AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her words stung my pride and broke my heart. She didn’t need to carry that burden. As her mate and alpha, I should have been the one protecting her.
“I’m not here under duress. I’m here because I chose to be here with you, to support you, and to help you find your family and finally be rid of the demon mark. That’s what you do when you love someone, Talia. You put it all on the line for them. And I’d do it again. Faced with the same outcome, I’d still choose you. Every single time.”
My declaration seemed to strike a chord and unleashed the tears she’d held back moments before.
“I hate that I can’t hold you.” I wrapped my hands around the metal bars, taking out my frustrations on the fabricated steel.
The bars molded the shape of my fingers as I tightened my grip. I pulled and pried. They bent, but wouldn’t break.
Still, I refused to give up, weakening the metal until the first bar snapped free.
That was all I needed.
The keypad was within arms reach. I stretched my arm out of the expanded opening and fumbled around until I felt the digital keypad.
“Galen, what are you doing?” Talia peered through the bars of her cage, a glimmer of hope in her eyes as she watched my attempt to escape.
“What I should have done last night.” I didn’t elaborate, letting her believe I was talking about breaking out when in truth, I was referring to challenging Bjorn.
I pressed the buttons, listened to the different tones and tried the combination from memory. It buzzed.
“ Shit.” Another failure. It should have beeped.
“What if it has a silent alarm?” Talia begged me to stop. “Galen, please stop. What if one of the guards comes in? You’ll get caught. Please, I’m begging you, don’t make me watch them hurt you again.”
“Don’t ask me to watch them steal my mate and force her into an unholy union with some demon god. I thought we could reason with them somehow, but I was wrong. I won’t sit in this cage, waiting for them to take you away. Not while there’s still breath in my lungs. “
I punched the keypad, hitting numbers until I hit the right sequence and matched the tone I’d heard yesterday. The lock beeped and clicked.
Success.
The door swung open. I crawled out on my hands and knees, pushed to my feet when I cleared the top of the crate and stretched to my full height.
“Galen.” Talia gasped, her hands outstretched through the bars of her crate, beckoning me.
“Shush, it’s alright. I’m going to get you out of here.” My body felt electrified by her touch, recharging my belief that she was my mate.
Talia was meant for me.
Mine, my wolf growled; eager as I was to free her from her cell. I punched in the same sequence of numbers into the keypad on Talia’s cell but it didn’t work. I tried again and again.
Nothing but buzzing, every time.
“Maybe there is a silent alarm. Could they have changed the code remotely?” Talia squeezed through the bars and grabbed my wrist.
The main door to the kennel opened with a whoosh of arctic air, as if in answer to her question. Footsteps echoed in the entrance way and approached the inner door leading to the holding area. I kept at the lock, punching in random numbers at a fevered pace.
“Hey, what the hell?” One of the guards exclaimed as he charged into the holding room. “Jeff, get your ass in here. He’s loose.”
I abandoned the lock, turned on the guard in a full sprint with my right shoulder pitched down like a defensive lineman making a play to sack a quarterback and hit him center mass. He went down hard on his back and I stayed on top of him, hammering punches in rapid succession to his face.
He raised his forearm in front of his face, blocking a few blows and tried to dismount me with a barrel roll to his side. Grappling in the nude with a trained fighter proved dangerous for me and more than a little awkward for my opponent.
Nudity was an inevitable part of our transformation. Clothes never survived the shift. Bashful just wasn’t in our nature. The guard however, seemed to have a bigger problem with two hundred fifty pounds of naked man sitting on his torso than the punches landed to his head.
I used that to my advantage.
The second guard did not seem to share his partner’s inhibitions. He burst into the room and jumped into the fray, grabbing me by the neck and forcing me to the ice cold concrete. We wrestled on the floor, throwing body shots, upper cuts and rabid punches to the back of the skull.
