Page 35 of Rivers and Roads

He was mine.

He had always been mine.

But I had taken something from him now that couldn’t be given back. The serum was meant to help him save me and others. This—this unexpected consequence that had given him no choice in agreeing to mate an Alpha—it was not the way a love story began. It was yet one more thing I would have to find forgiveness for thanks to my feral state.

Taking a shuddering breath, I laid down on the forest floor, my hand reaching for the phone. My eyes were still a little blurry, but I could feel the last vestiges of whatever the humans had pumped in me fading with each exhale. Opening the screen, I found the only number in there, and I hit the button.

It rang three times before the rough, gravelly voice of the Head Alpha came across the line. “Orion.”

“Zane,” I corrected. It felt strange to say my own name. It was alien on my tongue when I had been a beast for so long.

There was a long pause, then Kor let out a sharp breath. “You’re okay.”

I couldn’t help a small laugh as I dragged a hand down my face, then pressed fingers into my closed eyes to watch the starbursts. “I don’t know if I would say that, but I’m…” Back? Aware? A person again? “I’m coming off whatever the fuck they were feeding me.”

Kor let out a quiet stream of curses, and I heard him grunt, then the soft, sleepy complaint of his mate in the background. “Give me a second,” he said. I could hear him murmur something to Misha, then I heard him rise and curse again when he bashed into something. After a few moments, though, it was quiet in the background. “Where’s Orion?”

“He’s asleep,” I said. The truth hovered in the back of my throat, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Kor that I had taken him during his heat. “Shit went sideways yesterday.”

I could feel the tension rise in Kor, even this far away from him. “What happened?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, then breathed out. “I need to speak to my brother. Your number is the only one in here, so…”

“Zane,” Kor said, and there was something in his voice that turned my body to ice.

“What happened?” My voice was barely a whisper, and I was too afraid to ask.

Kor’s silence spoke volumes, but I waited for him to find the courage to tell me. “We think he went after you. My contact at ComTech had to raze the building so Orion could get away, but we weren’t sure whether or not he made it out. Danyal…all I can assume is that he panicked and decided to try and bring you back himself.”

I pressed my fingers harder into my eyes and felt a well of fury at my idiot brother. “What happened?” I asked again.

“Honestly, I’m not sure. He left in the middle of the night without telling anyone. All we know is that they grabbed him about a hundred miles outside of Corland. Mikael was able to tap into a traffic camera. He was at a stoplight. Grabbed right out of his car.” Kor’s voice was flat, resigned, and I wanted to scream at him and ask him why the fuck they hadn’t been tearing the country apart to find him.

“Where is he now?”

“We don’t know. The moment Orion released all the files he grabbed from ComTech, they began to dismantle all the labs. The only one they couldn’t move was yours,” he said on a quiet breath. “Mikael went after him.”

I deflated a little with some relief, though it wasn’t much. Considering what I’d been through, considering what they did to me—making sure that I didn’t spend a second of those long weeks without torture and pain—I couldn’t fathom it happening to my brother.

Not Danyal.

It wasn’t that he was an Omega, it was that he was the baby. He was the unexpected miracle that arrived just months before our father was killed by a bomb. It had become my job after that to protect him, to save him.

Closing my eyes, I reached across the bond, searching for him. He was there—the connection was weak from the distance, just like my link to Talia, but he was alive. And more than that, as far as I could tell, he wasn’t in pain. He wasn’t suffering. I wasn’t sure what the hell was happening, but it meant we had time.

I had failed in the worst way imaginable, but it wasn’t over.

“We’ll get him back,” Kor said gruffly.

I pushed up to sit, reaching for the clothes, and I pinned the phone between my ear and shoulder as I struggled into the sweats. “What happened when Orion got to the city? How much do we know?”

“Everything,” Kor said, and that single word had me freezing with my shirt halfway on.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Kor said, “he was able to download almost the entire ComTech database, which contained the location of the labs, their bases, the log of humans and Wolves they’ve taken. And before he left, Mikael was certain that a lot of the coded information we got were the experiments they were running.”

I blinked, surprised at how much was done in such a short mission. “How far are you in decoding?”

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