Page 57 of Wolf's Forbidden Curse

She clicked her tongue. “You really don’t know a fucking thing, do you? I can still take you out, right here, right now, and get the pelt. All I’d have to do is keep your body cold and your blood artificially flowing until the next full moon, and you will shift even if you are no longer alive. I wouldn’t make as much, but it would still very much be worth my time.”

There was no way to know whether or not this woman was lying, so I had to assume she wasn’t. If there were people out there running underground human zoos, then it really wasn’t that surprising that those people would also purchase the skin of a dead werewolf. I scowled and turned my head away from the gun, then, with great effort, I pulled my legs up into my chest and maneuvered my way out of the car.

The second my feet hit the pavement—I ran.

Three steps, four, five.

I only got maybe ten feet from the car when my knees gave out, and I fell hard on my side. I seethed, breathing through my clenched teeth like a cornered animal—which is exactly what I was. Missy sauntered up with a confident gait, and even though I wasn’t looking up at her, I was sure she was grinning.

“Nice try, but the drugs are still very much in your system, I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s going to be a long time before you’re able to walk on your own again, nonetheless run. So, no more escape attempts, okay? It’s only going to prolong the inevitable, and I really don’t have the energy to chase you around. Next time you try to take off, I’m just going to aim the gun at you, got it?”

She bent down beside me and hooked her hand underneath one of my arms. She hauled me to my feet. If I had been nothing but dead weight, she probably wouldn’t have been able to get me up, but I had fallen on a patch of gravel that was sharp, and it was digging into my already aching shoulder. Besides, I knew she wasn’t bluffing about pulling that trigger. If there was one thing I had learned from the few and far-between interactions I’d now had with this woman—it was that she was absolutely unhinged. There was no point in continuing with this power struggle. Missy tugged me toward what appeared to be an abandoned old schoolhouse. There was ivy crawling up the front of the building, and the front doors were hanging off their hinges. Surrounding the school was nothing but greenery. If it weren’t dawn, it would be pitch black because there weren’t even street lights on this road.

We were far enough from civilization that nobody would hear me scream.

“Come on,” she barked, trying to get me to move faster. “I don’t want anyone seeing us.”

“It’s like you said; the drugs are still in my system,” I reminded her as we stumbled along together. “Forgive me for not being very mobile.”

Inside the building, Missy brought me to a chair that had already been set up in the middle of what might have once been the great hall. There were ropes on the floor next to the chair legs, and on a table nearby, someone had laid out a series of instruments. I had no interest in finding out what they were used for.

Missy deposited me in the chair and immediately proceeded to tie me to it with the ropes. She was so quick with this work that I assumed it wasn’t her first rodeo. I tried to recall what she and that man had been talking about in the car—about what had been said regarding Missy’s previous ‘jobs.’

“How many innocent people have you brought here to be sold like fucking animals, huh? How many lives have you taken?”

“I resent the accusation,” Missy snipped. “I haven’t ever killed anyone.”

“That’s not what I meant. Sending someone to be in a fucking zoo is worse than killing them.”

“If you think you’re going to moralize your way out of this, you’re a lot stupider than I thought. It’s nothing personal. You’ve got something my buyer wants, and I need the money.”

“This is never going to work,” I said as she continued to tighten the knots. It was time to change tactics. “Someone is going to report me missing. They’ll launch an investigation. It’ll be a whole lot of attention. You fucked up when you tried to go to the next level, Missy. Your partner was right. You should’ve stayed in your lane.”

She pulled the ropes hard so that the cord dug into my skin. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll bet they’ve already got the police involved,” I added.

“Who? Who is going to report you missing?” she taunted. “Your family is hiding out overseas, you haven’t told anyone the truth about who you really are back in Solara Bay, and you’ve been so cold and secretive that there’s no reason for you to think the people of that town actually care about you.”

I couldn’t stop my eyes from widening. “How did you know about my parents?”

She laughed. “It’s my job to know everything about everyone, sweetheart. I knew who you were within twenty-four hours of meeting you. I learned all about your family, about the money troubles your parents found themselves in. It was honestly not that hard to figure out. You need to do an online cleanse if you’re going to keep trying to hide your identity. Although, I suppose it’s too late for that now.”

“Is that why you’re targeting me? Because of my family?”

“No, it’s the opposite, actually,” she mused. “When I found out who you were, that was my reason for initially taking you out of the running.”

“The running?”

“To be my mark,” she said. “I had a few different prospects when I first got to town. If you had just been another lost girl looking for a chosen family, I had an angle for that. I would’ve played up the maternal stuff and seen what there was to take from you once we built that trust. But then I met Al, and he told me about how he’s been saving money for such a long time… It just made a lot more sense to go after him.”

“You’re sick, do you know that?” I was so shocked by the casual tone she used to talk about such things. Some of the nausea I felt while driving reared its ugly head again. “Al is a good man. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“It’s not about who deserves what,” she corrected me. She stood up and inspected her handiwork, walking around the chair with a scrutinizing expression. She nodded, “That’ll do,” and went to go sit in the chair by the instrument table.

“Then what is it about? Why the fuck do you do this?”

She exhaled as if my questions were such a bother to her. “I could launch into some sad story about what I dealt with growing up, about all the things that happened to me that I didn’t deserve, but you don’t care. Frankly, I don’t even really care. I find the whole villain origin story is overdone. You’ve already made up your mind about me, and that’s that.”

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