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I can hear her screaming from here, begging him to come back, begging for help.
“We can go, I’m okay…” Cricket whispers, twisting in my arms and trying to stand.
The compassion in her heart for a stranger even when she’s hurt moves me, and I press a soft kiss to her temple.
“We’ll go check on her,” I tell them. “I’ll look for a phone inside to call the healers.”
“Call Evelyn, not Rachel!” Ryder calls out. “Rachel will kill me for risking my life!” He tries to laugh, but it turns into a cough and then he’s spitting blood.
“You don’t need to try and lighten the moment, dude. It’s actually dire, you know!” Chase scolds him.
Ryder rolls his eyes. They keep talking and Ryder keeps trying to joke even as Cole attempts to insist there's nothing to laugh about with that monster still out there.
We get to the porch of the cabin, and I set Cricket on her feet. She wobbles, but besides some bruising she seems to be okay. I push through the door first, and see a young woman bound and chained in a cage too small for her body.
“Please! God, please! Get me out of here before he comes back!” she screams when she sees us.
Cricket rushes to her side and holds her hand through the bars while I search for something to break the lock.
“I haven’t seen a normal person for so long…” the woman sobs, clinging to Cricket so hard that her nails are drawing blood from my mate’s hand.
“How long have you been here?” Cricket asks, reaching through with her other hand and stroking the woman's back.
“Six months…” she sobs, choking on emotion.
“You’re pregnant?” Cricket gasps in shock.
I turn to face them. Indeed, the largest part of the malnourished woman in the cage is her enormous stomach.
“He made me mate with a monster…made me mate until I was pregnant…then one day the monster he beat until he listened didn’t come back again…I think he’s dead…he didn’t want to do it, he didn't want to be here either. He was a prisoner too, a man made into a monster…”
Gabriel. It must be. The bastard made Gabriel mate this human until she was with child. I want to be sick, I want to tear someone limb from limb. The child inside this woman will be a sibling to Cole and Ruby, and moon only knows what kind of monstrosity it will be.
“We’re going to get you out of here…” Cricket tries to comfort her, but the woman is too full of fear and desperation to register that she’s safe.
“We have to hurry before he comes back!” she screams. “He was waiting for the old lady to bring someone, but he said he couldn’t be here when they got here! He could be back any moment!”
“Who is he? What does he look like?” I ask her, suddenly still.
We need to know what sick fuck is behind all of this.
The woman turns horrified eyes to me. “I don’t know, he wears a mask, and uses a machine that makes his voice sound weird, unnatural. He says he’s doing this to destroy the dogs? I didn’t understand what he was talking about…he was crazy, just crazy…”
Whoever it is, they’re targeting the packs specifically? My blood runs cold. His experiments have been evolving, his creatures becoming more and more wolf-like. If he’s allowed to continue, eventually he’ll create a wolf that we can't tell apart from any other…
“Jax, look!” I look over to where Cricket is pointing and see a ring of keys on the wall. Quickly, I grab it and try every key to open the cage. Finally it snaps open and the woman scrambles out. She's panicked, screaming, and she throws herself out the door of the cabin before we can say another word.
She takes two steps out the door and there’s a crack. She falls backwards with a spray of blood covering the cabin.
Cricket is screaming, I’m standing in shock. The woman’s head has been blown half off. In the distance I see the flash of a sniper’s scope and I grab Cricket and pull her to the floor.
The man doing these things, whoever he is, wasn’t about to let one of his experiments escape alive.
Chapter15
Cricket
I’m covered in the woman’s blood, pressed to the floor with Jax over me. I can feel the seizure coming, feel the weakness growing in my arms and legs, but I can’t look away from the blood spray on the roof or stop screaming long enough to warn Jax. When the trembling starts he doesn’t notice, not at first, he’s too focused on the sniper. On the dead woman. On the unborn child. My head jerks and hits the floor, vision blurring, and that’s when Jax finally notices.
