Hunted by the Feral Alpha

by Lillian Sable

  “Yeah.”

  “It sounds like there might be more to it.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “What kind of cancer was it?”

  “Um…pancreatic. No, I mean…breast. It was breast cancer.”

  Hunt leaned against a piece of furniture and crossed his arms over his chest. “So let me make sure I understand. Your mom dies out of nowhere and your dad is so broken up that he moves all of her stuff into a storage locker and does his best to write her out of existence.”

  She clenched her hands around the picture frame. “That about sums it up.”

  “That doesn’t seem strange to you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I think,” he stood abruptly and took a step toward her, completely invading her personal space. “there’s more to the story than what you’re saying.”

  Sophia tried to look away, but he was so close that there was no way to avoid his piercing gaze. “Please just let it go.”

  He barely touched her, hands sliding up the outside of her arms and making the hairs there stand on end. “Tell me the truth.”

  Unholy curls of desire already rose up in the pit of her belly at his touch. Wasn’t this exactly what she was afraid of, why her father tried to keep her so far from anything to do with her mother, that she would end up making the exact same mistakes that her mother had?

  “My mother was a whore, okay?” She wrenched her arms out of his grip and stumbled back away from him. His touch was unbearable when it was a visceral reminder that the apple had fallen right next to the tree and planted seeds of its own. “And it got her killed.”

  He held both hands up in a calming motion but kept his distance. “What happened?”

  “I guess nowadays they call it an addiction and you go to counseling or support groups. They didn’t have that kind of stuff back then. Bottom line: she could never stop herself, even when my dad threatened to leave her and take me with him.” Sophia was surprised at how little her voice shook as she said the words, words that she had never spoken out loud before in her life. “She cheated on my dad dozens of times, probably more times than he ever found about. It was a sick compulsion. She would say she was sorry, cry and plead for understanding. They would go to church and pray to God to take the demon away, but it never made a difference.”

  Hunt watched her silently, his expression unreadable. She couldn’t read anything in his voice when he finally spoke.

  “How did she really die?”

  “What do you call it…erotic asphyxiation? She went missing for a week and when my dad finally tracked her down, he found her at some crappy motel with a belt wrapped around her neck. She’d been dead for at least a few days. Best guess: the guy she was with freaked out when she didn’t wake up and ran off.”

  His lips twitched but aside from that little tell, his face remained very carefully blank. “So the cancer story was a just a cover?”

  “Everything reminded my dad of what happened. That’s why he moved all of this stuff out here. He doesn’t talk about her, ever. I only figured out what happened a few years ago after putting together bits and pieces that I’d heard from people over the years. Eventually I confronted my stepmother, Magda, about it. She finally told me the whole truth.” Tears threatened in the corners of her eyes but she forced them away, making her nostrils burn. “My dad wanted to protect me and my mom’s reputation.”

  The mask of Hunt’s face cracked a bit and she could see his anger. “I’m sure his own reputation had something to do with it. The real story doesn’t exactly match his political image.”

  She glared at him through the haze of unshed tears. “I get it. As far as you’re concerned everything my dad does is with the worst possible intentions. But he had a good reason to do what he did. My mother was damaged.”

  He scanned her face, searching for something that he must have found because he sighed and looked away. “You think you’re like her.”

  “Look at this.” Sophia wrenched the picture up in a violent motion and shoved it toward his face. “Look at everything that’s happened. I know I’m just like her and I’m probably going to end up the same way.”

  They stared each other down for a long moment that felt like it went on for days.

  Finally, Hunt turned away and moved to an unopened box. “We’re wasting time.”

  She tossed the picture onto the chaise where it landed with a soft thump. Her mother’s face smiled up at her, innocent and bright because the woman in that photo had no idea what was in store for her.

  But she did.

  It had been a few hours of Hunt searching methodically and Sophia pretending to do more than flip through scrapbooks before the mutual silence was finally broken.

  “I hope you’re interested in my baby pictures because that’s all you’re going to find here.”

  Hunt had ripped the sheets off every piece of furniture and opened most of the boxes. He surveyed the storage unit with an inscrutable expression. “You said your father hadn’t been here since your mom died?”

  She sighed. “Yep.”

  “And that was ten years ago, right?”

  Something about his tone made her turn to look at him. “That’s what I said.”

  “It seems like the good Senator Reynolds is the type to keep track of his media coverage. Most egotists are like that.” He rifled through a stack of magazines that were sitting in the seat of an antique armchair. The various levels of fading in the colors meant they’d probably been collected over the course of several years.

  “So he kept some old magazines.” She didn’t like the comment about egotism, but chose to ignore it. “That’s totally normal.”

  “When was Daddy dearest profiled by Time Magazine? Was it during the last senatorial race?” He held up a magazine that she recognized from her father’s last run for office. “What was that, about two years ago?”

  Her heart started to beat a little faster. Her father had always made such a big deal about never coming out here. Too many memories, he’d always said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means he’s been here, and a lot more recently than eight years ago.” Hunt tossed the magazine aside. “In fact, the year of this profile is the same year that the multimillion-dollar super PAC funding his campaign was started. Makes you wonder where the money came from.”

  “Fundraising and donors—”

  “Corporate donors who give money through dozens of intermediaries so it’s difficult to track down the real source.” Hunt scoffed. “If you’re gonna funnel cash bribes from hiding illegal government experiments and human trafficking of American citizens, that might be a good way to do it.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “This much intel can’t be wrong. Your father is a part of this.” His voice was cutting. “Whether you’re willing to believe it or not. All I want right now is proof.”

  “You can’t possibly think a magazine is important.”

  “It is if your father has been here recently. Makes me wonder why, especially since he didn’t bother to tell you about it. Although if I were trying to hide something, I’d use a place that nobody expected me to go. Didn’t you say this unit wasn’t even in his name?”

  Sophia swallowed hard. “It’s in my mother’s name, but that makes perfect sense. She collected antiques. She had the unit before they got married and paid the rent for years in advance. He just never bothered to have it transferred into his name after she died. It probably never occurred to him to do that.”

  “Or he wanted to make sure that anybody looking for information wouldn’t think to come here.” Hunt stalked around the room, closely inspecting the boxes. “I pulled every piece of information that was available on your father, both public and private. There’s no record of a storage unit. It didn’t occur to me to check under the name of his long-dead wife.”

  “None of that matters.” Sophia shoved a box away and rose to face him. “We came all the way out here
and there’s still nothing to find. You’re just wrong.”

  “Someone saw him, Sophia. I know he’s involved, and he’s going to lead me to the others.”

  “If he were involved in something bad, I would know.”

  “I could probably fill this storage unit with things you don’t know.”

  She was done trying to convince him. “Just be careful with the furniture. It’s all French Restoration. My mother loved this stuff.”

  “Hmm.” He moved toward her. A flutter of anticipation that she couldn’t stop rippled through her, but he pushed her aside to get at something behind her. “That doesn’t look like something out of a catalog.”

  “What—”

  He picked up what looked like a wooden stand covered in rawhide with colored strings pulled down the sides. “This belong to your mother?”

  She’d never seen it before in her life. “Probably. Maybe she liked drums.”

  “They call it a djembe, actually. I used to see them all over when I was stationed in Mali.” He hefted the thing in his hands, testing its weight. “Seems like an odd choice.”

  “Is this really the time to be critiquing my dead mom’s taste?”

  He looked a little taken aback and set the drum back down. Then, seeming to make a decision, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. “This didn’t belong to your mother.”

  Realizing what he intended to do, Sophia lunged for the drum. But he easily pushed her aside, holding her back with the weight of his body. She watched in horror as he took the blade to the top of the drums, slicing easily through the leather.

  “I hate you!” She beat on his back with hands that balled into fists, but the blows were as ineffectual as the wind beating at a mountain. He put up with the abuse for about a minute before turning to painfully grip both of her arms.

  “That’s enough,” Hunt said, voice dark. When she made another move toward him, he pushed her away hard enough that she stumbled back to sit down hard on a Louis XV armchair.

  “It is enough!” Sophia snapped, suddenly so angry that she felt the sharp pain of tears in the corners of her eyes. She had always been the type to cry more from anger than any other emotion. It had never been a problem until she met him. “I’ve had exactly enough of this bullshit. It’s bad enough you’re messing with all of my mom’s stuff. If you cut up anything else, I swear to God I will kill you.”

  Hunt didn’t react to her outburst. Instead, he shoved his hand through the ripped leather and rooted around inside the drum.

  Momentarily forgetting her anger, she watched him in shock. “What are you doing?”

  When he pulled his hand back, there was a thick stack of bound papers in his grip.

  Why would papers be sewn inside of an African drum?

  “What is that?” Sophia asked, even though she feared that she already knew the answer.

  He smiled in cold satisfaction. “Exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was all there. Correspondence, bank statements, transfer advice: everything Hunt needed to prove the link between Senator Reynolds and the crooked scientists who had created Project Alpha.

  His heart pounded hard enough to beat right out of his chest as he quickly scanned each page. There wasn’t time to completely analyze it now, but once they could dig into it, he knew that they’d be able to identify every person who had ever taken part in the project and take the whole thing down, once and for all.

  It might have seemed strange to hang onto evidence of a serious crime, but for Reynolds this was likely the best insurance he had. Getting into bed with criminals was a dangerous game, and the senator was just one piece on the board. Hanging on to incriminating evidence used the threat of mutually assured destruction to prevent a double-cross. If any of the other actors tried to move against him, he could go public with proof of their misdeeds and burn it all to the ground.

  Sophia said something, but he was too focused on the culmination of months of work represented by these few dozen pieces of paper.

  Her voice finally filtered through the haze. He looked up to find her staring at him, eyes wide with what he could only assume was alarm.

  He didn’t want to listen to her defend her monster of a father, even though he shouldn’t expect her to do anything else. She loved that fucker because he was the man who had raised her. And he almost certainly kept her away from the worst parts of himself. She couldn’t do anything besides insist it all had to be a mistake. But that didn’t mean he wanted to hear it.

  When he finally focused on her face and on the hand that frantically pulled on his arm, Hunt realized she was saying something completely different.

  “Do you hear that?” Her voice was pitched high, just on the edge of panic.

  Once she said it, he realized that he’d been hearing it too.

  Police sirens.

  He rolled the papers into a tube and shoved them in the waist of his jeans. He didn’t really care what happened to himself at that point, whether it was prison or a grave, but this information had to be protected.

  Sophia didn’t fight him as Hunt pushed her out of the storage locker and back toward the car. His gun was in its holster on his side but one 9mm wasn’t going to do much against a SWAT team.

  The sirens only grew louder once they were back to the car. He had to shove Sophia toward her door and she stumbled before catching herself. Her eyes were distant and unfocused like the functional part of her brain had fully left the building. Maybe it was shell shock or trauma, but she needed to snap the fuck out of it.

  He’d barely managed to get the engine turned over before the first car came speeding around the row of storage units. It was a plain black sedan with heavily-tinted windows and a blue police light stuck up on the dash. An identical vehicle raced after the first one.

  So not the local cops. Fuck.

  He gunned the engine, pushed the clutch into gear, and floored the accelerator. His attention narrowed to a focused point as their car sped toward the two approaching vehicles. The second one had moved up so they were driving side-by-side and completely filled the aisle with no room to maneuver around them. If this were a game of chicken, he’d be on the losing side.

  There were less than a hundred yards separating them and the ground was getting eaten up fast.

  Sophia stared straight ahead

  Popping the emergency brake, he wrenched the wheel. With a loud screech of the tires on pavement, the car made a ninety-degree turn through a break between buildings and raced into the next aisle.

  In the rearview mirror, Hunt watched as one car made the turn behind them. He waited a beat but the other car didn’t follow behind, which probably meant that it was hoping to cut them off by coming down from the other side.

  Hunt floored the gas pedal, urging the rust bucket forward with as much mental urgency as he could muster. The cars trailing them had better engines, better handling, and higher top speeds, so it was going to be close. It wasn’t even a choice about getting caught. He would go down before he lost the information that he’d found.

  The second car made a turn out in front of them, a couple hundred yards away. He’d been right about it trying to pen them in. The storage units were arranged in a grid pattern but the buildings were different lengths depending on the size of each unit, so the gaps were laid out in random intervals.

  There hadn’t been enough time for him to get the layout of the place before they’d made their move on the storage unit, which was a stupid mistake on his part. He’d been too focused on proving Sophia wrong about her father and too distracted by whatever it was happening between them to be smart about it. When Savage showed up, he was going to rip Hunt a new asshole.

  Unless the dicks chasing them managed to get the job done first.

  This entire time, Sophia had been completely still and silent beside him. He didn’t have to guess why. She’d just found out that the man she trusted most in the world was the kind of monst
er who profited off of death and pain. That couldn’t feel good.

  He took a narrow turn between two buildings and the bumper screeched against the wall as he maneuvered too close to the side of one building. Quickly, he regained control of the wheel before they crashed.

  When he spared a glance over at her, Sophia didn’t look like she had so much as blinked.

  “Hey!” he shouted more than once before she slowly turned her head toward him. “You okay?”

  Her mouth opened but no words came out of it. She moved like someone had hit the slow-motion button.

  “No,” she finally said, so softly that he could barely hear it. “I mean…I don’t know.”

  There wasn’t really time to comfort her but he tried anyway. “Everything is gonna get worked out.”

  She turned away to stare out the window as storage unit doors whizzed by them. “You don’t know that.”

  “I will work it out.”

  His words hung in the air between them, full of a dozen unspoken things.

  He wanted to let her go, Hunt realized. He wanted to let her go back to some semblance of the life she’d had before she could be completely chewed up and spit out. Even if he recognized that it was crazy and a great way to get himself sent to prison, not to mention losing the information that it had taken almost a year to get.

  And he had to think about his guys. Savage and Chase had given up everything to get this done.

  But even with that rationalization, he’d unconsciously lifted his foot off the gas pedal and their car had slowed down. It was just enough for the car behind him to get close enough that the front bumper just barely kissed their rear.

  He looked in the rearview mirror and in almost the same moment, shouted at the frozen girl beside him. “Get down.”

  Without waiting for her to respond, he shoved her head toward the dashboard just as the sound of gunshots exploded around them.

  These weren’t the fucking cops.

  His ears were ringing so loud that Sophia’s screams seemed like they were coming from a mile away. Bullets struck the front windshield and he could barely see through the hundreds of spidery cracks in the glass. He hunched down in the seat as shots continued to fly over his head.