Releasing the Wolf (10 page)

“If something happens to you—”

“If something happens to me, the pack is yours. If something happens to Ryan, the pack is yours.”

He felt the blood drain from his face. “I’m really not Alpha material. I’ve only been a wolf for eight months.”

“Being a leader has nothing to do with how long you’ve been a wolf, and it doesn’t have to be about brute strength, you know that. You’ve earnt the pack’s respect over the past few weeks. You have the skills of strategy, and mediation. They already listen to you. You would do a good job.”

“I … I haven’t made my peace with being a wolf yet.”

Lawrence pinned him with this pale blue eyes. “That’s bloody obvious. But sometimes you have to throw yourself in the deep end before you can know what you’re capable of.

“Right then…” He snapped the barrel in place and slotted the gun into the fitted clips on his trousers, along with two hunting knives. “It’s almost one o’clock.”

They headed out of the study and down the huge staircase, but before he opened the door, Lawrence turned and stared at him with the most warmth he’d ever seen on the guy. “You did good tonight, Taylor. With Lydia. You did good.”

He just about succeeded in pushing down the lump in his throat.

Yeah, very Alpha of you, Taylor – go ahead and bawl your eyes out.

He nodded his thanks, Lawrence opened the door, and they both stepped into the rain to meet the pack.

~*~

It was the scream that woke her, and it took her a good few seconds to realise the scream was coming from her own lungs, and even longer to understand that she was no longer dreaming. Because she could see his face.

She remembered his face.

Oh, god, I remember his face!

Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she didn’t know if they were of relief, joy or agony. That cold, stabbing pain in her heart was back, just as strongly as before.

She wailed and doubled over, clutching at and rubbing her chest – anything to ease it. Her vision was blurry; her head pounded with something that felt close to a migraine, the pelting of the rain against the window only marginally louder.

I can’t do this, I can’t do this, oh fuck I can’t do this!

She risked a glance down at her chest, fully expecting to see a gaping hole where her heart should be, or some knife sticking out of it – it wouldn’t at all have surprised her to discover that maybe she’d stabbed herself in her sleep. This pain was too real – no
way
was this imagined. Of course, there was nothing there but smooth skin.

She blinked, trying to clear her vision. Lights flashed in front of her eyes every time she did so. All these years she thought she’d suffer from a heart attack, but these flashing lights were new … maybe it was a brain tumour that would end her.

Amid all the chaos traversing her body, she registered the familiar scent. Perhaps it was
because
she’d lost control over her other senses, that her sense of smell seemed to heighten tenfold. She could smell Taylor.

No, that wasn’t quite right. She could smell…

Her clothes!

She catapulted out of bed and landed on the floor, on her side, with a thump; her need to quench the agony so great.

Not willing to release her chest, she half-crawled and half-slithered across the floor with one arm propelling her towards the bathroom and the laundry basket where she’d thrown her waitress’ uniform. Not bothering to even try and stand – there was no way she could have – she gripped the top of the basket with one hand, crying out as her stretched arm pulled at her chest, and tipped the basket over.

Her white blouse, being right at the top, was the first thing that tumbled out and she pounced on it, burying her face in it, breathing it in…

Oh, yes!

The pain eased a little as Taylor’s scent hit her hard. He’d been lying on this blouse, rubbing his naked torso on it as he’d—

She groaned. She didn’t need to think about that again, but god damn it, it was helping. That other too-familiar ache bloomed between her thighs, and she grabbed the material, blocked out all thoughts of how crazy this was, and rubbed the blouse all over herself, starting with her neck. She worked her way down between her cleavage, around and across her breasts, down her stomach and navel, lower…

No, I shouldn’t…

The hell she shouldn’t. The pain was going.

She reached between her legs and pressed the blouse there, her whole body sensitised to the pressure of it, the feel of it, the smell of it …
oh, shit…
Her climax racked her body.

All at once, the pressure on her chest lifted and her mind cleared, but her head still pounded, and the lights still seemed too bright…

Uh, no, Lydia – the lights aren’t on.

Oh.

It was only now as she lay here, sated, with no chest pains, that she could feel how hot her skin was. Her fever had come back fighting. She’d thought this was just a bad cold. Clearly it was a virus. She wondered when she was going to be able to fit in a doctor’s appointment.

You’re a train wreck, darling
, scolded Aunt Gladys.

Instinctively, she brought her blouse up to her nose, breathing it in again. It occurred to her that she didn’t feel guilty for her earlier sexcapade with Taylor. She had felt guilty when she’d slept with Brendan. She’d always felt guilty sleeping with anyone who wasn’t Ryan ever since she first started dreaming about the guy – which was before she’d even lost her virginity. Her entire sex life had been plagued with feelings of guilt, something that she had spent her adulthood trying to curb. She’d always wondered if it was connected somehow to the pains in her chest. So why no guilt with Taylor? It seemed odd.

Abruptly, Ryan’s face appeared in her mind, clear as day, just as it had when she’d woken up from her nightmare.

Wow.

He seemed so real.

In her imagination, her eyes travelled the length of him. She was pulled backwards as if behind a camera on a wheeled stand, and she saw he was chained to the ceiling by his arms. His head hung low, those arms stretched upwards, red and blistering … he looked battered. He’d
been
battered. But even in his brutalised state he looked magnificent, his body like some powerful machine that could blast anything out of its path given half the chance.

Mine
, growled a voice in her head. But then, she’d always felt that way about him in her dreams: possessive to a fault. She was pretty sure the therapist would put it down to abandonment issues.

Out of the corner of her mind’s eye, which still played out the scene in front of her, she saw walls made of cement, dank and dark – a warehouse. He was in a warehouse. Crates were piled up in one corner, and on the side of one of them, a symbol: a trident.

Her memory reached for something. She’d seen that symbol before – that
particular
one: three prongs that sat on a circle, the circle itself encasing a black cross.

It was on the outside of a warehouse located on the road where the post office depot was! She’d seen it the couple of times she’d been down that way to pick up parcels.

The realisation bolted her out of her vision. She knew where Ryan was.

Going to him would be stupid, because he wasn’t real.

She looked at the blouse bunched up in her hand. She stared at her chest which permanently ached with a pain she could never fathom.

She was going to go anyway.

Nope. Her first assessment had been correct: this was stupid.

The wind smacked into her, rain riding the gale. It whipped across her cheeks, the bite of the water stinging.

Her father had said there was a storm on the way, not that she’d paid it much mind at the time, but this was more than a storm: this was more like a friggin’ hurricane.

She wouldn’t normally have cared – she’d always liked storms – but she wasn’t feeling well enough to battle nature right now.

“I should have stayed in!” she cried into the brewing tempest, needing to hear her own voice – maybe hearing it would knock some sense into her.

Instead she strode on, taking heart in the fact that her blouse, carrying Taylor’s aroma, wrapped around her under her coat. She hadn’t been able to part with it, too worried the chest pains would reappear if the blouse wasn’t in contact with her skin.

A pair of grey, cotton jogging pants covered her legs, and she’d shoved her feet into her trainers.

Lightning flashed briefly far off in the distance, followed by a faint roll of thunder. The hairs all over her body rose, as if responding to the electrically charged atmosphere all those miles away. She wondered if the storm was heading this way. She should really go back home. But, even though she hated to admit it, Taylor’s conversation with her rattled around in her brain, and the little flame of hope that Ryan could actually be real was something she couldn’t extinguish.

She passed the post office depot. The warehouse she’d seen the symbol on was just a little further up on the left. Despite the howl of the wind, she could clearly make out her heart hammering against her ribcage – at least, that’s what it felt like – as if it was trying to leap out of her and show her the way to Ryan.

That flame inside her grew a bit brighter.

Before too long, the derelict looking building presented itself, and there was that symbol on the wall by the door, although she could barely make it out through the wind and rain. It didn’t help that the entrance gates were chained.

Gates?

Her heart sank, the weight of her disappointment alone pulling it down.

“Guess that’s that then,” she muttered, then turned and almost jumped out of her skin when she came face to face with a brunette woman who had the weirdest fucking eyes she’d ever seen.

The wind blasted through the stranger’s hair, carrying her scent on it, and Lydia recoiled. It’s not that it was horrible. It’s that it was
dangerous
. Beautifully seductive in a way that screamed “poisonous”.

Her smile would have turned the stomachs of angels. “Ms Lydia Martin, I presume.” It was a statement, not a question.

For one bizarre moment she thought her therapist had found her in the midst of her crazy night time venture. That receptionist over the phone was the only other person she could think of who had addressed her by her full name.

She didn’t have time to think anything else. Her world exploded in pain; too late she realised she’d been punched in the head, and then everything went black.

Chapter Eight

Taylor’s scent coaxed him into consciousness.

They’d found him.

They’d fucking found him!

Then everything hit him at once – a barrage of sensory information that made his head spin: he could smell Tridents – not just that psychotic female, but other Tridents too. Many were in the room, including males. He suddenly realised that Taylor’s aroma was old, carried on the air for too long. So, he wasn’t here? But it was definitely him, mingled with—

His eyes snapped open, his entire body tensing:
Lydia!

How the fuck he could recognise her scent from a dream was beyond him, but it was definitely
her
. Not only that, but he could tell she was close to the change.

Shit.

For a second, he was stunned. She actually, really smelled that way?

Blood rushed to his nether regions, which still felt pitifully sore after the tsunami it had had to endure. Nevertheless, as always, the need to mate overruled all else, including sense. He was fully erect in seconds, and he kinda wished he wasn’t ‘cause, well, enemy territory and all that.

Then reality crashed down on him heavier than a ton of bricks: not only had she just been proven to exist, but they’d caught her.

Despite his parched throat, a low, warning noise rumbled through him. Desperation, right on the tail of anger (and maybe something to do with lust), renewed his strength and he swayed in his chains, ignoring the way the silver bit into his already mangled arms.

“Ah … the mighty Ryan finally awakes,” came the voice from the darkness. The shadows shifted before him, and the female Trident who had tortured him earlier appeared, dragging an unconscious Lydia across the cement floor by her arm, as if she were a rag doll.

He lunged at her – hadn’t really meant to, but it was pure instinct that drove him now, partly because he was seething, and partly because of the full moon’s pull, its power palpable above all the storm clouds that he knew had gathered. He couldn’t see any of it, but he could hear it, and he could more than fucking feel it.

Of course, he made it about four inches forward before the chains arrested his movement. “She has nothing to do with this!” he roared.