I bare my teeth. “Trying to stay away from dumbfucks like you.”
He laughs. “How’s that working out for you, sweetheart?”
I don’t answer. I just grab my pack and lift my chin. Defiance is all I’ve got left. “Let’s get this over with.”
Skeleton takes my pack, and the clown steps forward, tying my wrists again. His touch is softer this time, but the control still makes my blood boil. He tosses me back over his shoulder, and the heat crawls up my neck. But I hold my tongue. Save your strength, I tell myself.
After about an hour of my head bouncing on the clown’s ass, I feel sick. My skull pounds and the world spins with each heavy footstep. Nausea creeps up the back of my throat.
“Hey, you fucker,” I hiss. “Can you carry me another way? Or do you want me to throw up all over you?”
He grunts and shifts me into his arms, holding me bridal-style. His grip tightens under my legs and back, steady and firm. The pressure on my head eases, but the new position feels too intimate. His warmth seeps into me through my clothes, through my skin, and I hate how my body responds to it.
I haven’t been held, let alone touched, in three years.
My wolf stirs inside me, content, almost nuzzling into the feeling, and it turns my stomach.
He smells good, too good, like the woods after a rainstorm. But I force my mind to pretend it’s shit.
The disgusting smell of fresh turd. That’s what I tell myself he smells like. No, not just fresh turd, but hot turd. Turd that has been sitting in the hot sun for hours.
I pull the hood of my hoodie up over my head with my bound hands, trying to hide. I don’t want them to see what the smell and being held like this are doing to me.
My eyes prickle. The burn of tears threatening to spill.
Fuck, Mo. Get it together. You’re stronger than this. You’ve survived too much to fall apart now.
But the warmth. The closeness.
I’m being kidnapped. This is not a hug. This is not comfort.
I try to hold on to my anger. I’m tied up, being carried against my will by a pack of alphas who probably see me as nothing more than property.
And yet.
My eyes close, and my body relaxes in his arms. In my exhaustion, I almost nuzzle my head against his chest, searching for more warmth, more safety.
How low have I fallen?
The thought makes me sick. But my wolf is content, her soft whine of satisfaction hums in the back of my mind.
I want to fight it. Fight her. But I’m bone-tired.
My mind knows the truth. But my body, my wolf, they don’t care about truth. They care about warmth and touch and the fact that for the first time in three years, someone is holding me, and it feels like I’m not about to die alone in a cave.
I hate it.
I hate how much I don’t hate it.
7
Darius
Icould barely stay still. She had been consuming my every thought since I first scented her, and now we had her.
We’d set out at first light, all of us restless and wound tight with anticipation. Her scent haunted me as we tracked her through the dense woods. Wild berries and something deeper like cinnamon, something that made my blood run hot.
I’d never encountered anything like it.