Punished By The Alphas (Steamy Werebear Shifter FMMMM Menage Romance) (2 page)

Of course, I knew the truth. The shifters likely did not kill any hikers. There was an unspoken law among shifter kind to never kill humans, and I was somewhat familiar with these parts. These shifters were probably not the culprits of the slayings that the sheriff suspected — he probably considered all bears in the area shifters, and that was certainly not the case.

But that didn’t matter so much to me. I had a duty to perform the work I had been contracted to do, and the pay was going to be extraordinary for killing a whole pack at once.

I began to wander down a trail, keeping my eyes alert for any signs of bear activity. While they didn’t coexist exclusively, werebears in isolated packs like this one tended to intertwine with the regular bears, and finding the native population usually led me in the right direction for my hunt.

I would love to be able to say, at this point, that I came across some scratchings against the trees that gave me a solid lead. Hell, I’d settle for having to come back out several times over the week, until I finally spotted activity and snuck up on one of the bastards. But neither of these, nor any other reasonably believable circumstances of my job, actually happened that day.

Because the shifters knew I was coming. I’d somehow been careless, or perhaps one of them had spotted me in my brief time atop the hill. Even on my guard, I barely heard a branch snap behind me before my world went black as I fell crashing to the ground.

*              *              *              *

It was hours before I regained consciousness. Ignoring the pounding in my head, I fought through the haze of grogginess and slowly opened my eyes. My vision was filled with a blinding, orange light, and I focused on the crackle of the roaring fire. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized that I was alone in a dimly-lit cave.

Well, not alone
per se
. I could barely make out several forms further up, towards the mouth of the small cavern. Their voices were trailing down towards me, and while I couldn’t distinguish the words, I knew that they were speaking animatedly.

Trying to move my arms, it dawned on me that I was tied up, slumped with my back against the wall. Thinking quickly, I started to maneuver myself against the wall, reaching down to try and withdraw the knife that was always concealed in one of my boots — sheathed and ready for moments like this.

Fuck! It’s gone!

“It looks like the little shifter traitor is awake now,” I heard. Struggling to maintain my composure, I glanced up angrily at my captors, who were now just on the other side of the fire. There were four of them — all rugged, shirtless, and gazing upon me with an odd spectrum of curiosity and tranquil fury.

“I’m not like you. I’m not like
any
of you!” I practically spat in a venomous rage. “Don’t you
dare
compare yourselves to me.”

“You can try to deny your true nature,” one of them spoke, stepping closer, “but you can never bury it. It will always loom in the darkness, waiting for you.”

“Shut up!” I growled. “You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about!”

“Do I not, Hunter?”

My lips went silent, and I glowered in fury.

“That’s right…we know
exactly
who you are.” This one was clearly the alpha among them, speaking for the rest. They nodded quietly behind him, their piercing green eyes all locked onto my own. “You are the most dangerous of the entire order, for you are the shifter who turned on the rest. The one who tracks and murders her own kind. We have known about you for a long time…and we prepared ourselves for the day that you would come, Lira.”

“You don’t have the right to speak that name. Let me go.”

“Why did you betray us all, Lira?” The alpha asked calmly, his animal side placated for now. “What drove you to dedicate your life to exterminating the rest of us?”

I stopped struggling against the bindings. The vines were strong, full of life even after their removal, and I had been stripped of any blades within grasp. Biding my time, I considered the options and quickly decided to play their little game.

“My parents,” I answered. “Murdered by shifters.”

“You know that isn’t true,” he answered. “Every shifter in North America knows of Erek…of his valiance, and his dedication to protecting his town. Your father was the greatest shifter among our entire kind, and what happened to you was a tragedy…but we do not murder our own kind.”

Silence filled the air as I restrained my anger.

“Not until you came along, that is.”

“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but you have no idea what happened. You weren’t there. I WAS. And I saw them, both of them…draped across the forest floor, dripping in their own blood…shifters standing above them…”

I tried to bite back my tears, but the sorry little bastards denied me my composure. Humiliatingly, I began to sob in front of them, my shoulders bobbing with my cries.

“
You weren’t there!
You can’t possibly defend your filthy, backstabbing kind when you didn’t see them, murdered by their…their own…”

The pack averted their gaze, but their alpha kept his unwavering stare on me as I descended into a fresh fury of tears.

“But you don’t understand…I
was
there,” he finally spoke after I had regained most of my composure.

The words hit me like a slap in the face, and I slowly turned my furious, hateful eyes upon him. The words came slowly, drenched in malice as I carefully enunciated every last syllable. “You are going to have to repeat that for me.”

“My name is Grizz…and these are my pack brothers: Patrick, Lionel, and Darren.” Each of the shifters in turn bowed his head respectfully in turn, before their alpha – Grizz – resumed his explanation. “I was but a cub when I met your father, but the night that he was murdered, I was a teenage shifter, already beginning the Change,” the alpha began to explain. “My family spoke very highly of him. That night, I was prowling with the rest of his pack in those woods, when we heard a disturbance. We rushed to aid your parents as quickly as we could, but by the time we got there…the wolves had already gotten them. It broke our hearts. They raced away as we arrived, right before you stumbled upon their clawed, ravaged bodies. Had we known you had seen us, we would have stayed and taken you in — but our thoughts were centered on vengeance. We chased the perpetrators for an hour, a small group of feral, regular wolves, and the pack of us overpowered them quickly. We didn’t rest until their sinews were ripped asunder, their blood drenching the underbrush.

“But by the time we returned for you, the authorities had already whisked you away,” the alpha continued. “We learned our mistake all too quickly, knowing that in our bloodlust we let Erek’s very memory down. We should have immediately come for you instead. If only we had known that you were right there! Instead, you were pulled from our world, raised as an orphan with your own breed of personal vengeance in your heart…but we had no idea how deep your demands for justice would run.”

I silently listened to his words with unflinching anger.

“I wasn’t with the pack when you found them, still in the forest around your town. Just several dozen miles over,” he pointed towards the cave’s mouth. “I hadn’t heard from them in several years. But as the news of their deaths swept across the community, we knew that there was a new, deadly Hunter on the loose. We had encountered your order before, but the savagery of your kills…it was clear that this was something entirely new altogether. It sent a wave of panic through all were-kind. As shifters continuously fell across the years, all killed under the same circumstances, we began to piece together the truth. By the time we knew it was you, there was no stopping your advance.”

“If that’s all true,” I spoke, carefully mulling over my words, “then why haven’t the lot of you simply disposed of me already? You could have rid the world of your scourge earlier, while I was unconscious…”

“Others might have slaughtered you, but I knew your father,” he answered me. “I prowled with him. He was a good man…a good shifter. Even with my life on the line, I will never be the shifter who murdered Lira, daughter of Erek. No matter how far you had fallen, I knew firsthand the tragedy you had suffered, and the misunderstanding that guided every silver bullet you’ve ever fired.”

I felt myself involuntarily avert my gaze.
If this was all true…my gods, all the shifters that I’ve slain in my quest for revenge…

“I am the only one left from that night. You started your rein of terror by killing the others, and through your primal, shifter need to hunt…you never stopped. You have carved fear into the hearts of every were in the country, and when they encounter a Hunter, they pray that it is not you.”

I turned to him again, and the anger across his face is palatable. He approached me now, dropping to a kneel beside me, and for the first time since I had stirred I felt genuine fear.

“You want to know why you are still alive? Why I haven’t enacted my
own
justice, avenging our kind? I’ll tell you why. I needed you awake and alive so that you could understand what I’m about to tell you.”

I gritted my teeth, struggling to keep the fear out of my eyes. He was so close now, and I was so defenseless. “What is it?” I murmured through a clenched, tightened jaw.

“I forgive you.”

*              *              *              *

At the sound of his words, I was frozen on the spot. My brain couldn’t comprehend what it was hearing, and as I turned to him with wide, searching eyes, I looked deep into his own.

But there was no malice there. No vengeance. He meant every one of those three words, and I was stripped of every ounce of fight that was within me.

“You…
forgive
me?”

He drew me into a warm hug, and I slumped almost lifelessly against him. My eyes fell upon the other three shifters, still on the other side of the fire. They had listened to the tale with unwavering curiosity, and stared at me with something akin to sympathy, if not outright respect.

“You have spent so much time in pain, Lira,” he whispered into my ear. “And through this pain, your misunderstanding has slain many innocent lives. You’ve destroyed families and slain countless wanderers, searching for a pack to join. But if you are willing to atone for your sins…perhaps, within time, the community will find a place for even the likes of you. But you are going to have to earn it.”

“How?” I asked quietly, reeling from the revelations of the night. It all made sense, what he had said. I had seen them flee the scene, my father’s pack. Their bodies were riddled with telltale claw marks, and the coroner had suspected bears…the signs all added up. But they added up wrong, and based on that I had made it my mission in life to slaughter them…all for nothing.

And to think…my parents were avenged all along that fateful night.

“You have slain dozens of werebears. You are going to have to bring some of them back. Not that your body will allow you to birth as many as you killed…but perhaps you can make up for several litters of them.”

“You…wish to mate me?” The thought sparked a flicker of passion in the back of my mind as my baser animal instincts wrestled up from the darkness.

“It’s a start,” he growled as he bit into my neck. “But you’re not mating me…you’ll be mating all of us.”

“All of you?” I murmured, feeling his bite stir the embers of budding lust inside me. I had never spent enough time near werebear shifters for my primal urges to awaken, but the time we had spent rectifying my past had allowed them to creep up the back of my mind.

“Of course. We are a pack, and we do everything together as such. It is about time that we had some cubs of our own…”

As the others drew close, I felt the weight of my atonement — the debt for my sins. But as they surrounded me, their minds filled with need, all I could think about was how badly I needed to be satisfied…