Chapter One
Argh!
There’s a scream, a big shadow, and a crash as someone is thrown over my head and into a stack of top shelf liquor bottles on display for the patrons of this once fine establishment. I sip my drink and let the mayhem unfold around me.
I used to get into this part of things, but I’m getting older. Maturing. I have more responsibilities, and less interest in the kind of rough bickering that’s happening now. Don’t want to pull a muscle, not while I’m enjoying this particularly fine whiskey they had stashed behind the bar.
A gang tried to move into our territory. Thought they’d show up with wolf patches of all fucking things.
A bullet sings past my ear. I don’t bother to move. Danger has already passed.
When my father was in charge of things around here, this would never have happened. Nobody else would ever have dared move in on our territory. They would have come with their heads lowered and they would have asked nicely if they could live in our city.
Since word got out that he moved to Hawaii to retire, every shitty little pack with ideas of grandeur has been testing my patience.
The world has gone to hell, and I am Cerberus.
The whiskey burns on the way down, tempering the rage I’ve been trying to stuff down for the past several weeks. It was never supposed to be this way. I knew I’d lead the pack one day, but I didn’t expect it to be because my father made a series of fucking stupid decisions and then fucked off to leave me to deal with the aftermath.
Some little upstart wearing a wolf vest has the nerve to step up beside me. I’m guessing this is the gang’s alpha, trying his own little power play in the midst of madness.
“I heard there’s a real werewolf now,” he says. “Not a shifter, an actual walks on two legs fucking…”
“You heard wrong,” I say, my voice a low, dominant growl.
“I heard Orion’s lab made a freak of nature and now your brother is fucking it.”
I punch in the direction of the voice and it stops. My knuckles ache a bit, but the whiskey takes the edge off. I don’t have time for this shit. My phone vibrates in my pocket, picking the wrong fucking time to get my attention. I snatch it out of my pants, throw it on the floor, and stamp it with the heel of my boot.
I hate technology.
My father’s obsession with it to engineer an army of shifter pure bloods was doomed to fail from the beginning. If nature wanted a lot of wolves roaming the planet, she’d have put them here. Truth is there’s only so much room for so many apex predators.
I turn around and survey the bar. When we walked in here, it was full of about thirty little fucking upstarts from Arkansas thinking they had a chance to move south and take some territory. I don’t have the reputation my father did, because I was always the enforcer. Not exactly a public facing role.
Now I’m the alpha of New Orleans, and hell, in my mind, Louisiana. I am not my father. I am something much worse. They’re going to learn that. Every single wolf in this state is going to bow to me, or I am going to make them regret the day they were whelped. That’s a promise.
The bar is trashed. Bodies everywhere. I can smell a little death in the air, but most of them are still alive, just beat to hell. My men, the ones who stayed with me when the political shit show went down, are the roughest and toughest the pack ever boasted. Now that we’re effectively all that’s left, we’re making our mark, one mass beating at a time.
“Get them into a warehouse and lock them behind silver,” I order my men. “Let’s make a fucking example of them. I want every wolf from Los Angeles to New York to know how we run things here, understand?”
There’s a rumble of assent, and the boys start picking up bodies. There are vans outside that can carry more than this number of people if needed, especially if they’re stacked neatly.
I turn back to my whiskey. Job well done. Wish it felt more satisfying, but I guess you can’t really decide how you feel about things. You’ve just got to do what has to be done. That’s what being an alpha is. Taking care of problems forever.
“Boss?”
My friend Raglan gives me a quick nudge. “We’ve got a human problem. When the shit kicked off in here, not everyone was human. Girl saw some of the boys shifting. Freaked out. Tried to record it. We think we stopped her, but so much of this shit goes straight to the cloud.”
The cloud. We’re worried about remote fucking computer servers. I hate it. I hate everything I have to concern myself with that feels like a sneaky little trick by a weak little fucker who couldn’t stand up in a fight.
“Why haven’t they taken care of her?” I don’t even bother to turn my head as I ask the question.
“She’s pretty.”
I sigh inwardly and finish my drink. Humans who see wolf shifters have to be killed. Period.
Recent events have made that more clear than ever. Letting people live when they know what wolves are is asking for trouble of a kind that disrupts and puts everyone in danger. Better to kill one or two people every now and then, than to be exposed as supernatural creatures in a world starved of magic.
“I’ll take care of her.”
He shifts uncomfortably. “She’s really pretty, boss.”
“Not a problem.”
I get up from the barstool, aware that every eye in the place is on me. These are my men, my pack mates. Some of them are friends, but most of them are underlings who like to do what they’re told. It gives them a place in the world, somewhere to belong, and someone to belong to.
They respect me, and they fear me. Some of them probably hate me, too. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’d prefer to be under my father’s law. He was old-fashioned. He’d been in power for the better part of forty years. Most people here don’t remember a time before Orion Dulac. Karl Dulac doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
I’ll deal with the girl who saw too much. I’ll deal with it because it’s my fucking job, and because half the reason I’m in the mood I’m in is because someone else failed to deal with another cute girl who saw too much. Being adorable is not a get out of death free card when it comes to me. I’ve spent years hardening my heart. Hell, my dad ensured it would be hard from the moment I was born. I was raised to rule the pack one day, but the truth is I’m not like him. I’m not a strategist. I’m not a diplomat. I’m not even really a leader. I’m a brute. I know it, and I let everyone else know it.
“Where is she?”
“Put her in the back office, boss. Sorry.”
This won’t take a minute.
I go through the door marked Management Only to the office. It’s full of all the crap involved with running a business. I don’t pay attention to the location. I pay attention to the female who must die. My tongue runs over the sharp points of my teeth as I look at her. I like killing. I never hesitate. I bite the neck or I pull the trigger, and that is the end of it.
Seconds pass by. We look at each other.
She should be dead already.
Why is she still alive?
She looks at me with seductive eyes full of some kind of emotion I can’t quite place. It might be fear. If it is, it’s fear mixed with something else. Raglan was right. She is very, very pretty. She has long dark hair, big brown eyes, and the kind of features that angels would be jealous of. Generous, wide mouth. Cute nose. Her face is round and her chin is sharp and her body is all curves. She’s wearing leather. I wonder if there’s a cute pink bike out there with a fuzzy toy on the end of the keychain and a bunny ear cover on the helmet.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she says.
My anger flares. How dare she ask for mercy in a world where it doesn’t exist? She thinks she’s special, that she gets to break the rules. That’s what everyone thinks these days, that consequences don’t apply to them.
I walk over to where she’s standing, bend down, get ready to snap her neck.
She punches me in the throat.
Straight arm, twisted hips, she puts her whole weight behind it.
There aren’t a lot of places a human woman can hit a wolf shifter and make an impact. She hits one, and then finds the other, significantly further south, driving her knee right up into my crotch with a viciousness that I’ve really only previously encountered in myself.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice timid. “I can’t die today. I’ve got things to do. Don’t come after me, okay? I don’t want to have to kill you.”
Her small hands roam my pants for a brief moment, before she snatches my keys out of the interior.
She doesn’t want to have to kill me. What fucking irony.
Just like that, she’s gone. Out through the door I came in. I hear my car start, because of course she’s taking my vehicle.
“Fuck!” I slam my fist into the wall as I try to get my breath back. My balls feel like they just had an anvil land on them, but that’s not going to be enough to stop me. I get up and I go after that little fucking bitch.
[divider]
Ellie
The memory of those broken eyes boring into mine is going to stay with me for a while. He was the most intense creature I’ve ever seen, I think, and that includes the wolves I saw becoming men earlier on in the night. I’m not used to big cities. I’m not used to people who are this outright mean and aggressive.
I was lurking in the bar, trying to get some information, trying to get my way to someone who matters. I don’t have time to die. I have stuff to live for. I’ve got to get away from that place as soon as possible, and that’s why it’s okay that I stole his car. It means he can’t follow me and I can just leave the keys in it later and avoid any criminal charges hopefully.
I figure I’ve gotten away.
I figure wrong.
A motorcycle comes weaving through the traffic and roars up beside me. I’m still hoping that’s a coincidence, and then the passenger side window bursts into a million pieces. A bullet makes the stuffing of the seat next to me turn to airborne foam.
Shooting his own car. Interesting move. Crazy move.
I know it’s him. Can’t see his face under the helmet, don’t know his license plates, but I know in my gut that he’s following me. I’m in his car too, so odds are he’s going to know how to track it. It’s probably got a tag on it.
I thought I was being smart, but I was actually being stupid as hell. I’m now trapped inside a metal box that I can’t really get out of in this evening traffic. The roads aren’t super busy, but they’re far from empty and I can only imagine how many hundreds of eyes are on this crime.
A sane person wouldn’t want to draw police attention, though judging by what I just saw in that bar, I don’t think this man much cares about the cops, or being sane.
I press the accelerator toward the floor and the whole beast leaps forward, throwing me back into my seat and leaving him in the dust.
I drive like my life depends on it, my animal instincts taking over. I want to get out of this built-up area. Ideally, I want to get onto an open rural road where I can really make this beast of a car do everything it is capable of in order to help me escape.
I manage to find LA-23 out of town and then head out into what turns out to be a series of dead ends that terminate in a lot of water that I definitely can’t drive in. I try my best to turn and reverse, but in the end I find myself cut off with a gun trained on me through the windshield.
These could be the last seconds of my life, and that pisses me off.
“Fucking kill me then!”
I gun the car straight at my stalker. He jumps off his bike at the very last minute and both the bike, and the car with it, head straight into the water at high speed. I wasn’t thinking. I was panicking, and as the water starts to rise up the sides of the car and I realize I can’t open the fucking door, I start to panic even worse.
I don’t want to fucking die here. I have to survive. I am far too busy to die.
That’s not stopping the water bubbling up to my windows though, as the car swiftly heads to the depths of what have to be reptile- and snake-infested waters. There is danger all around me, and I find myself hopelessly paralyzed in the midst of it all.
My killer comes in through the window, holding a knife. He cuts my seatbelt and drags me out of the vehicle, pulling me to the shore as I struggle against the water, and against him.
He drops me on the ground and stands over me. We are both panting. Me more than him.
I can’t believe I’m alive. I can’t believe he didn’t just leave me to die. That’s what he was trying to do, right? He wanted me dead. What the hell is happening?
I roll over onto my back and look up at him. He’s staring down at me with piercing eyes, his jaw muscles flexing as he clenches and unclenches. He looks furious.
“Why?” I rasp the word out. I got some water in me on the way up from trying to scream while I was being rescued or murdered. I don’t know which was happening. I still don’t.
“I could ask the same fucking question,” he says. “Try to take me out, end up totaling my bike and my car?”
“You were going to kill me.”
He shakes his head swiftly, but not really in a way that implies he’s denying it. More in a I cannot believe this shit sort of way.
“I was just going to kill you,” he says. “But now I think I need to teach you a lesson first.”
He whips his belt off, and I ready myself to fight for my life again.
He grabs me up by my sodden jacket and throws me face down over a barrel. One of his palms presses firmly against my lower back, keeping me in place as he lashes the leather of his thick belt across my wet ass.
The snap of the belt is loud and the sensation stings immediately, bursting across my skin in a wash of tingles that don’t stop in my ass, but find the pathways of my nerves and run all the way down to my toes, and out to my fingertips. I buck upward, but his hand moves from my back to the back of my neck.
“Stay fucking still,” he growls at me, lashing the belt against my ass over and over again. “You think there’re no consequences to fighting back? You’re wrong.”
“I should have lay down and died for you? That would have been more convenient?”
“That’s what happens to prey, sweetheart,” he snaps.
I knew the new alpha of New Orleans was a piece of work. There have been tremors of fear passing through the night for a while now. Usually when an old alpha dies or retires, there are ceremonies. There’s a chance for the packs to meet them and to come to terms with the new alpha. That hasn’t happened. The man currently beating the shit out of my ass isn’t cut out for the job. He’s not an alpha. He’s a thug. Worse than a thug. He’s more like an executioner.
I shouldn’t like rough handling. I don’t like cruelty. I should fucking hate him. I do hate him.
But there’s something about being thrown around that’s exciting. Something about someone with the nerve to lay a fucking hand on me and think they’re going to survive. So I don’t fight quite as hard as I could. I let him think I’m just another human girl who wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time and maybe took a lucky shot at his scarred face.
I start to feel excited in ways I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s arousal, and it’s fucked up because I think he still might fucking kill me, even though he’s taking his time about it and he definitely just saved my life.
I hear an animal growl behind me. He reaches around, yanks at the snap of my jeans hard enough to break it, and pulls them down to my thighs as far as they’ll go while wet and tight.
It’s enough, though.
Enough to give him access to the part of me he really wants.
I arch my hips, and I feel the thick rod of his rough, hard cock running along my slit, which is wet for reasons other than the bayou.
I guess I’m going to let him fuck me. I guess there’s not really a choice. The thick head of his cock is already pushing between my lower lips, driving inside me. There’s nothing gentle about the way he’s handling me. He’s not asking me. He’s just using me.
I let out an animal groan as I feel myself stretched wide, my pussy taking him because he’s giving me a rough fucking.
I know what he’s going to do. He’s going to knot in me, and if he does there will be truly no way to escape. I’ll be stuck on his dick, taking his cum, and he’ll be able to kill me without me being able to do anything once that post-orgasm clarity hits and he remembers he’s a merciless fucking murderer.
Neither one of us is going to climax.
[divider]
Karl
She’s tight. And she’s hot. And she owes me this pussy after taking two of my vehicles. I don’t know what I’m doing or thinking. I’m not really thinking at all. I’m just taking. I’m claiming.
I can feel my knot starting to thicken. She feels it too. I hear her make an animal sound, a sort of growling yowl I didn’t think someone like her could make. And then I feel her move underneath me. Not the soft, curvaceous undulation she can’t help. Something else. Something bigger and darker and much more powerful.
The woman I am fucking. The human female I am teaching one last lesson turns into a wolf beneath me.
She shifts smoothly and swiftly. She’s practiced. And she’s furious.
Her teeth find my neck before I can get into my fur. I’m too busy being shocked by the fact that we somehow all missed the fact she’s a shifter.
While I’m busy being stupid and surprised, she bites down. Hard. Merciless.
She could rip my throat out in this instant. She could kill me with a flick of her neck. It would be that simple. But she doesn’t pull my jugular out and drop the blood supply out of me in an instant. Instead, she bites just hard enough to let me know she could, to draw enough blood to slow me down and stop me following. Then she’s gone, black fur fleeing into the night. I am left bleeding on the ground, putting pressure on the wound on my neck so I don’t bleed out all at once. It’s pretty wild. I might die if I don’t get help soon. All the pressure in the world isn’t stopping the leaking. I’m going to have to shift, heal, and take my human form again to call someone to come get me. In the meantime, I am bleeding out on the side of a private dock out back of New Orleans, with both my vehicles trashed in the water beside me.
I am in fucking love.
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