Page 16 of Brutal Alpha

“Where the hell am I?” I croaked, trying and failing to stand up. I was still woozy from whatever they’d used to knock me out, and as I rose unsteadily to my feet, I realized that my hands were tied behind my back, and my captor was forced to step into my field of vision in order to catch me before I fell.

He wasn’t as big as most Alphas I’d seen, but no one could argue he wasn’t one. Authority rolled off him in waves, and his smirk said he knew it. He was younger than I would imagine such an Alpha to be, with dirty blonde hair and only the suggestion of lines around his mouth. He smelled better than his hunters, but not by much, and beneath it I could smell the same fresh earth that was common to all Arbor wolves.

“You’re with us,” he said, lowering me back into the rough-hewn chair I’d been sitting in. “That’s all that matters.”

He smiled as he looked down at me, trussed up and barely conscious. All right. So he was one of those males. The ones wholiked their women bound and helpless. Not to be cowed, I raised my head, my good eye meeting his gaze.

“Lowell Axton, I presume.”

Lowell Axton grinned. His canines were long and sharp, like they never fully shifted back from his wolf’s, and I shivered.

“She’s smart as well as pretty,” he said. “We’ve caught ourselves a prize.”

He was clearly enjoying our little hostage situation, and I was swiftly moving from terrified to pissed off. If they were going to do something awful to me, the least they could do was warn me first. The cryptic shit was boring.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

“Surely you’ve heard about our little enterprise. Humans are willing to pay an impressive sum for shifter brides, you know. It’s all over the islands, much to my irritation.”

Ah, shit. If I got out of this alive, I was going to have to tell Caleb he was right. I hated it when Caleb was right. I especially hated it when his being right involved me getting kidnapped and sold off by a bunch of asshole shifters who hated every member of my Pack.

“Oh, I’ve heard about it,” I said. “I just thought it was so cartoonishly evil that it couldn’t be real.”

Axton’s expression darkened at that, his eyes glinting in the meager light.

“It’s easy to call other people evil when you’re sipping out of a silver spoon,” he snarled.

“Silver is from Argent. I’m a Lapine girl,” I pointed out because I had absolutely no self-preservation instincts. This time, however, my jab didn’t land. That mocking smile was backin place, and Axton’s voice was once smoother and even when he said,

“I’m very aware of that, Julia.”

I froze—how did he know my name?

“Don’t look so surprised,” he continued. “It’s well known that the Lapine Alpha’s sister has a cursed eye—a bad omen, you know.”

“You don’t think it’s stupid to kidnap the Alpha’s sister?” I said, grasping at the offered straw. “I’m sure you remember what happened last time Arbor threatened someone he loved.” Admittedly, they hadn’t known at the time that Alyssa was Caleb’s mate, or that Jack and Emmy were his children, but surely Arbor wouldn’t risk another conflict with Lapine over one defective female.

“It’s a risk, yes,” Axton admitted, “but I’m willing to bet that your scent, and the scent of my hunters, will have faded by the time anyone thinks to look for you. For the price a female with Alpha blood will fetch? It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

He was right about one thing: no one was going to look for me. Caleb wasn’t expecting me back until late afternoon, and Ethan was hardly going to come looking for me after the fight we’d had. He’d assume, correctly, that I didn’t want to stay on his stupid island any longer and had gone home. If anything, I could console myself with the thought that if I did get sold off to some human and was never seen again, he’d feel really fucking bad about it.

“So what?” I asked Axton. “Your predecessor started a war with a couple of toddlers, and you’ve decided to commit to the bit? Arbor’s the Bad Pack now?”

Axton only sighed.

“Connor Slade was a stupid man with very little vision,” he started, clearly ramping up to some kind of villain monologue. “He took us to war over a slight, and he got what he deserved. The rest of us, however, had to live with the consequences of his incompetence. With half our fighting males dead, we’ve found ourselves with a surplus of females—their mates, their daughters, and so on—who are no longer of worth to the Pack.”

Yep. There it was.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said, and Axton’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re very mouthy for a female,” he observed, and I smiled.

“So I’ve been told.”

“We don’t suffer females like that on Arbor.”

“No, I imagine it’s the females doing the suffering.”

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