Page 8 of August

“When I locked eyes with her when she stole the SUV. Wait, she’s getting off at the next exit.”

“She is? That’s weird, you’d think she’d keep going.”

He watched the red dot exit the parkway and turn left. He told Jupiter.

“She must be scared,” August said. “Or…could the jackals have caught up to her?”

“I don’t know. Could they have been watching the park for her to leave? Possibly. They’re tricky fuckers, that’s for sure.”

Jupiter pulled off the parkway, taking the exit ramp and turning left at the light. They’d managed to get close to Ginny, but not close enough to see her vehicle.

“Where is she going?” Jupiter asked.

“I don’t have a clue, there isn’t anything here. It’s just…woods.”

She was a few miles ahead of them. Then he realized the dot wasn’t moving.

“Shit, I think she stopped,” he said.

Jupiter hummed. “I don’t think that’s a good thing.”

August rubbed the space over his heart as his gorilla hooted in worry.

Ginny had thought she’d gotten off scot-free when she fled the park, but two vehicles pulled up behind her just as she got onto the parkway. She could see in the rearview mirror that it was males from her pack. She didn’t know where she was going, just that she was headed north.

The faster she went, the faster they went. No matter how she darted between cars and changed lanes, they always stayed right on her tail.

Then they split the lanes, with her in the middle, the two vehicles creeping closer and closer. They were going to box her in!

She jammed her foot hard on the accelerator and jerked the wheel to the right, taking an off-ramp and flying through a red light at the bottom of the ramp. A horn blew as she narrowly missed T-boning a pickup, and the SUV tilted on two of its wheels for a heart-stopping moment before she was able to keep going.

They were going to catch up to her. She could just feel it in her bones.

She wasn’t ever going to be safe.

Not while they could find her.

Panic choked her as she saw their vehicles speed up behind her again.

How was it possible that they’d caught up to her so quickly?

She looked at the GPS screen. On either side of the road was nothing but trees. She zoomed out and didn’t see another road for miles ahead. If she stayed on this road, they’d definitely catch up to her, so her best option was to pull over and run for cover, shift and race away as fast as she could.

Pulling over, she jammed on the brakes, put the SUV into park, and nearly fell out in her haste. Righting herself, she ran into the woods on the right side of the road, ignoring the sting of tree branches.

Something moving fast darted in front of her and she stopped, tottering on the balls of her feet.

The male stopped a few yards in front of her and grinned in a way that made her think nothing but wicked, vile things.

“You never were very fast, Ginny,” her grandfather’s right-hand male, Diedrich said darkly.

She saw the others as they circled around her.

All her grandfather’s most trusted males, the ones who’d been party to killing her family, including the two who’d been carrying her brother’s body.

“You can let me go,” she said, trying not to panic or cry or barf. “I’m not a threat to him. I don’t want to be alpha, I never did.”

“As long as you’re alive, the claim to the pack is yours,” he said. “You know that.”

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