Page 32 of Possessive Mate

With that, he gave Eddie a shove away from the farmyard and in the direction that would take them around the back of the barn.

Eddie paused just long enough to glower at Hanson for a second or two before he whipped around and stormed off into the trees on his alpha's orders.

“You better go with him,” Zander whispered into Hanson's ear, nudging him with an elbow. “Before he goes and gets himself killed on his own.”

Hanson gritted his teeth. Though Eddie had been a fucking asshole lately, he didn't like the idea of losing a single packmate, and so he dipped his head and started to follow.

He caught up in just a few paces, but when he thought of something to say about how they were on the same team whether Eddie liked it or not, he couldn't bring himself to speak.

He was sure that if they didn't figure this out soon, they were sure as hell going to get into serious trouble. How could he help on a mission in which his own packmates didn't trust him? He was as good as dead, and so were his friends.

Only the thought of Elena kept him going. Just seeing her smile one more time would send him to his grave happy. Seeing her freed before then would make it even more worthwhile. All he could hope for was that they would accomplish that before all hell broke loose out front.

I'm coming, Elena, he thought, wondering whether she could feel his closeness as he felt hers, like a flutter in his stomach and a tightness in his chest that told him he wouldn't be able to breathe until he had laid eyes on her again.

“Slow down,” Hanson hissed when they drew near the back of the barn and Eddie started to climb up onto a large old rusted farming machine. “We don't know it's safe yet.”

“What are you?” Eddie demanded, reaching up to a shuttered window above his head that Hanson suspected lead to some kind of hayloft or something. “A wolf or a mouse?”

Hanson would have liked to grab hold of Eddie's ankles and yank him back down off the machine. He'd have liked to pin him to the ground and demand to know what the hell his problem was. But a scuffle between them right now might well be the difference between life and death. So he fought the urge for violence, and instead watched his packmate's back as he hauled himself up onto the wooden sill of the opening.

When this is all over, I may well beat your ass! He thought, glancing this way and that, reaching with his hearing for any signs of their being discovered.

It was as he started to follow Eddie, hopping up onto the machine himself, that he caught the strong scent of Elena wafting from inside. And his own pace quickened. He was not going to let her think her brother was the only one who cared for her wellbeing.

Besides that, the wolf inside him was clawing to be free. If he didn’t lay eyes on her soon, all hell might break loose.

Chapter 16 - Elena

The silver chains weakened Elena further and further by the minute. The biting, burning pain of it was excruciating. And soon, she could not hold her head up, for the aching in her neck from doing so was too much too bear.

Leaning back against the pillar, she breathed only a half-breath of relief. It took some of the agony away, barely.

What it didn’t take away was the horrid feeling in her gut that something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong—that somehow, though she hadn’t realized she had it in the first place, she was going to lose everything. Again.

She couldn’t go through that, not again, not now that she had felt the sheer heartbreaking agony of being ripped from not only her mate but also the very last threads she had to him.

Against her eyelids she saw all the horrid things that might happen. Might she open her eyes to find blood pooling beneath her, feeling the agony of losing yet another child, one she hadn’t even realized she was carrying? Somehow, that made it even more difficult a thought. She hadn’t even had the time to connect, to learn what their flutterings in her belly felt like or feel the way they kicked when she was trying to rest.

The images cut her deep, and she tried to open her eyes to keep them from her mind. But eventually they closed again. And then she saw yet more terrible things. She could practically hear Hanson’s dying screams as Christopher got his hands on him, dragging him before her just so that he could torture her with his death before doing whatever it was he wanted to do with her.

Then there was the rest of the pack. What was he going to do to them if she didn’t somehow figure out a way of freeing herself to warn them? What would he do to Eddie, to Jack, to Bonnie? There were children in Nightstar, so many children. What would he do to them?

Christopher didn’t seem like the kind of man to let another pack’s children live just because they were children. He had already talked of killing the one in her belly. Killing living, breathing children would be even easier than that for him, though a well-aimed blow to her stomach might well do the job.

Bile rose in her throat just at the thought of it. She wriggled at the need to escape only to feel the fresh biting of the chains as they moved.

“Fuck!” she growled through gritted teeth.

“Psst!”

Elena froze. What the fuck was that?

Her ears pricked.

“Psst!”

When it came again, she somehow managed to find the strength to move her head, swift as a snake, up to the hayloft.

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