Page 70 of Fire Bound

“Then where is she?”

Beau shakes her head lightly. “I don’t know, she should have been there.”

As the third bomb explodes, so does my control.

My eyes shift into their wolf form and my fangs and claws descend as my wolf pushes forward. My skin is too tight and too hot, Winslow’s spacious home is too confining. My palms burn like my hellfire is close to exploding from them.

“Jax.” Isabeau tries to get my attention but I’m slowly being consumed by my wolf rage.

“What was she coming to tell me?” I ask, my voice sounding rougher than usual.

“We figured out who Sterling is.”

The winof finally discovering who Sterling is, is lost on me. I couldn’t give a shit we finally have a name, or I now know where the other half of my DNA truly comes from. I don’t even feel anything knowing I’m related to Pruitt. That knowledge should probably make me feel some sort of way, but now as I stand on the road staring at the drops of my mate’s blood, I’m consumed by the feeling of rage. Rage and complete and utter helplessness.

My mate has been taken and she’s bleeding.

I don’t care if the sky started flying and Lucifer himself emerged from the depths of hell in front of me, I would still only care that Remington isn’t where she’s supposed to be.

Which is with me, at my side.Forever. That’s what we promised each other.

“How did this happen?” I bite out. “How were they able to get onto pack territory. I thought we had it locked down tight.”

“We did,” Ryker, who had joined us after getting Pru to her parent’s house, says at my side. “We do,” he corrects.

I turn on him so fast, he jerks back a step. “No, you clearly don’t. If you did, your sister—my mate—wouldn’t have been taken!” I snarl as I invade his space with fury seeping out of my pores.

Isabeau, suddenly the voice of reason of the group, gets between us, her cold hands pressing into our chests. “Jax, you’re forgetting who we’re dealing with. This is Sterling. He’s a cockroach and can find his way into anywhere.”

I know she’s right, but the rational side of my brain isn’t dictating my emotions. My wolf is and he wants blood. He doesn’t care if it’s Sterling’s or Ryker’s at this point. Until his mate is returned, he’s going to crave the bloodbath.

Ransom’s truck roars down the road and skids to a stop by the Jeep Remi had abandoned. My eyes stay locked on the glass from the broken window that’s littering the ground. The shards are caked in Remi’s blood.

“What did you find?” Ryker questions his brothers. After they knew their mates were safe and well, they’d taken off to check out what the explosions were.

“There were definitely bombs being set off, but they didn’t damage anything. Only some trees on the west side of the property were affected. The fences there are fully intact still,” Ranger explains quickly. “There were tire tracks on the edge of the fence line. Looked like they used dirt bikes to ride out there. We followed the tracks but lost the trail when they hit the main road.”

“What was the point of the bombs if they didn’t ruin anything? Why go through the trouble of setting them if they aren’t going to actually hurt any of us?” Winslow asks the group the question we’re all thinking.

Isabeau steps away from the huddle and walks into the middle of the road. Instead of looking to the west side of the territory where the bombs were, she stares off to the east. Her head cocks to the side. Due to her advanced hearing, I know without having to confirm with her that she can hear something. After a minute, she stops and turns her head toward me. All it takes is one curt nod from her to figure out what she’s heard.

“They weren’t trying tohurtus,” I clarify, my voice full of frustration. “They were trying to distract us.” A trap that we fell perfectly into. “While we were busy running around getting our mates to safetyor checking the explosion site, they were invading the east side of the territory.” The lingering scent of Remi’s blood fills my nose as I grit out, “And taking Remington right from under our noses.”

Winslow stands up straighter and pushes her shoulders back in an attempt to make all five feet of her look bigger and stronger. “How many are there?”

Isabeau’s head tilts again as she’s listening to distant noises before answering. “A lot.”

“I don’t care,” I tell her. “There could be a hundred or a thousand of them here, but I’m still getting to Remington.”

“You don’t need to worry about the hundreds or thousands, you need to worry about theone,” Beau reminds me. “The numbers don’t matter if he’s gone. Without their leader, they’ll crumble.”

I vowed when I was eight years old I was going to kill my father and burn everything he’s worked for down. I’ve waited patiently for sixteen years, but today is finally the day. When he took my mother from me, I barely survived it, but now that he has my mate, I know I’ll never recover from that loss.

Either way, one of us won’t live to see tomorrow’s sunrise.

Like I’ve been held under water for a long time, I wake up gasping for air. My body feels wrong, like I’m still missing my energy, but I’m strong enough to hold my head up and keep my eyes open. A small victory, but one I’m thankful for as I wheeze for my next breath.

When I try to bring my hands up to my chest while I catch my breath, I discover I can’t move my arms. At first, I think it’s still a lingering effect from what that Mina bitch did to me on the road, but when I try to move them again, metal bites into the skin at my wrists.

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