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And now they were at the door. Ryder hesitated, then knocked and tried to open it. It was locked. Ryder grunted, and leaned into the door.
It popped open, going inward. He didn’t even harm the hinges, Benny thought with admiration.
Ryder stepped inside, and Benny quickly followed. Jessie was only a step behind.
Two men were shaking a young woman. “Where is she?” demanded one of them.
Ryder growled, and the two men looked their way. “Get the hell out of here,” the other one said. “These are our women.”
Benny looked at him. “Trevor,” he said flatly. The young man from last night.
Trevor rushed him. Not Ryder — but him. And Benny stepped forward eager to do battle. He’d wanted to do this last night. And hearing the crap this morning followed by Amanda’s story? He was more than willing to fight.
Ryder didn’t try to stop him. Good thing. Benny wasn’t sure he was in control of his wolf enoughtostop.
He shook his hands out of the clenched fists he’d formed when he saw the two men abusing the woman. Trevor was big. But it wouldn’t matter. The bigger they were, the harder they fell — a truism only if you were a skilled fighter.
And Benny was. He didn’t wait until Trevor actually grabbed him. He lashed out with his foot, pivoted, then horse-kicked the man in the head, and heard the satisfying crack that said he’d connected with Trevor’s neck. Trevor dropped. Down and out.
The other man, also from the dorm last night, just turned and stared. Benny couldn’t remember his name.
“Happier?” Ryder asked dryly.
Benny snorted. He was, although he wasn’t going to admit it. It sounded juvenile.
Jessie shook her head at the two of them. She moved toward the woman who was huddled on the floor. “Cass?” she said gently. “It’s me, Jessie. You remember me? We’ve come to get you out of here.”
“Hell no,” the remaining man protested. “They’re ours. Bjorn said.”
“Bjorn’s dead,” Jessie said flatly. “And no one belongs to you against their will.”
“But...,” the man continued to protest.
“Shut up,” Ryder said in a conversational tone. “You’re going to be lucky to leave this house alive. Don’t dig your grave any deeper here.”
“Where are the other two women?” Benny asked. The man just looked stubborn. Benny looked at the man on the ground in front of him. “You want to join Trevor? He’s not dead —not yet. But I imagine he’s hurting.”
“How did you do that?” the young man asked, looking at his buddy. “I’ve never seen anyone kick like that.”
Ryder closed his eyes briefly as if he was in pain. Benny sympathized. Either this young man was developmentally slow, or just completely clueless. Didn’t he realize how much trouble he was in?
Really it made no sense, Benny thought, his eyes narrowing. Whydidn’tthis man feel afraid? And he wasn’t afraid — Benny could tell. Fear had a scent to it. So did rage. Trevor had been enraged. But he’d been raging last night. Benny figured Trevor was always in a rage. But this kid, and he was just a kid, Benny thought suddenly, this kid was truly clueless. He didn’t see what he was doing as wrong.
Why was that? His own rage dropped away as curiosity took hold. What the hell was going on with these men they called Chen’s recruits? “Check the other rooms, if you would, Jessie,” he asked quietly. Jessie nodded, and got up from the floor, pulling the woman up with her. Not as young as Amanda and Jessie, Benny judged. Something in the way she moved, said she was older. Not for the first time, he sympathized with Abby’s frustration that age was so hard to judge.
The room looked like they were all students at the local college, but ages ranged from Jessie at 22, to him at 63. And Benny probably looked the youngest, actually. He looked at the befuddled young man standing in the middle of the room. Well, maybe not.
“Ryder? We’re going to need the doc,” Jessie called from the back room.
“Go,” Ryder ordered. He turned to the door, opened it and whistled, a long low sound. Benny headed into the bedroom with only a sidewise look at the young man standing there. He glanced toward the back door —where were Ryder’s Wolves?
But he didn’t have time for that. In the back bedroom, a woman lay on the bed, bleeding. Another woman was trying to staunch the flow. Benny was grim. He truly was going to kill someone. Jessie has crooning softly to the woman, who was trying to tell her what happened. The woman from the living room, Cass, was standing out of the way, literally wringing her hands.
“Cass,” he said in a low voice. “She needs meat. Is there anything in the refrigerator? The freezer?”
“I’ll look,” she said. “They left yesterday around lunchtime. They left us sandwiches for supper —we’ve been locked in this room until those guys got here this morning.”
That was interesting in itself, but then it hit Benny what she’d just said. He looked around the bedroom with its attached bath. Two queen-sized beds. A table by a window that had been covered with an iron grill. Where had Amanda escaped? She’d said something about the bathroom window....
