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“We can overlook everything.” Alpha Rollins reached out his hand for mine. It was youthful. More youthful than it should have looked at his age. Even shifters reached a point in which their bodies could no longer heal the testament of time. “Step back from the edge, Freya. Let’s talk about this. We only want what’s best for you.”
Such sweet, sordid lies.
“There is nothing to talk about.”
I turned to face them. The members of my pack who I’d grown up with. Their faces were stone, impenetrable. They all knew what would happen to me, to the women who had been chosen, and they didn’t care. My life was hanging on the tilted blade of a knife, and all it would take was one plunge to save those who would be chosen after me.
“Never again…”
Rocks shifted beneath my feet as I slipped closer to the edge. Small pebbles coursed down the side of the cliff, their fate soon to be mine. Just one more inch. A small step and…
Their screams followed me off the cliffside as I plunged toward the icy depths of the channel below.
Up until today, my life had always felt like a fairy tale. But the problem with fairy tales was that although they all started withOnce upon a time, they didn’t always end withhappily ever after.
CHAPTER TWO
Fucking kill me.
I was starting to think the universe fucking hated me. My sister Sarah would tell me the stars weren’t aligning in my favor or that some damn planet was in retrograde. Hippy dippy bullshit if you ask me. The scene was quarantined off by yellow tape. I parked my motorcycle, a classic Indian, just shy of the perimeter before making my way toward the probationary officer on guard duty whose pimply face and greasy hair told me he was barely out of high school. Ignoring his protests, I swept past him toward the scene of the crime.
It was a fucking massacre.
“John.” I greeted the officer on duty with a nod of my head. He was one of ours. Not just on our payroll.
“Wolf, sorry ’bout this, man.” He shook his head. “I normally wouldn’t have you ride all the way out here, but this shit is weird.” I wasn’t sure what was weird about a bunch of bikers being gunned down on the road to Montana. Then I caught sight of one of the decals that graced the tank.
Pharaohs.
Fuck. They were my cousin’s men out of Colorado. They had been tasked with running our gun shipment, and I’d been expecting them later tonight.
“How many?”
John sighed. “All of them.” He shook his head. “Bloody fucking massacre. Whoever did this knew what they were. They were peppered with bullets. The spray pattern is consistent with a drive-by. Probably caught them taking a piss break.”
“Human bullets?” I asked before he continued. John nodded.
“They would have been fine if that were the end of it,” John said. “But each of them was shot execution style with one of these.” With a gloved hand, he held up a see-through evidence bag containing one of the rare things that could kill a shifter stone dead if applied right.
Silver.
Whoever had taken down my cousin’s men had taken the time to stop and shoot them in the fucking heads with silver bullets.
“That’s not the weird part,” the deputy continued. “Smell the air.”
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and let the scent of the surrounding area wash over me. The flow of the wind pushed the earthy essence of dirt and dry grass around. It was tinged with the astringent aroma of gasoline and oil. This was a well-used road. An iron tang from the bodies of the fallen men still clung to the air as well.
There were a few unique scents that littered the area, each belonging to one of the deputies on scene. There was only one I didn’t recognize, and that seemed to belong to the pimple-faced rookie. His scent would need to be cataloged later, but I wasn’t worried about that.
What worried me was that there weren’t any other unrecognized scents on scene.
Not one.
“That’s not possible,” I growled. There was nothing. Nothing. No stray cologne or sweat scent. No pheromones whatsoever that would corroborate someone being here besides the fallen men.
“At first, I thought it was just me.” He shook his head. “That’s why I called you out. There should be some lingering scent left, but there isn’t. It’s like these men were gunned down by a fucking ghost.”
A ghost.
