Broken Wolf: Moonbound Series, Book Seven (21 page)

Andrea moaned on the floor.

He settled a hand onto her forehead. “It’s going to be all right, love.”

The click of a gun behind him made Owen’s body lock. A cold muzzle pressed into his back and his hands went up instinctively.

Clara let out a little squeal, and Vadik looked up.

From over his shoulder, a hard voice said, “All of you, freeze, or he dies.”

“
D
amon
, please.” Clara held up her hand. “You don’t have to do this. We’re all going to be free of him. You can leave this place. We can all leave.”

“How did you get out? Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” Damon’s eyebrows rose, and he frowned; the light in his eyes dark with fear and something else. “There’s nothing out there for us. Our father is our world and they’re taking him away from us.”

“Our father kills people. Kills our siblings. Kills our mothers,” Clara whispered, a tear fell, burning a trail down her cheek. “Please, Damon.” She risked a step forward and his hard gaze bored a hole through her.

Blood pooled around his foot on the wooden plank floor and Clara winced at the nasty gashes showing through his ripped pants—almost like he’d been bitten.

“Men are here. They’re killing us. Ricardo died on the beach. Hemi is bleeding out as we speak.” Damon limped forward a step, shoving the barrel of his AK47 harder against Owen.

“And I’m sure you didn’t shoot at them first,” Vadik hissed.

“They are the intruders,” Damon snarled. “I was protecting my home.” He glanced at Andrea and shook his head. “You should put her out of her misery. She’ll never be the same, even if she does survive.”

Vadik’s eyes glowed yellow and magick billowed in waves through the small building. “Threaten her again, and you’ll feel every second of pain this world has to offer.”

Clara fought to remain upright. She’d never felt so much emotion, almost like Vadik was channeling his pain across his wolf spirit’s magick.

Damon staggered a little under the weight of Vadik’s anger, but Owen didn’t seem affected. Something about Owen and Vadik was different than other wolves on the island. Perhaps because they’d both been turned, not born? Even her father didn’t command this much strength through his wolf.

She took another step toward Damon and touched his outstretched arm. Her brother looked so haggard. So tired. He’d been the one tending to them in the cages, but he hadn’t spoken to her the entire time. Never made eye contact with her.

The muzzle of his rifle moved, stopping as it lined up with Clara’s face.

She breathed deeply to calm her racing heart. He wouldn’t shoot her. Underneath all the pain and misery, they were siblings. “We can leave together. Help us.”

Damon shook his head. His dark curls were heavy with sweat and sand. Blood ran down one angular cheek from a cut on his forehead. “The others know I’m a guard. I am their enemy.”

“We all have our burdens to bear. The blame for all of this is on our father. Not us,” Clara continued. “Help us.”

His honey-brown eyes, just like their father’s, met her gaze and he gradually let the rifle drop. “You won’t let them kill me?”

Air rushed from Clara’s lungs. There was the boy she’d grown up with again. The one who’d come running into the kitchen to steal treats. The one who’d laughed and played her in the nursery when they were small. “I won’t. I promise.” She turned to Vadik. “I need you to calm whatever it is you’re channeling.”

The big Russian narrowed his golden eyes at her, magick slammed against her chest, but she held her ground. Seconds ticked by.

Another groan from his mate on the floor distracted him. The glow disappeared and he nodded, turning his focus back to Andrea. The tension from his magick instantly dissipated with it.

“I’ve never felt a wolf do that before. Even father, when he’s angry, hasn’t ever done that.”

“Stop contemplating the universe asshole,” Vadik growled. “If you’re going to help,
fucking
help.
”

“Vadik!”

Owen turned around, snatching the rifle from Damon’s hands before her brother could react. “Vadik’s right. You need to make a choice right now. Which side are you on? Your father’s?”

Damon shook his head and reached into his pants pocket.

Clara stared at the strange metal square he produced.

“Here.” He held it out to her. “The collars are enchanted, and this key is the only way to get them off. But none of us can leave. We all have implants that detonate if we leave the island. They stop our heart.”

She covered her mouth with a hand. She stared at the metal square and then at Owen. After everything. All this time. All this fighting…for nothing.

“I want to be on your side, Clara. It’s just that we’re going to die if we try to leave.”

“No you won’t,” Vadik rumbled. “That’s why we blew up the power stations. To turn off the failsafe on your implants.”

Footsteps thudded outside the building and Clara sprang toward Damon. The door shattered and
huge
men in tons of gear, armed to the teeth with rifles poured into the room.

She threw herself between one really big angry guy and the rifle he was pointing at Damon. “Stop!”

The big soldier looked down at her. His face was black with some kind of paint. The whites of his eyes showed harshly against the dark skin and they were cold…calculating.

“Who the fuck are you?” he snapped.

Owen raised his gun and the other soldier mirrored him.

There were too many. Too much tension.

Vadik was going to implode again at any moment. The man was stretched to thin and in too much pain through his connection with his mate.

“Where’s Luther?” Vadik asked, surprising Clara with his even tone. The strain was there, he was just doing a good job of tamping it down.

“How do you know Luther?” The big guy at the front asked.

“Vadik? Is that Vadik? Let go of me you big oaf!” A familiar female voice called from outside the guard post.

A few moments later a small wisp of a woman covered in tattoos slithered through all the stony guards.

She met Clara’s gaze and smiled in recognition.

Clara grabbed Maggie’s arm. She was the one who’d taken Faye. She and Luther had saved her. They’d come back, just like they’d promised. “How is Faye?”

Maggie paused, her eyes glassy. “She didn’t make it, Clara. She never made it off the dock. I have to help Andrea.” She shrugged off Clara’s hand and hurried toward Vadik and Andrea. “Oh, gods! Banner, get your ass over here and gimme one of those wound packing powder thingys.”

Clara struggled to breathe. Faye died on the island. Never made it off? It wasn’t fair. She’d fought so hard to give them a chance and still her father had somehow managed to win. He always won.

“Stand down, men.” The big guy lowered the rifle aimed at her face and held up a fist. The rest of his team followed suit. He crossed the room to Andrea and pulled several small packets from various pockets on his vest.

“Can you help her?” Vadik asked.

Owen moved to her side and they stood next to Damon while the soldier attended to Andrea’s arm.

“Hold on. Where’s Young? He’s got the big packet of woundseal,” the big one said.

Another of the soldiers walked out into the night, calling
Young
into the dark.

Clara gasped when Damon gently grabbed the back of her collar.

“Hold still. I’ll get this off of you.” Two sequential metal clicks followed his words and sure enough…the collar fell into two pieces. He handed it to her and then moved to Owen’s neck. After removing Owen’s he placed the small metal square in her hand. “Run this over the face of the collars. There are two small magnetic locks that will slide out when you do.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, leaving them both and moving toward the people bustling around Andrea and Vadik. She needed to get their collars off too. Before anything else happened.

She reached out toward Vadik’s arm. He turned to her before she touched him. Opening her other hand, she held up the magnet. “Run this over the face of the collars. They have magnetic locks. Damon helped.” The last two words were barely a breath. But she needed him to know that her half-brother had chosen a side.

That he deserved a second chance.

They all did.

O
wen ran
his hand along the bare skin of his neck. Two years, that collar had been his life. Whether wolf or man, it had grown and shrunk with his body, stayed with him always. But it was gone. His heart bumped against his chest.

He was free
.

Clara was free
.

He pulled her into his side and wrapped his arms around her. They’d escaped the hunt. They had escaped the collar. If they could only escape the island, they would know true freedom.

Vadik took off Andrea’s collar, and then his own, while one of the Rangers poured a powder over her wound.

A short, dark-haired woman with two full-sleeve tattoos turned the discarded collar over and over in her hands. “What the hell is this, anyway?”

His jaw worked as the words rolled around inside him.
Torture. Cage. Hunt.
But he couldn’t put them together anymore. It felt like, if he said them out loud, he might wake up from whatever dream he was in, or whatever end-of-life hallucination must be taking him. Because they couldn’t possibly be escaping.

“They’re enchanted collars that my fa—” Damon began, but a hard look from Vadik stopped him. “That Rossi used to control the wolves in the cages.”

“Cages?” the little woman spat the word out with as much disgust as Owen felt building inside him.

“What the hell was he doing with wolves in cages?” one of the Rangers asked, coming inside the building and hanging on the door frame.

“He was hunting us.” Owen kept his voice low. “Men would come in to the hunting ground, armed with these rifles that could blow your head off at twenty paces. And the collars would make us shift into wolves so he could kill us.”

The silence that cascaded around the small, packed building was deafening. No one responded, or made a wise-crack, and Owen watched it really sink in to everyone’s features. Even behind all the war paint, he could see the nausea. The anger.

Even the one who’d been tearing open little silver packets and pouring them into Andrea’s wounds had stopped moving. They were all going to be sick, no doubt.

“Each hunt, they’d get to kill one wolf.” He slipped his hand to his neck and rubbed at the new skin. “He turned some of us. Some of us were wolves already. But whenever there was a hunt, the cage doors would open and we’d be on our own until the collars shifted us and the shooting started.”

Still, no one responded. Probably because there were no words.

On the ground, Andrea groaned and Vadik looked up from his prostrate position. His hands were on her before the big Ranger could warn him off.

“Careful. That’ll only stop the bleeding if you let it sit.”

But Vadik had her head in his hands and pushed off the hulking man. “Andrea. Andrea. Listen to me, love. We’re going to get you to a hospital. You’re going to be fine.”

The Ranger stood and looked at his buddies. Owen had seen that expression before. It was the same way his partner used to look at him when they stood over a family member who couldn’t accept that their loved one was going to die. It was resignation, pity, anger. But it was unmistakable.

“What happened to her, anyway?” one of the Rangers said in a low voice.

Owen pointed at the floor on the other side of Vadik, where the hunter’s rifle had been dropped and all but forgotten. “The hunter winged her, trying to get us to shift.”

Another Ranger raised his gun into ready position. “Where?”

“We killed him.” He held Clara tight. “It was him or us.”

“Hey, no one holds it against you, buddy.” The Ranger clapped him on the back. “We just wanted to make sure he’d been neutralized.”

“We need to get her out of here,” Vadik said, pulling Andrea into his arms. The big man who’d fixed her held out his hands to take her, but Vadik pushed him off and stumbled to his feet. “I’ll take her.”

“We have to wait for Rain.” The Ranger beside Owen touched something on his communicator. “Alpha leader, do you read?”

“If we retrace our steps to the beach, we can meet him,” the woman said.

Another of the Rangers grabbed Damon’s shoulder and pushed him forward. “We’re not really taking this one with us, are we?”

“Cool it, Warrick.” The big Ranger pushed at the man’s chest with his gun. “Maggie says he’s good to go, that’ll be enough for Rain.”

All of the Rangers froze at once, hands on their ears. The man next to Owen glanced up at the tattooed girl. “Ranger down.”

Someone wrestled Damon out of the building and the Rangers filed out, with Maggie walking near Vadik, as though she was ready to catch him if he fell. She appeared to know him.

Clara tried to rush ahead when they took Damon out, but Owen grabbed her and pulled her into his side. “Don’t,” he whispered.

One of the Rangers took up the rear behind him. “Let’s go, we have to move.”

Owen pulled Clara out of the building, leaning down to her. “You can’t put yourself in front of Damon anymore.”

“But he’s my brother.”

“To him, he’s the enemy. If you align yourself with him, you’re going to be the enemy.” He held his breath for a moment, all-too-aware of the Ranger over his shoulder. “I can’t lose you, Clara.”

“You won’t.” She touched his arm as they followed the group out into the half moonlight and ran across the higher terrain of the island, looking out across the topography of the nightmare they’d lived.