like he knew it was there,” Angus said defensively. “It was securely boxed up and under the seat the whole time.”
“The seat we were sitting on? Are you insane?!”
Zipping the duffel bag closed, Angus slung it over his shoulder and army-crawled out from behind the neglected sign and into the ivy-covered cart return with the rest of them. A big man, both tall and broad, he lay down in the ivy, ants and cat piss right beside Gabe. He didn’t need to be standing to loom over him. “If you haven’t taught your kid how to behave around weapons,” he said, his bush of a beard doing little to hide his scowl, “then that’s your rotten parenting, not mine. I didn’t have him juggling grenades or refurbished Russian landmines. It’s just dynamite, for shit’s sake. We take it up the backroads when we go fishing all the time. It barely even sweats.”
“That shit is sweating?” Gabe whisper-bellowed, only belatedly remembering how close they were to the compound walls. He snapped a glance across the street, but all three gate guards were in their shack with the roar of dirt track racing blaring through the open window.
“Fish and Game is still law enforcement. You know that, right?” Colton said evenly. “Fishing with dynamite is illegal.”
“So is breaking and entering,” Sebastian said, exchanging mirrored looks of pained irritation with his brother. “And assault and battery, and attempted if not actually murder, or any number of the transgressions which we are about to commit here tonight. I’m curious. Are you really that hypocritical or are you just pissed because you know you never would have got this far without me?”
Gabe swatted an ant off his cheek, then rubbed his mouth, struggling for a calm he did not feel. Guns, dynamite, McQueens…Sebastian was right. But knowing that didn’t knock any one of those things out of the top three spots on his current shit list.
Four spots. Deacon was still holding strong at number one.
“You’re right,” Colton finally acknowledged. “In case I forget to tell you later on, thank you for your help. We’d still be walking into town right now if it weren’t for you and your brothers.”
Sebastian tipped him a smug nod. “Thank you.”
“But just so we’re all on the same page,” he continued. “If we live through this, I’m raiding your house just as soon as we get home.”
The McQueens exchanged looks again. Angus laughed, dropping his head onto his arms to smother the sound. Sebastian only smiled.
“Ever stolen a car, either of you?” he asked, all teeth.
Mentally adding grand theft auto to their list of transgressions, Gabe shook his head. “Nope.”
“No,” Colton admitted.
“Come with me, Alpha.” Patting Colton twice on the back, Sebastian winked at his brother. “Let Angus show your man how to make dynamite grenades while you and I take a walk. We can debate your chances of ever getting a McQueen in handcuffs while I demonstrate to you all the fine points of hotwiring a late-model Ford.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The effects of the muscle relaxant were long gone, but Neoma still couldn’t move. Small as she was, the kennel cage built into the lower frame of Deacon’s bed held her so tightly confined that even Shifting offered no relief. It was long, but not long enough to support a human lying stretched out. At less than two feet high and wide, she couldn’t stand and it had taken forever—after Joela stuffed her in—to turn around. The wire mesh of the door was too narrow for her to squeeze more than a finger through and the lock was a two-part mechanism that required both pushing and pulling to open. The same wire mesh made up the entire interior of the kennel. Already it was cutting into the tender pads of her paws, while the removable full-length pan beneath suggested she would be spending long hours trapped inside.
Neoma the wolf faced the front of the cage, which gave her an unobstructed view of Deacon’s bedroom door. Shifted or not, she had no illusions of how poorly she’d be able to defend herself later on, once he was rid of the guests she could hear laughing and talking somewhere beyond this room. He would easily drag her from this prison when and if he chose. And he would choose. He’d made no secret of that. Any minute now—and she’d been waiting for that minute for what felt like hours, the slow creep of mobility seeping back into her lethargic limbs and those limbs already beginning to cramp from the tightness of walls that refused to allow for stretching—Deacon was going to come to her, no longer merely a nightmare from her past, but her pup’s murderer and, after tonight, her rapist too.
But not if she killed him first.
Her lupine stare hard upon the door, Neoma held as still as she could, only distantly aware that it was growing stuffy and hot in the kennel where the only access for airflow lay in the open wire of the cage door. A drooping corner of blanket from above obscured part of that opening, but with her head resting tense on the bottom of the cage, she could see everything she needed to. Like the flick of a light switching off in the hallway beyond the door. Or the passing shadow that paused just outside to press an ear to the hollow wood panels and listen for her just as intently as she listened back. She feigned a pained whine. She even managed to make it sound weak and sickly, frightened—everything right now that she was not.
Content, the shadow moved on, retreating down the hall. Somewhere in the house, a door closed. From somewhere else, low male laughter became briefly more audible as an
other door opened. A new set of carpet-softened steps approached Deacon’s bedroom. Every nerve in Neoma’s wolfish body heightened when she saw the doorknob turn. The effort to keep her breathing slow and labored felt suffocating. Even harder was forcing her aching limbs to relax, as if she were still under the debilitating effects of the relaxant Marcus had injected her with. The door cracked open, but it wasn’t Deacon who peered in to check on her.
Hugging his broken arm to his chest, Jax slipped into the room. He checked the hall to make sure he wasn’t seen, then softly shut and locked the door behind him. Tall and lean, he stared at his own hand upon the door for a long time before he turned to her.
Neoma whined again, a warble of desperate submission by a volka incapable of anything but the barest toe-scrape along the wire bottom of the kennel.
“Still can’t move?” Jax tsked, as he approached the bed.
She whined again, fumbling to retreat despite the confining walls before collapsing once more in a heap of exhausted helplessness. Her stomach rolled, the tightness of so many angry knots sickening her. Throwing up right now could only have aided the illusion, but Neoma kept her muzzle shut and her teeth locked.
Jax hunkered down, tossing the blanket up over the bed so he could better see her; and she, him. More laughter from down the hall resulted in a nervous glance back over his shoulder before, scratching under his cast, Jax returned his cautious gaze to her. He was young, not much older than herself, but it wasn’t his age that Neoma saw as she feigned another sickly whimper. It was the cool calculation in his eyes—his father’s eyes—assessing and accepting every scrap of weakness she fed him.
“I’m trying to remember all this isn’t your fault,” he said as he reached into his sling to pull a long hunting knife from between his cast and chest. Wincing, he took the sling off over his head, gingerly maximizing his range of movement before edging close enough to unlock the kennel. “It’s nothing personal, little sister, but I haven’t survived that sonofabitch all this time to lose everything to your womb’s next regurgitation.”