Page 2 of Defeated

I wait for him to realize he’s at the wrong house, or even waste his time by ringing the doorbell.

No one would answer.

Wherever Colton is, he hasn’t been back to this house since he helped me escape. His scent is faded and old.

The shifter reaches up, standing on the tips of his black boots to peel something from the top right side of the doorway. My eyes narrow.

After glancing up and down the street, he inserts something into the lock. A key. Metal glints as the door swings open and he disappears inside.

Suddenly, the U-Haul makes all the sense in the world. I don’t know who he is, but now I think I know what he’s doing here.

Colton is gone. Has been for several days. Whoever this guy is, is taking full advantage to help himself to the contents of Colton’s apartment.

He must be dead.

The back of my eyelids prickle. Blinking rapidly doesn’t help, just encourages more tears to form.

I can’t stay here.

Scrambling to my feet, I hurry down the street, head down, vision blurry, until I hit a short alley lined with dumpsters and dart down it.

As I slide down the wall, I’m beyond grateful it’s a quiet suburb, and there’s no one around to wonder why I’m sitting on the ground in the middle of the day.

Colton intervened to save my life, and it cost him his. That must have been what happened. The shifters who were after me found him and killed him. Now one of them is here to take even more from him than his life.

A memory of that day hits me. My desperate sprint through the city, the footsteps closing in on me, and the certainty I wouldn’t get away this time.

I’d known there were shifters in this town just outside Jersey City. I’d known I would soon have to leave, the way I always had when they got a sniff of me.

Shifters—alphas especially—seem to have a real problem keeping their hands to themselves when lone females come within sniffing distance.

That’s how my life has been for years.

Move somewhere, find a quiet place to live my life, get a job that pays cash. Try not to get noticed. Pick up the scent of a pack, gather my stuff and move on before they notice me.

This time I have nowhere else to run to. It’s here or…

No.

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

Who runs back into the cage they ran out of?

I shake my head. A piece of my shoulder-length white-blonde hair stabs me in the eye, but I’m already crying, so what’s one more irritation? After tucking it behind my ear, I rest my head on the brick wall and stare blankly ahead as I work through my options.

But the past hasn’t finished with me yet.

Every day it drags me back to the option I could have taken but didn’t. It’s what has me coming back to this suburban street, hiding behind parked cars, and watching that same townhouse where no one ever leaves or enters.

It’s not my biggest regret, but it’s my most recent one.

I stayed when I knew I should have left.

It had been inevitable the pack here would catch my scent, though I’d stuck to the edge of town, hoping to stick to areas they might avoid.

It was stupid.

I was stupid. And desperate.

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