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It all seemed very James Bond, which nearly made me laugh as I found myself chewing up and choking down the paper ball. It went down rough, and as my gaze went from the clock to the unconscious, bound Alpha on the table, I wondered how the hell this wolf thought I was going to get him out.
Not only was this place more guarded than anywhere on the planet, but they drugged me at night. And even if I wasn’t sedated, the shit they pumped into my veins incapacitated me. There was no way I was running with an unconscious Wolf.
As though he could sense me, the creature on the table groaned. It was a faint, hoarse thing, but it was the first noise that wasn’t a scream he’d made since I’d been there. I didn’t dare move from my spot on the floor, but I didn’t take my eyes off him either. It would be a miracle if he could walk. It would be a miracle if he lived.
I was taken to my room and brought my dinner tray, but by seven, no one had come to pick it up. No one had come in with the cart, with the needle, with the bags of viscous fluid that would bring the pain. Was that captured Wolf right? Could he really pull this off?
I laid down on my bed and watched the clock tick closer to eight.
It didn’t take me long to realize that no one had come for the Alpha either. No one had given him his nightly sedative. He was starting to stir, but the room remained empty. My heart began to beat faster, and I crept from my bed, testing the door. When the handle turned, when the lock clicked open, my head swam with fear.
It couldn’t be this easy—though I supposed maybe it wasn’t. After all, that Wolf was likely about to sacrifice himself for this to happen. And if that was the case, what right did I have not to use every ounce of strength I had left to get us both out?
He might actually survive if we could get away. And it was the only chance I had to stop whatever changes were going on in my body. The pain was starting to linger, the strangeness of not fitting in my own skin pervasive. Almost as much as I wanted to be free, as I wanted a real future outside of that little cell and those sedatives, I wanted to know what was happening to me.
Was I dying? Or was I simply changing?
I supposed it didn’t matter, in the end. We had one chance, and I was going to take it. I crept out of my cell minutes before the clock hit eight, and I began to work Kor’s bindings. I was weak, but I managed to get them undone without much trouble. I wasn’t sure he was going to come around, but just as I freed his ankles, his entire body jolted with awareness.
He began to sit up, his eyes wide, wild, unseeing. His pupils consumed nearly all of his irises, and it didn’t take a genius to know he was blind. He groped around, and I held him fast as I begged him to obey me.
“We don’t have much time,” I whispered, feeling the strength of his hand as he gripped me. I glanced up just as the clock ticked over to eight. And then a minute past.
The explosion rocked the lab, and I knew this was it. Our only chance.
As we burst through the side door, my eyes began to burn from the smoke. It was like hot metal and burning plastic, and it almost took me to my knees for a second. But Kor’s grip on me reminded me I had no time to be overwhelmed. I made a wild guess as to the East gate, but it was easy enough to run for it because everything else but that one exit was on fire.
Kor slowed me down, but the car was exactly where the wolf had promised, as were the keys. And the GPS. There was a bag of supplies in the back seat, and though I knew my unwilling hostage was starving and frozen, I couldn’t take time to investigate what the Beta Wolf had left us.
On the road, my tension eventually gave way to a quiet sort of trembling from my adrenaline as I talked. Kor was more coherent than I expected him to be—and sharp in spite of his brain fogged with drugs for however long he’d been there. He let my nervous rambling fill the car though, but by the time the GPS directed me to a barely maintained road, the Alpha had succumbed to sleep. It was enough for me to be able to regroup, and the only sound in the car after that was the soothing GPS telling me to keep driving.
“Okay,” I said to myself after moving what had to be hours through a canopy of trees that felt like it was leading nowhere. “We did it.” Because we had. For now.
We were out. I knew this could have been a trap, that I could have been walking into something worse, but the risk was worth it. My father was a madman, and I was going to need a good ten years of therapy and his head on a spike to process what had been done.
I had been in survival mode for so long, knowing that freedom was close enough to touch terrified me. But I couldn’t be weak now.
Another cramp hit me just as we started to approach the house, and I breathed through it as I reached the end of the dirt road.
When I saw the house come into view, I turned off the lights, then crept into a canopy of trees and killed the engine. I could tell the Alpha Wolf was dead to the world as the noise of the engine faded into the pitch-black night. It would be a miracle if I could get him from the car to the house. Though, frankly, getting him out of the lab and on the road had far exceeded my expectations. He hadn’t spoken a word in the months I’d been near him, hadn’t fought, hadn’t tried to escape. I knew they were keeping him under powerful drugs—I knew that their hold over him had no bearing on how powerful he was capable of being. But I was expecting someone a little more feral.
All the same, as docile as he’d been before, I wasn’t sure he would stay that way. The drugs would be leaving his system more rapidly than they would a human’s. His mind would be returning, his body healing. It would take days, and there was trauma lodged deep in his brain. If he snapped, I would be his only target.
But I had to take the risk. The moment I became nothing more than a number instead of a man, I knew there was no hope. The humans had turned their backs on me. Just as the Wolves had sold Kor to the labs, my father had done the same to his own son.
With a trembling breath, I got out of the car, closing the door as gently as I could. Kor didn’t stir as I grabbed the bag, and I headed inside first to make sure we really were safe. I wasn’t sure if the place was being monitored, but after a ten-minute look around, I didn’t see anything resembling security. There was just dust and a little mold, and a few places where it looked like raccoons had made a home.
It was empty, though, and dry. Not warm, but a fire would fix that once I could get the windows blacked out and a few logs piled on the old, blackened ash. There were moth-eaten blankets in a linen cupboard, and one of the rooms had an old mattress that sat naked and full of holes, but it was better than lying on the floor.
The rest of the place would need to be explored when there was light. For now, I had to focus on getting the Alpha inside. I dropped the bag in the empty front room, but when I moved to the porch, I came to a skidding halt.
Kor was there, ten feet from the steps. He was baring his teeth, a hint of fang in the moonlight, his hands stretched in front of him. His nostrils flared like he was scenting the air, and I wondered if he smelled me like I was prey.
“You’ve got like six feet before you reach the house,” I said, my voice sounding a lot braver than I felt. He could probably sense it—maybe even smell it. Maybe he could hear my heart as it beat rabbit-fast behind my ribs. And maybe that would make it worse, but I breathed a little easier when he closed his mouth and began the walk at a slow shuffle. “Are you okay if I help you inside?”
His jaw ticked, and I knew the more he needed to rely on someone like me, the more he’d hate me. But I could live with that—assuming I did live. “What the hell is this place?” he growled as he shuffled a few feet closer to the porch.
“It’s a cabin. We’re in the middle of nowhere—off the grid I think.” I said it mostly because I didn’t think Kor’s Wolf allies would lead him somewhere that could be easily tracked. Though if this was a set-up, all bets were off.
