Page 57 of Brutal Mate

“Illegal turning ring?” Will asked, and Kane, Jack and Hanson all nodded in unison.

“Looks like it,” Jack said aloud.

“At least now we know why Miley was bitten,” Will mused aloud.

“The question is, why now?” Zander asked.

Jack shook his head. “We can worry about that later. What matters now is putting an end to it and getting Miley and the others out.”

“Safe and sound,” Kane put in, growling low in his throat. Too many times he had seen these things go sideways.

More often than not, werewolves were likely to kill the humans they'd attempted to turn in order to stop them from talking if they were caught. Kane wasn't about to let Miley become just another statistic.

Zander looked at Will and Eddie before he said, “Jack, there's something you need to know before we go in there.”

Kane's insides twisted. He didn't like the sound of that.

“What?” Jack demanded, glancing over his shoulder at the farmhouse.

Kane had heard them, too, the voices and laughter of men as a couple of them appeared from the farmhouse out on the porch, acting as if it were just another day and they had not a care in the world.

“This place is crawling with wolves, and we recognized at least three or four of the scents,” Eddie explained, looking to Will and Zander for confirmation.

“Who?” Jack asked. Kane's hackles rose.

“We don't know who, exactly, but they are the scents of wolves who followed Christian,” Zander explained, and the look on his face suggested that just speaking the man’s name made his blood boil.

“Christian is dead,” Jack pointed out.

“Many of his men aren't,” Zander responded. “And they did promise they'd be back with more trouble.”

“This looks like trouble to me,” Hanson put in.

“You knew Christian and his friends from before,” Jack said, turning to Hanson. “Does an illegal turning ring sound like something they'd be capable of?”

“Do we really have to discuss this right now?” Kane demanded, feeling as if he had ants crawling all over his skin. He needed to shift and kill something.

And he'd vote for killing the two laughing on the porch first. Anyone willing to risk the life of another by turning them was worthy of a death sentence in his book. He'd been on the receiving end himself. He knew the pain and fear these rings caused in the humans they infected all too well.

“Hanson?” Jack asked, ignoring Kane's question, but gesturing to Zander to keep an eye on him as if he thought he might do something stupid.

“Christian would never have been foolish enough or stupid enough to come up with it himself, but he had brothers, ruthless brothers, who would, yeah. I heard one or two of them suggesting humans were nothing but toys. One even once suggested to Karl that we should just turn everybody in town and be done with letting outsiders in.”

Bile rose in Kane's throat. He'd heard that kind of radical talk before.

It never ended well. Not for the humans or the wolves who tried it.

“I can't stand here like this anymore!” Kane hissed under his breath, a little louder than intended. Again, he started to pace. “We have to get in there. I won't lose my mate to fuckwit radicals!”

At that, Kane stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes widening.

The others all looked at him. Will and Eddie stared at him as if they were just as shocked, while Hanson looked sympathetic. Zander and Jack's reaction was the one that angered Kane.

They looked at each other, smirking before they turned to him and said as one, “Welcome to the club.”

A low growl erupted in Kane's throat even as Will exclaimed, “No way!”

“Who'd have thought Kane would fall for a human!” Eddie put in.

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