“Riley!” Brenton’s voice slammed in to her made her go stiff. She turned to him in the doorway slowly.
“Yes?” She forced it out, still trying to show respect for her Alpha.
“Go for a run. Clear your head and then get back by lunch. You’ll back in here for the afternoon too since you seem to have an attitude today. Stay on the property.” He snarled, pointing out of the gym. She growled and stormed past him.
Fuck, she would have to continue this all afternoon? What special hell was she in now?
She stripped off her shirt before she even reached the backyard and finished everything else once she was there.
She shifted quickly and took off, letting herself fly into the woods at nearly top speed. She knew the area well enough at this point, she wasn’t worried about tripping. As long as she stayed in the center of the property, they let her out to run nearly every day. They knew how badly she needed to stretch out her legs. It was freeing to move that fast even when it burned her out fairly quickly. Nearly a football field from the house, she slowed down and trotted through the woods towards the stream that cut through the property. She liked playing in the water on warmer days, even when the guys didn’t want to get wet with her.
She had a couple hours until lunch, so she got to the stream and fell in a grassy spot and took a breather.
The last month had been wonderful except for the training in the morning. Sure, she wasn’t allowed to go back to work yet since they were still worried about her safety but everything was kind of good. She got Star back a week after the break-in and her cat was now a tripod. It was cute and Star adjusted really quickly to it. She also loved roaming around the mansion like she owned it, not caring about the giant shifters that also lived there.
As for her and the guys. Well, that was a weird situation. She fooled around with all of them but none of them let her pull the trigger and have sex. She was aching for it and she couldn’t convince any of them to just let it happen. She loved the dynamics between them and they had fallen into a really solid rhythm together. They just wouldn’t sleep with her. She was twenty-three with five hot almost lovers. Almost lovers since they had yet to get around to actually making love. And her feelings for them wouldn’t stop growing. Every day, she learned a little more about them, like Zachary was hated by his family for being a white tiger, which was pretty fucked up in her mind. Who could do that? The leopard brothers’ parents all hated each other. Troy’s mom hated Gabe’s mom and Gabe. Troy hated his mother and their dad hated nearly all of them except Gabe, who was technically the bastard son. Troy’s mom was the wife, not Gabe’s. That family sounded like a soap opera when they explained it to her.
She cared for them and she just wanted to get closer and closer to them. She hadn’t gone out with Phoebe in over two weeks and she was so done with Haley that she barely crossed her mind. Haley made that decision and Riley wasn’t going to dwell on it. These guys were her family and once she got past their insane spending habits, it’s worked well.
She did still have a hard time with bossy Brenton though. Once a week, he would have to drag her off and spank her ass until it burned for disobeying an order too many times. She could get away with once or twice on occasion but after that, he blistered her ass. Then he would get her insanely worked up and deny her a climax as the end of the punishment. After a few minutes of that, she would beg and promise never do to it again and he would let her finish. Then it happened all over again the next week. She was currently a day behind in her ‘piss off Brenton’ schedule. It was a good schedule. She wouldn’t ever admit to him that she disobeyed him on purpose.
She rolled around in the grass, trying to stretch out the soreness in her muscles from the training. She then took a dip in the stream, letting it soak her coat.
Perfect.
She knew she’d wasted nearly all her time laying about, so she needed to head back. As she left the stream, she heard a twig snap. She swung about to the noise. She was upwind to that direction and hissed softly, baring her teeth at what or who might be there. It was possibly one of the guys, they knew she liked this spot.
When nothing else happened over a couple minutes, she turned to head home. A weird sound of air decompressing and a sharp sting on her hip made her jump.
She spun to see her hip and growled at the dart in it. Fuck. She had seen that before in a training session. A tranquilizer dart.
“Got her!” A male voice called out and a ton of shuffling in the bushes happened around her. “Keep her in your sights!”
She turned toward the house and began to run.
“She’s a runner, boys!” A second voice called out. “Told you!” She felt like she recognized that voice. Weird.
She had less then a minute to made it back close enough for them to find her. She needed to also find a place to hide, it was rule one they had beaten into her head in case it ever happened. Shifter-hunters would tranq them then go in for the kill since it was safer. They didn’t want to tangle with an injured big cat with human intelligence.
She had to make it, she couldn’t get killed like this. At home. She just found her family.
She found a patch of bushes as she wobbled on her feet and dug in underneath the foliage. She blacked out before she get all the way in.
TROY
He sat for lunch with Zachary and Andrew. They all avoided mentioning the obvious.
Riley was over an hour late getting back from the run that Brenton had ordered her to go on. And they saw no sign of her coming up to the house or being close by.
“She could have fallen asleep,” Troy threw out. It happened to all of them at one point or another.
“Then we need to go out and get her dumb ass,” Zachary snarled. “She was in a fucking mood all morning but that doesn’t mean she’s just go pass out in the sun and ignore us.”
Troy nodded since Zachary was right. She had been a bit bitchy. She was insecure about her self defense in human form and was lashing out. It got worse every day, slowly building up to what happened today. She never snapped at them like that and Troy’s heart still ached from the tone she took with him.
Brenton walked in the kitchen, snarling.
“Where the fuck is she?”
“She’s late,” Zachary snarled. Even Andrew was there for lunch, having the day from the diner. He looked a little upset. Troy knew he’d been looking forward to helping her get through self defense.
“I told her that she need to be back by lunch,” Brenton roared. They all shrank back. Troy wished desperately his brother was there to back him up or just offer moral support when dealing with Angry Brenton. Angry Brenton was terrifying.
“We know,” Zachary growled softly to their Alpha. “We’ve been keeping an eye for her but there’s no sign of her close to the house. Only her trail when she left. We didn’t want to do a full search without your go ahead.”
Brenton nodded to that slowly. Troy watched him clench and relax his jaw several times. They sat in silence for a moment.
“Let me call G-”
“I’m here!” Gabe ran in, holding his laptop. “And I have really bad news!” He looked around. “Where’s Riley?” He paled.
“Over an hour late from getting back from a run I sent her on.” Brenton growled.
“Oh, no, she can’t be late right now,” Gabe hissed and placed his laptop on the counter. “Oh all the fucking times she’s not back on time.” He was shaking as he tried to open it.
“Gabe?” Troy had never seen him brother this worked up. “Brother, what’s wrong?”
“Fuck!” Gabe snarled, prying the laptop open finally. “Seventy-two hours ago, a Capture Alive Contract was placed on her! Two million in cash for whoever was able to grab her! I don’t know who put it out. I only found out it existed because someone claimed it! They reported that they would turn her over in forty-eight hours if the money was delivered to them on time! They fucking buried the contract deeper then my automated alert system could find,” Gab
e’s voice broke.
Troy dropped his glass and let it shatter on the floor. No one said anything for a long time, then Brenton roared, grabbing a coffee mug and throwing it over the bar into the dining room. They heard it shatter into a thousand pieces.
“Everyone backyard! Zachary, you and I going in cat form. Andrew, Troy, grab guns and cover us in case we find anyone out there. Gabe, find out who put the contract out and who fucking claimed it.” Brenton’s word were barely legible but they began moving.
Troy met Andrew at their gun safe and both took M4s. Their guns were maintained and cleaned once a week and kept fully loaded in case of emergencies. Like this one.
Once they were loaded up with enough ammo to take down a pride of lions, they moved into the back. Zachary and Brenton were ready to go and they began running to the tree line. Troy wouldn’t be about to hear anything Brenton or Zachary were saying, so he and Andrew just had to rely on the feline body language.
He saw Zachary catch Riley’s scent from when she left in morning and they followed close behind him.
They tracked the scent all the way to the stream, where they found the dart that must have hit her and then fallen off.
Troy pocketed it. They could analyze it later. She was definitely hit though. These fuckers had come on to their fucking property and grabbed right from under them. Andrew cursed and pointed. Boot tracks were everything. Troy walked around and tried to grab a scent.
He knew that scent and quickly ran through his recent memory.
The cougar he smelled in Riley’s apartment.
“Andrew, it’s the same guy,” he whispered. Zachary and Brenton were both checking for Riley’s exit trail.
“Yeah,” Andrew swallowed visibly. “Who the fuck is this guy?”
“A dead man,” Troy growled.
He and Andrew found ten scents of other shifters in total. They formed a semi circle around her favorite spot on the property. Had the property been breached for weeks now? They regularly checked for anything and none of them had found anything. Maybe they stumbled on her by accident and were actually planning on storming the house. Troy growled at the thought. The fuckers would have all died before they made it through the backdoor.
A huff told Troy and Andrew that they needed to followed Zachary and Brenton. They did without complaint. Troy followed them and realized where Riley’s trail was taking them.
“She was trying to get closer to house. She knew she was going down but wanted to be reachable by us.” Troy groaned. “And she wasn’t able to get close enough.”
“If she was running, her heart rate would have accelerated the effects of the drugs.” Andrew reminded him. “She did what she was trained. We can only hope she’s passed out in a bush.”
“Shifters were after her. They would be able to track her just as well as we can!” Troy growled. Andrew paled and nodded slowly.
Zachary snarled and Troy knew what he found. He stepped closer and saw where she tried to conceal herself. Her tracks made it clear that she wasn’t doing hot when she finally found the spot to duck into. And it was also clear that she wasn’t been about to completely hide. Brenton shifted to human and turned to Troy.
“We want to track the other shifters and see either where they came from or where they went. Hopefully both. Do either of you have a phone?”
Andrew showed his and Brenton nodded.
“Keep in contact with Gabe so he knows he can give updates if he learns anything.”
“What do you think this is?” Troy asked his Alpha softly.
“I think that there’s an Alpha or a pride that has a bone to pick with Isabella Gordon and finally decided to piss me off by going after Riley,” Brenton snarled. “I warned them on the night of the break in. I made sure they fucking knew that if they involved Riley, this pride would fucking end them.”
“Then let’s fucking do that,” Andrew snarled viciously. Troy nodded in agreement. These fuckers were going down.
Brenton shifted back to his feline for, and lead them all away. They all figured the trail was nearly two or three hours old, meaning she had probably been trying to get home on time when she got tagged by the invading group.
They tracked the group for nearly two hours and only ended up on a long path to the highway. It took another hour for them to hit the highway and lose all the scents.
“They got into a vehicle and left with her. They could be hours away at this point. Troy snarled. Andrew called Gabe to come get them, who had no updates either. Brenton and Zachary had to hide off the road until Gabe brought them some sweats so none of them would get arrest. They also couldn’t come out as cats since that would just be too much for passing drivers.
Gabe only had to drive for an hour to find them.
“I still haven’t gotten any hits,” he told them as they piled in the Range Rover.
Fucking wonderful.
RILEY
She was groggy and pissed off. She knew they had found her since they had to administrate the tranq two more fucking times during their trip to the house they brought her to. They were in the middle of fucking nowhere, she knew that too since there was only natural sounds outside. Not a single car drove past and her captors were just the only human form anythings in her hearing range.
She ran through everything she knew. Four cougars, an ocelot, two tigers, a lioness, two leopards. She was totally outmatched in a fight in feline form and human form. They were talking about the two million they were going to earn for turning her over in thirty-six hours. None of them spoke to her yet but she knew at least one of them was planning to. That terrified her. She still recognized one of the scents as well but the answer wouldn’t come to her. Something about it touched on an old memory and she couldn’t put the pieces together.
She looked around her room. They had locked her in and put a shock collar on her once they got her into human form. If she shifted back into a cheetah, the damn thing would strangle her. Which sucked because people were less likely to rape a large cat then they were to rape a five foot two woman. At least there was a clock on the wall that worked?
There was a mattress she couldn’t get under and a closet with no door and nothing in it. The mattress didn’t have sheets or a blanket or a frame. It just sat bare on the floor. These assholes really know how to show a girl a nice time, she hissed to herself bitterly.
The locks on her door opened and she backed up to the far wall, watching the door. She had to stay aware and safe. She couldn’t threaten them and get herself shocked.
Two men walked in. Both cougars by the smell but that wasn’t what bothered her.
The first one looked like your classic hick. A true southern shithead. Plaid shirt ripped to be sleeveless and a small beer gut. He wasn’t completely out of shape but he was getting there. He must have been around her guys’ ages. He had short brown hair under a trucker cap and dirty jeans. His eyes were even a muddy brown. This guy didn’t bother her, not really.
The second man however… She knew him well. Sandy blonde hair and bright brown eyes, he was smiling at her. He stood at exactly five foot eleven. That hadn’t changed. He was more muscled then he used to be and he was never a scrawny guy. She shook her head slowly at the sight of Trevor Laursen. What the fuck was her ex doing here? Had he always been a shifter and never told her?
“Riley,” he crooned at her. “I told you I would always be able to find you.”
She took a deep breath and realized he was the one she recognized. Her heart pounded in her chest. This didn’t make sense.
“H- How?” She swallowed.
“I was always a shifter. How do you think I could find you no matter where you went in the state? When we started dating, I was just another half-breed like you but then I got that job in Montana. Then the world opened up for me.”
He laughed softly and began to close the distance. “I enjoyed having a cute little half-breed around that had to listen to me. I was really upset when you left Montana. Broke my fucking hear
t since it was so hard to find you.Then I was really upset when I missed you at your apartment. I might have gone a little wild because of how upset I was. You never went back so I had to find other options to getting to you.”
It was him. He destroyed her apartment. Trevor had been trying to find her. Oh no. Riley fought to lower her heart rate and keep it steady.
The other shifter just stood by the door, guarding it in case she tried to make a run for it.
“Did you miss me, Riley?” Trevor took another step closer.
“No,” she growled. “Never seeing you again would have been too fucking soon.” Fuck him. Fuck all of this. Let them shock and beat her. They were planning on planning on selling her anyways. They couldn’t damage the fucking merchandise too much. Her temper flared. Two years of getting stronger. Two years of mentally preparing for him to show back up. She wasn’t going to be scared.
He growled at her and lashed out, backhanding her hard enough that she smacked the back of her head into the wall.
“You lose your fucking manners, Riley?” He snarled at her as she tried to regain her bearings.
“Yeah, the last time we saw each other, you kicked them loose and I lost them somewhere on the highway,” she spit blood at his feet. He brought his knee into her stomach and she doubled over, gasping for air.
“Hey man. She can’t be too fucked up for the guy to recognized her. He said he wanted her relatively unharmed.” The other shifter growled. “She’s got the shock collar for a reason. Just don’t fucking stop her heart.”
She looked up at Trevor and smiled.
“So, is this why you were always an asshole? You wanted to be an Alpha but didn’t have the balls or power to matter? You damn sure weren’t born one. Still had to take fucking orders no matter how you much beat the shit out of your girlfriend?” She laughed and he pulled out the remote for her collar. She glared at it and when he hit the button, her view of the world changed.
Wild Pride (The Kingson Pride Book 1) Page 22