Page 59 of Possessive Alpha

And because I won’t, I will die in this cave.

“You can’t have her,” I cough.

One of my packmates saw two male shifters hanging around, but these aren’t new arrivals looking for a place to call home. Cody and Seth came for my sister, not to claim her for themselves. They’re here to take her back to a Minnesota alpha that I made a near-fatal mistake in trusting. And a man who has been determined to get his hands on my little sister since we ran in the night.

“I’m a patient man,” Seth says quietly. He even sounds reasonable, as if the thing he wants is only small, and he can’t understand why I won’t give it to him. But that thing he wants isn’t small, and he isn’t reasonable. He is a killer, and he will grind my bones into dust if it got him the thing he wants.

His heart is black.

“You can’t have my sister,” I repeat.

Seth leans into my face, lets me see the wolf in his eyes, and it’s impossible to hold my terror inside me. “My patience isn’t endless, Martha. My alpha has set me a task, and I do not intend to fail him.”

I see my own death.

But there are some things I will never back down from. This is one of those things.

I tilt my chin up. “You can’t have my sister. Ever.”

He studies me for a long while, seconds counting down to nearly a minute. And all the while, I brace myself for him to kill me.

When he gets to his feet, I almost don’t believe it.

Until he says, “You’re going to draw your sister right to this cave.”

“No,” I say tightly, “I won’t. Because she knows you have me by now, and she’ll know it’s a trap and stay away.”

An icy voice comes from the shadows. It reminds me I’m not facing down one enforcer, but two of Adrian’s fiercest. “She won’t when you start screaming.”

I inadvertently shiver, holding tight to my courage.

It won’t last.

Soon, probably very soon, they will do things to me so I will scream and scream until I fall down dead.

There’s no way I can win.

And there is no way I’m leaving this cave alive.

CHAPTER 18

Trying to stay calm when sharing a small cave with two men about to start torturing you is impossible.

Utterly.

But I still try, if only to stop myself from falling apart completely.

Keeping Clara safe is what matters. It’s the only thing that matters.

Cody and Seth eat from clay bowls near the dying fire, speaking in short, terse sentences too low to overhear. I think about the mistake I made, the trust I put into an alpha I thought—had believed—was kind when I dropped my groceries outside a Minnesota store.

Initially, I’d been wary of Adrian’s help. Clara and I had been on the road for a long time, too long for me to trust easily. I wasn’t ignorant or naïve about the dangers we faced. After our car broke down and we’d wound up in a homeless shelter, things that had so badly dented my belief that I could look after Clara, I convinced myself Adrian was a good guy.

Adrian had seemed kind, and he’d been friendly.

At least at first.

He hadn’t been pushy or done anything to set off any warning signs.

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