Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2)

by Taylor, Theodora

  “Let’s go,” he said, ruffling Knud and Nago’s hair as they turned around and made their way to the residential road leading to Chloe’s house.

  However, when they passed by Grady’s trailer, his sheriff came running out. He looked agitated as he signed, “We need talk. Not town business. Personal.”

  Grady, Rafe knew, had his demons, but he didn’t advertise them. He was more likely to work off steam, destroying punching bag after punching bag in his basement’s gym, rather than coming to Rafe with anything that was bothering him.

  So even though Rafe knew good and well what this was about, and had hoped to avoid the subject for a few more days since he already had enough drama on his plate, he turned to speak with his best friend.

  “Boys run on ahead,” he said to them. “Tell your mama the good news. I’ll catch up.”

  He waited until his sons were well out of earshot before saying, “What’s up?”

  Grady signed, “I see Tu and Janelle talking yesterday.” Grady’s jaw set. “Tu say staying in Wolf Springs. Say help with your cubs. I go out trailer, say ‘hell no.’ I say she can’t stay here. She say—”

  “Wait, sign slower. I’m barely understanding you.” Rafe said. “Tu wants to stay here? That’s the first I’m hearing about that, by the way. And you said no, and she understood you?”

  “Yeah, she know sign language,” Grady signed impatiently, like that was neither here nor there. “She say staying. Say I can’t stop her because she princess and I am beta.”

  Grady was nearly punching his signs into the air now, and Rafe inclined his head to the side, not just because his beta was so angry, but because…. “Tu said that to you? Tu Ataneq? She’s barely said two words to anybody but the children since she got here.”

  “She say more than two words to me,” Grady signed. “She say I have problem with her, talk to my boss.”

  “Grady…” Rafe started.

  “I have problem with her.”

  “Come on, Grady.”

  “I am not sheriff if she stay here. I can’t.”

  Now Rafe was truly alarmed. Grady hadn’t even threatened to quit during the years Rafe left him unable to do his royal job, taking on all challengers himself as opposed to routing them through his beta.

  And Grady kept going. “Oklahoma border five hours from here. My pack no have king. If they know she here, they—”

  Rafe went from conciliatory to alpha in zero seconds flat. “No,” he said with the full authority of the Colorado kingship ringing in his voice. “No harm can come to Tu, especially while she’s here. I won’t allow that.”

  Grady’s eyes flared with frustrated anger. “Tell her go home.”

  “I can’t do that either. She’s my future sister-in-law and a princess of a state to which Colorado is allied. I can’t just tell her to get out because my beta has a problem with her.”

  “You with her? I your friend long time… always! Tu is bitch, only care about herself. Alisha same.”

  Rafe’s eyes narrowed. “Alisha is my queen. Don’t disrespect her.”

  Grady looked at him like he was crazy. Then his hands really started flying, reminding Rafe that Alisha had betrayed him, taken his sons from him… Grady signed that the only reason she wasn’t still rotting away in her turning cage was because she had Rafe—

  “Grady, you’re coming real close to saying something that will get you fired,” Rafe told him before Grady could sign “pussywhipped.” And Rafe meant it. He refused to let another wolf talk badly about his mate, even if he’d thought the same vicious things about her himself over the course of the last week.

  Grady frowned, but finished his rant with, “I help you. Now you help me. I want Tu go.”

  It was true. Grady had served him well as beta and he deserved better than having to live in the same town with the she-wolf who’d brought such misery to his family. But…

  “You said you would quit if Tu stayed. Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”

  Grady’s expression went from absolutely infuriated to crushed. “You want me leave?”

  “No, man, of course not! You’re the best friend I’ve got. But kicking Tu out of town won’t bring back your brother. It wouldn’t change anything.”

  Grady deflated a little when Rafe said that. And his hands were less aggressive when he signed, “Tu think me nothing. She say me nothing.”

  “You know who she’d never be able to talk to like that—an alpha king.”

  Grady both shook his head and slammed the pads of his index and middle fingers into his thumb in the sign for “No.”

  “You said it yourself. Your pack is without a king. That makes them dangerous. And you’re the rightful heir now.”

  Grady kept shaking his head and signing “no,” but Rafe pressed on. “I like having you as a sheriff, but no one’s come after me in years and I’ve already proven I could handle it if they did. I don’t need a rabid grey from Oklahoma to serve as my first line of defense. Hell, my dad’s old sheriff beta is already sick and tired of fishing every day. He’d probably take over back here in a heartbeat. You wouldn’t have to worry about leaving me in a lurch.”

  But Grady kept shaking his head, seemingly no more willing to take his rightful place on the Oklahoma throne than he’d been after his brother died. “Forget what I say before. I stay here. No quit.”

  With that, Grady returned to his trailer, his shoulders sagging, his bluff totally called. And though they had no psychic connection, Rafe could feel his beta’s disappointment as if it were his own. Which left him feeling like a shitty friend as he made his way to Alisha’s house.

  But then he thought about her in that tight little number her mother had forced on her, and that made him feel a little better. He wondered what she’d be wearing today.

  However, when he arrived at the house, he found the boys in a state of panic. They were inside but apparently they’d let themselves in, because they were rushing from room to room, yelling, “Mama! Mama! Where are you, Mama? Mama, answer us!”

  When they saw Rafe, they swarmed around him, crying in triplicate, “She’s gone! Mama’s gone!”

  A cold terror fell over Rafe. “What do you mean gone?” he asked. “You mean she’s not in the house?”

  “No, she is gone from this village,” Rafesson said, his face a grim picture of a kid trying to keep himself under control. “We can only smell her a long time ago.”

  Rafe wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by this at first, but it soon became evident. He found everything of Alisha’s missing. The clothes her mother had gotten her, her journals… he opened the door to the master bathroom and found she’d even taken her toiletries. And her scent, which had hung so heavy in his nose the night before, was now only a faint smell lingering in the air like a memory.

  Just in case, Grady scoured the town, literally sniffing around then covertly knocking on a few doors to make sure no one had seen her. No one had seen her… or Tu. Though, according to the general store manager, Tu had stopped by bright and early to buy a pair of jeans, a few other items of clothing, including a coat, all in sizes too big for the she-wolf who was both shorter and smaller than her older sister.

  “Tu probably help Alisha escape,” Grady signed, when he delivered the news. He had enough manners to keep his face grim and straight as he did so, with no evidence he was happy about this turn of events, even though he’d inadvertently gotten his wish.

  And after further investigation revealed chicken blood sprayed around the back of the house, Grady almost seemed impressed. Animal blood was one of nature’s best scent concealers, it’s presence making it virtually impossible to smell another wolf’s scent, much less track it. Grady’s hypothesis was that the two sisters had probably traveled through the woods to the main road and either got in a car they had waiting or hitched a ride.

  Rafe’s mind went to five years ago, when he figured out Alisha had hitchhiked her way to Wyoming in order to stay out of Rafe’s clutches. Yeah, his mate was a
big fan of hitchhiking.

  And now the only evidence left that Alisha had ever been there was a torn dress on top of the kitchen’s trash can, openly mocking Rafe for deciding to trust Alisha again right before she pulled her latest betrayal.

  26

  Alisha awoke with a start, her head pounding, her body feeling like it was made up of the heaviest substance on Earth, her stomach swaying like it was working hard not to throw up. And that was before she realized she was in semi-darkness in the back of a moving truck, one that stank of rotting chicken blood.

  If not for a thin slice of light leaking through one side of the truck’s back door, she might not have been able to see. But with that small light source and her wolf vision, she made out another huddled figure sitting across from her. Her little sister.

  However, Tu’s familiar face brought Alisha no amount of relief. The smaller she-wolf’s right arm was hanging at an odd angle, her head lolling to one side. Her face was a wreck, her left eye swollen shut and her bottom lip split. Then Alisha saw Tu’s right eye was open, wide as a saucer, as if the eyelid had been permanently glued in the open position. Alisha’s heart stopped. Was she dead?

  But then Tu sucked in a labored breath, one that made her shake with obvious pain. She probably had some broken ribs, too, Alisha thought, adding it to the mental checklist of Tu’s injuries. There were a pair of handcuffs around her wrists, and from the looks of the nasty burn scars at the places where her hands met her arms, they were made of silver.

  How was Tu even conscious at this point? Judging from the damage, she should be as passed out as Alisha had obviously been. Yet she remained awake.

  Alisha started to go to her sister, only to discover she’d also been handcuffed in front of her body, but hers must have been made of steel. They weren’t painful, just restrictive.

  Seeing Alisha’s movement, Tu suddenly animated like a zombie and frantically shook her head, only to stop, squeezing her eyes against the pain her sudden movement had caused. Eventually, she rode out what looked like a truly nasty wave of agony, and she gingerly inclined her head toward her right.

  Alisha followed the movement to another dark figure propped up in the corner of the truck. His head was also lolled to the side, but unlike Tu, he was actually sleeping, if the sight of his chest steadily breathing in and out was any indication. And, also unlike Tu, he had a tranquilizer gun resting against his side.

  “We’re going to have to kill the sister soon, bury her body and get the hell out of dodge,” came a voice from the direction of the cab.

  Alisha quietly sat herself up and strained to better hear what the unseen wolf was saying.

  “We cain’t kill the sister, though,” A wolf with a higher voice answered. “If the Colorado king ever found out…”

  “That fuckin’ Spic Injun ain’t ever going to find out. Everybody knows he’s only marrying her because she pissed out three pups. He’s going to think exactly what we set him up to think, that she run away again. Hell, we’re doing him a favor, getting rid of that bitch after what she done to him.”

  “But she ain’t had nothing to do with her sister.” Obviously, the wolf with the higher voice was having second thoughts. “It wasn’t her fault she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He said we was only supposed to grab her sister and bring her back to Oklahoma.”

  And the story started to fall into place. That morning, Tu had shown up for breakfast with a coat and a bag full of clothes that didn’t make Alisha feel like she should be arrested for indecent exposure.

  “Thank Janelle for the clothes. She gave me the money to buy them,” Tu said, in that now quiet way of hers. “But I bought the coat. I owed you one.”

  Alisha thought about the night Tu had visited her at the university in Juneau and the borrowed coat she’d never returned. It seemed like eons ago now, so much had happened since that night, and the gesture, though kind and thoughtful, made Alisha sad.

  The Tu she used to know didn’t do kind and thoughtful. The Tu she knew wouldn’t have thought twice about a coat she’d forgotten or didn’t care enough to return. The Tu she knew… was gone, Alisha realized with a pang, replaced by this soft-spoken stranger who wore her black clothes like a cloak of sadness. Alisha had to fight back tears, because the truth was it felt like her little sister had died while she’d been away. She’d missed the funeral and she was now left to deal with a corpse.

  But for Tu’s sake, she mustered both a smile and some enthusiasm.

  She immediately shed the ridiculous mini-dress she’d put on for jeans and a cashmere sweater. Then she pulled on the coat. “Oh my God, it feels so good to be back in a coat made up of synthetic material. I swear, after Norway, I’m never wearing any kind of fur again, unless it’s my own on a full-moon night. I don’t even want to take it off. Let’s go out back for a little bit.”

  She hadn’t been out of the house in days, and this seemed to be the perfect way to enjoy the coat without violating the conditions of her parole from the basement cell. Though why she cared so much about not going against Rafe’s orders after the argument they’d had last night, she didn’t know.

  She’d put it all on the table and he hadn’t believed her, would probably never believe her, or forgive her, or trust her again. Royal marriages filled with love, like the one Janelle and Mag now seemed to have, were the exception to the rule. Most royal couples were more business partners than lovers. Really, she should just resign herself to the fact that she and Rafe would have a marriage based more on duty than anything else.

  Yet, she couldn’t do that.

  As she stood in Chloe’s back yard taking in the fresh air with a silent Tu, she kept trying to think of ways for them to make the marriage work. She wanted to like Rafe and she wanted him to like her back. She wanted them back they way they had been on her last heat night, happy with each other and content. That warm, glowy feeling he had unleashed on her last night, she wanted that, all the time, not just after a bout of really amazing sex… but she was being stupid, she knew. Her stint in Norway, living with the most loving Viking wolf couple on the planet, had done something irreversible to her brain, and now she was so desperate for her and Rafe’s story to have a happy ending, she was grasping at straws.

  The wind shifted and a new scent caught her nose. Her forehead wrinkled. “Do you smell chicken blood?”

  Tu, whose nose was much better than hers, nodded. “Smelled it as soon as we came out here. Figured it was coming from that old chicken house over there.”

  Alisha turned to look at the weathered shed structure that used to house Chloe’s chickens. “Chloe hasn’t lived here in over five years. Why would her coop still smell like chicken blood?”

  Technically everything that unfolded after that happened fast. But Alisha was so massively confused, the scene seemed to unravel in slow motion.

  From behind the shed, two blond men with thin mustaches, dressed in overalls underneath flannel hunting jackets, emerged. They looked like Deliverance extras, and the film’s infamous banjo riff went off in her head as her mind reeled, trying to figure out what was going on. Then one of the men raised what looked like a tranq gun.

  “Alisha, run!” Tu screamed beside her—she must have known even then that they were here for her, not her older sister.

  But before Alisha could even process Tu’s command, she heard a whistling sound followed by a sharp sting. The world went blurry after that and then immediately black…

  And now she was in a truck headed to God knew where, with her sister, who had obviously been beaten up by what sounded and looked like at least three men, listening to them talk about whether they should kill her before getting out of dodge.

  “Well, we gotta make a decision here,” the driver was saying now. “That meth we gave the Alaska cunt is going to wear off soon, and I want to play with her before we get to Oklahoma. Never had black pussy before and we put ourselves in a hell of a lot of danger to fetch her out of Colorado. Only right we get first dibs
before we hand her over to him.”

  These wolves who had kidnapped them and beat up Tu—they were from Oklahoma. Oklahoma was a mange state. Tu had been mated to a mange prince. The situation, which had been so blurry up until now, suddenly came into sharp focus. They had shot her sister up with meth, so she’d stay awake while they beat her, and now they were planning to…

  Alisha should have been scared for her own life, which they were so casually talking about ending, but instead, her wolf reared inside of her chest on Tu’s account. There was no way she was going to let them touch Tu again, much less harm her. No damn way.

  She widened her eyes at Tu, hoping her intention to get them out of this mess was relayed in her fierce look. It must have been, because Tu once again shook her head as if to say, No! Don’t! I don’t want them to hurt you.

  Alisha ignored her sister’s unspoken plea, and studied the tranq gun on their snoring captor’s chest.

  She didn’t let herself think too long about her plan before she leaped across the truck and grabbed the tranq gun from the sleeping wolf.

  “What the hell—” he said, coming awake with a sputter.

  Alisha tranqed him before he could even fully sit up. “No, I won’t let you rape my sister. She’s been beaten too badly. You’ll kill her.”

  Tu looked from the tranqed wolf to her sister, confused. But her plan worked.

  “What the hell?” Alisha heard one of the driver side wolves say. “I know he’s not back there trying to get a piece before we do.”

  Alisha put on her best Deliverance accent to say, “I don’t care how bad beat down she be. I’m horny. And I’ve got a tranq gun, so don’t you dare trying nothing, girlie.”

  She rolled her eyes at herself. That accent sounded terrible even to her own ears. But it must have been good enough, because she was abruptly pitched backwards when the truck pulled off to the side of the road so suddenly, she could almost see the driver yanking the wheel to the right, angry at the mere thought of someone forcing himself on Tu before he had a chance to.

  Tu toppled over with a cry of pain, and Alisha mouthed “sorry” to her poor sister.