Page 52 of Betrayed By the Alpha Wolf

Leon fought against me in the chair, trying to pull free of his chains, but that was pointless. His eyes flared wide, fury making them bloodshot and wild. Leon’s fangs descended into his mouth, and claws sprouted from his nailbeds.

“Now, now. Don’t get so upset. You were never going to be Alpha. Or even a Beta, for that matter.”

Surging in his chair, Leon tried for a half-shift, but the claws and fangs were all he could manage, and they were already beginning to fade away. He didn’t have the strength to keep it up, which was quite telling, wasn’t it?

Why was he in such shitty condition?

Grinding my thumb into that hollow spot again, I held Leon facing me. He snapped in my direction, and I was quick to land a punch to his jaw.

“Where’s Reginald?! What are your plans for the drugs?!”

Leon snapped and snarled all the more. “You’ll all suffer at their hands! There’s no use fighting them. No one can face their might!”

I shook him, landing another punch to his face. “Who?! The hunters?! I’ve read Eli’s notes, asshole. Who are they?!”

“They’re your doom! All of you filthy wolves!”

The words struck me, and I looked over my shoulder at Jet and Kaiden.Filthy wolves? What the hell is he going on about? What’s happened to him?

In the seconds that I turned away, Leon went for my arm, striking out and biting into the space right above my wrist.

“Ahh!” I spun and punched him again before gripping him by the throat. “Fucker! Are the hunters behind all this?! Did they make the drugs for Eli?!”

Leon could barely breathe, but I’d left him enough room to speak a few words. “No. Eli’s drugs were Eli’s drugs. A tiny ploy wheretheirmight is legion!”

I lowered my face right into his, gritting out my words from between my teeth. “Who are they, Leon? Who are these rogue wolves, these hunters?”

But something had snapped. Despite my hold on his throat, the blood rushing down from his forehead, Leon just laughed, the sound manic and discordant.

“Sing a song of sixpence, sing a song of sixes.”

He shook with unrestrained laughter, his raspy voice croaking out the lyrics to an off-key tune. I’d heard the rhyme once before. When I was young in Jet’s pack, the elderly wolves of the pack would whisper it in warning, a way to keep us from wandering into the woods—for fear of…hunters.

“A bag full of rye,” Leon continued, his entire being thrumming with unsettling energy. “Four and twenty naughty wolves baked in a pie.”

I backed up from him, a slithering unease building in my blood. As I did, I heard footsteps behind me at the door and then the jingle of keys in the lock.

“When the pie was opened, the wolves were all inside down to the last runt. Isn’t that a dandy) dish, the wolves falling to the hunt.”

The door opened at my right, and I hurried out of the cell. Kaiden locked the door back up, and Jet came to my side, holding up my arm to inspect it.

“He’s lost his damned mind,” Jet whispered.

“You think?” I glanced at Kaiden, and his brow was deeply furrowed. “But I know that rhyme.”

We all looked at Leon again.

“The hunt was done on the blackest night, and the men tickled funny. The wolves tasted rich and sweet, like eating bread and honey.”

Jet shook his head, pulling me down the hallway away from Leon’s cell. We hurried toward the exit, but the echoing sound of the last verse hung in the air as we fled the basement.

“And there were then no wolves in the garden nor in the town where the good man goes. All the wolves were vanished, gone where? Nobody knows.”

Chapter 19 - Kenzie

“It smells like death in here. How do you deal with this all the time?”

Willow just chuckled to herself, moving more of the sickly-smelling chemical into the distilling tubes with her pipette. The color wasn’t particularly appetizing either, that lime green with too much yellow, and even though I knew that Kaiden had been given the stuff and we’d pumped it through the ventilators, I was having a hard time believing it was actually valuable.

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