The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (25 page)

I will not cry. Not now. Not again.
 

“But you do deserve happiness, Lily. It might not be with me. But you do deserve it. I hope someday you realize that.”

Connor reaches inside his jacket pocket and pulls out a small black velvet box.
 

My heart skips.
 

He opens the box, lifts a glittering ring, and says, “This is waiting for you. If you want it. I’m waiting for you. But I can’t say how much longer I’ll wait.”

Fuck him. The bastard. Doing this now.
 

But my anger’s fading, and in its place is something worse: resignation. I’m not meant to be happy. That’s the truth. That’s what my life has taught me.
 

“Don’t wait for me,” I say, my voice breaking and my tears mixing with the first few drops of rain. “I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you.”
 

I whirl and run up the steps alongside the house, heading for the front drive and the road and a cab back to my life. My shitty, walled-in, broken down life. When I’m behind Connor’s house, safely out of sight, I turn and look at the sky. Dark bellied clouds. Cold rain beating into my skin. And Star circling above, tethered by an invisible chain of shared need.
 

I’
VE
HEARD
THAT
if you’re abducted you can’t let yourself be taken to the abductor’s intended destination. He’s chosen that spot for a damned good reason: he’s confident he can hold you there for as long as he chooses. Thinks once he has you locked up there he can do what he wants with you. Maybe it’s a barn way out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe a penthouse with soundproofed walls. A cage in a basement. Where ever it is, once you’re there your odds of leaving alive are next to nil.

You have to escape when you’re in transit from where he took you to where he wants you to be.
 

That’s where I am now. In transit.
 

Flying low over a frozen landscape in an RCMP helicopter. I don’t know how long I’ve been out, but I know we’ve been flying south for quite a while: the bare, iced-in tundra has given way to an endless expanse of stunted black spruce growing from marshes and bogs. The boreal forest, the largest unspoiled forest left on earth. No roads. No cities. No development. It stretches from the arctic tundra nearly to Canada’s southern cities.
 

Being lost alone in those endless woods is a nightmare for most. But for me the forest means one thing: freedom.

I’m sitting sandwiched between two of those self-proclaimed Stricken cop creatures, my hands cuffed behind my back and numb from lack of blood flow. They’ve added ankle cuffs connected by a short length of chain.
 

The bullet wounds have stopped bleeding, but I’m trembling with exhaustion. I need to heal enough to summon my spirit animal, and fast, because I know I don’t have much time.

“Water,” I say to the cop sitting next to me.

He turns, gives me a long stare, reaches between his legs, retrieves a water bottle, takes a long sip, drops the bottle on the floor and smiles.
 

Fucking pricks.

Two thoughts repeat in my mind: escape. Find Pimniq. Escape. Find Pimniq.
 

Nothing else matters.

I lay my head back and try to rest. I doze into a fitful sleep, the sound of the helicopter blades thumping through my head as I dream of a land where the sun never rises.
 

In my dream it’s midwinter in the north. My people are hungry. Only they’re not my people. Not the ones I know from Pangnirtung, anyway. They’re strangers who I feel like I’ve known forever. We’re wandering across the ice, through wind so strong it’s nearly impossible to walk. Out in front there’s a hard-looking man with quick blue eyes wearing a black leather jacket with some kind of motorcycle gang patch sewn on the back.
 

There’s another guy to my left, his dark skin covered in brutal scars and odd, flower-like tattoos. He’s limping slightly. He’s got a shaved head and feels…wrong somehow. The wind picks up icy shards of snow and drives them stinging into my face. The tattooed man. Something about him makes my animal uneasy. I don’t trust him. I keep looking over my shoulder at him, expecting him to betray us.
 

There are others as well, walking alongside us, but they’re a little further off and the driving snow obscures their features. To my left there’s a tiny girl in a white dress, so small she reminds me of my sister. In her white dress against the blowing snow she’s almost invisible. Like a ghost. The fourth figure is up ahead. Another woman, this one built stronger. I can only see the back of her, but I understand she’s the one I’m following.
 

This is her pack.
 

I sniff into the wind. Fear prickles my spine. We’re being hunted.

“Faster, Anik,” the woman up ahead says to me. “Faster. We’re almost through. Soon we’ll see the sun.”

The woman turns to me as she speaks. I understand I will follow her to death. The wind lifts long enough for me to see her face, and when I do I realize why I’m following her. The woman looks nothing like me, but she’s my sister. My packmate.
 

Then there’s a scream, and the woman’s face grows troubled and grim. Something has emerged from the storm and taken one of our pack. Someone fell behind and whatever is chasing us has him. I lower my head to shield my eyes from the blinding snow and hurry forward, not wanting to be next, knowing my survival depends on not losing sight of the woman ahead, and she’s calling me, saying the name that is not my name over and over: Tornarsuk. Tornarsuk. Torn—

I wake screaming, the cops leaning into me, pinning me into the helicopter seat.

We’re descending.

Below us the spruce forest has been cleared for at least a mile. A series of fences, some chain, others cinder block, form a square around a small industrial building clad in beige aluminum sheeting. There’s a helicopter landing pad and a guard tower at each corner of the fence and not much else. It would look like a prison if the building were larger.
 

This is it. I don’t know what’s down there. Only that if I let them take me inside I’ll never get out.
 

The helicopter swoops low over the fence. A guard standing in one of the towers, dressed in an RCMP uniform, turns and salutes as we fly past.
 

The helicopter hovers over the landing pad. Not long now.

As the helicopter touches down I call him. I’m more rested than I was in Pangnirtung, and I feel my animal pacing just beneath my skin. The cop beside me sees my face bulge and screams a warning, opens the door and hops out, dragging me with him. I land in a heap and scramble to my feet, the helicopter’s blades whirring close overhead.
 

I charge at the cop, unable to break into a full run because of the ankle chains. I’m not worried, though. The animal will snap those chains without a thought. The cop has his rat or weasel face on, and I wonder if he can transform completely or if he’s trapped in that half-man half-monster form.

My shoulder’s are bulking up, my legs thickening. I hit the cop square in the chest with my shoulder, bowling him over, and then I’m shuffling toward the first fence, dirt exploding around me as the guards open fire.
 

The first fence is only twenty yards distant when my wrists and ankles swell against the cuffs so hard the metal cuts through my skin. The animal roars inside me, furious at being chained. I stagger another step or two, my vision a throbbing haze, before my ankle bones snap from the force of being compressed against the cuffs.
 

The chain’s aren’t breaking. Why won’t they break?

My animal roars. He’s furious at me for bringing him so close; he smells the cop creature’s foul black blood and senses the kill and refuses to be banished—
 

A bullet rips into my leg, and another into my chest and the ground comes up fast. My bones shift and shudder and my jaw descends and the animal’s close, hovering against the threshold, enraged. I feels like I’m being torn open from the inside. I thrash toward the fence, knowing it’s useless but needing to try. I can’t let them take me. Can’t let them lock me in a cell. The animal will go mad.
 

I’m distantly aware that the bullets have stopped. The cops and guards are circling above me again, shouting orders at one another. I want to fight and struggle and scream, tear the bastards to pieces, but it takes every ounce of will I have to keep the animal from leaping across the threshold. If that happens the chains won’t break. They’ll cut the animal’s paws off and I’ll die trapped inside him.
 

Iron
, the Stricken cop said, and now I know what that means.
 

It means pain. It means my animal is powerless.
 

I bite into the dirt. Taste rich, boggy soil. The animal roars, pawing at the cage I’ve created inside myself. He’s insane with hatred and hunger. This is new to him as well. He’s never known anything but raw bloodlust. The freedom of the kill. He’s confused. Uncertain. Think’s I’ve betrayed him.

And that only makes him angrier.

I grit my teeth and hold on, talking him down, telling him it’s the wrong time. Maybe he understands my words, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he simply understands defeat better than me. But eventually he slips away, and I feel my body slim and the pain in my wrists and ankles lessens and then I’m only a man.
 

Weak, afraid and bleeding.
 

The blue-skinned animal-cop hoists me over his shoulder and carries me across the yard without a word.
 

We enter the building through a steel plated door and enter a large room lit by industrial lights, the portable kind used at construction sites. There’s another cage in the middle and at first I think it’s my prison, but as we approach I see there’s a hole in the middle of the cage leading down to absolute blackness.
 

The cop carrying me pauses in front of the cage and presses a button. There’s a blast of air and a mechanical rumble as a gleaming steel elevator rises from the pit in the middle of the cage.

“Hope you got a good sniff of the woods on your last run, Indian,” the cop mutters as we step inside and the elevator doors close behind us. “Remember it real good.”

The elevator drops.
 

***

 
We descend for minutes, deep into musty blackness. The doors open and the Stricken cop carries me down a long, brightly lit corridor. He uses voice commands to open a series of heavy doors that slide open with a pneumatic whoosh. We turn right, then left, then right. Other corridors branch of from this main one. I concentrate on counting the cop’s steps and studying the number of doors we pass, but my mind is a fractured mess and I soon lose all hope of remembering the way to the elevator. I’m not even in a cell and I’m already trapped.
 

Another door slides open. I don’t know what I expected. A cinderblock cell, I guess. Or a room with a steel operating table and iron restraints and a surgeon’s tray full of scalpels. But I didn’t expect this: the door opens onto a room that looks like a lounge in a posh hotel. There are high-backed red leather ottomans and sparkling crystal chandeliers and a gleaming teak bar. The cop’s boots ring on a polished black marble floor. Bach drifts in from hidden speakers. The room smells sweet, like rot and decadence.
 

I’m carried into the middle of the room and dropped on the floor.
 

I stay lying on my side, gathering my strength, and when I look up I see a pair of sparkling black stilettos and a woman’s crossed legs. The stilettos taper to a razor-sharp point. The woman’s legs are long and unblemished.

Her skin is so pale it nearly glows in the chandelier light and her scent…I’ve never smelled anything like it. Seductive. Rich. Incredibly powerful.

The woman’s scent makes my blood race and my cock swell in my pants and suddenly I find myself…
wanting
her. More than anything I’ve ever wanted. I’m nothing compared to her. I’m a maggot. I’m nothing. But I need to please her—
 

I try and tear my gaze away from her legs.Her perfect skin. Her gorgeous calves. But I can’t. All I can think about is touching her. Feeling her pale skin against mine. I want to hold her, and I’m struck by a sudden insane fit of jealousy that this Stricken cop prick is in the same room as her.
 

She’s mine. It’s me she needs. Only me.

“You want to touch me?” a female voice asks.
 

The woman’s voice is soft and sophisticated. She sounds…experienced. Unlike me, and a wave of shame smashes through my chest. I need to please her. Need to prove I’m hers. I only hope I’m good enough.

“You can touch me, Anik. If it pleases you.”

Oh god yes. Please. It’s all I want. Please.
 

I’m not aware of speaking the words, but the woman uncrosses her legs, runs her toe down her calf. Her nails are painted bright red. I stare at her lovely toes, her delicate foot arched into the stiletto. My cock throbs with heat when I think of slipping those stilettos off, kissing her arch, kissing up her calf, along the tender backside of her knee—

“Leave us,” the woman commands, her voice suddenly cold as northern ice.
 

I flinch, afraid she’s talking to me. Have I done something wrong? Is she displeased? I can’t bear the thought of being dismissed.
 

Boot-steps ring behind me as the cop retreats. The door slams shut.
 

I’m alone with her.
 

The thought makes me tremble with desire.