Page 54 of Broken Arranged Mate
Pain explodes through my fist and up my arm, but it’s welcome. I hear the other car doors opening, and a second later, Emaline and Kira are there, trying to drag me away from the bloodied man and back to the car. Veva stands to the side, shooting out magic and catching goon after goon with bolts of energy, magic she’s described to me as a bullet made of light.
A tall man with shaggy hair reaches for Kira, and she manages to dodge, but the next one catches her by the arm and starts to pull her away from me.
One by one, they catch us, wrangling Veva up next and slapping a pair of shining, imbued handcuffs on her that dull her abilities.
We’re all bloody, breathing hard and glaring at them, and the leader—the man with the bulbous nose—glares at us, his face twisted into a full scowl.
“Fighters, huh?” he spits. “We’ll see how much money you fetch us at the dark market, huh?”
Kira and Veva are tense, and Emaline looks to me, eyes wide. These women have had intimate and unfortunate experiences with that market. I thought Oren had managed to dissolve the thing, keep it from happening again, but I know they’ve been moving around, assembling it in a new area and taking everything down before he can gather forces to catch them.
The last thing we need is to be going to a dark market—especially when it’s my husband trying to stop the thing from happening altogether.
“You’re making a mistake,” Veva says, her chin held high, her eyes blazing with defiance. Smiling coldly at the men, she glances left to me, and right to Kira, then cocks her head to the side. “Do you know who we are?”
“Do we know who you are?” one of the men laughs, then slowly drags his eyes up and down her body. “Don’t matter, sweetheart. Nobody’s gonna care about yourpersonalityat the market.”
“But they might care about the title,” Veva retorts, shrugging like it doesn’t matter to her either way. “Like Luna of Ambersky?” A quick glance at Kira. “Or Luna of Grayhide, and brand-new wife toOren Blacklock?”
He might be trying to shake the weight of his father’s legacy, but when his name is mentioned, it strikes genuine fear into the eyes of the men in front of us, who glance between one another, then back to us.
“Sister of Oren Blacklock,” Raegan adds, her voice surprisingly steady as she looks at Emaline. “And don’t forget the mate of Aidan Grayhide, the last of the Grayhide line.”
One on the end—the man with the shaggy hair—shakes his head and snarls, “Yeah, right. Like the lunas of the pack are gonna be running around on some back road in the middle of the night, you must think we’restupid!”
“No,” Raegan mutters, looking to the sky as they grab us and start loading us into the back of an unmarked van. “But weclearlyare.”
Chapter 31 - Oren
“Hello?”
Dorian’s voice is bleary, half-sleep-riddled when he answers the phone. For a moment, I think that I shouldn’t have called him, shouldn’t be bothering him with this—but it’s his sister, and I’m pretty sure his car was here.
If anyone knows where she is, it’s him. And even after everything he’s done for me, I’m not above bothering him in the middle of the night if he thought it was okay to do this without telling me.
“She’s gone,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. “Did you come to get her?”
After discovering she was missing, I ran around the house, sprinted through the dunes, thinking maybe she had gone out there again. I’d yelled her name and sent mentally for her in my wolf form—but there was nothing.
I’m normally controlled, strategic, but when I realized she was gone, it was like all logical thought flew from my head. Rather than follow her scent from the start, I kept circling the house, thinking she would show up on my next turn.
When I got back to the house and finally used my brain enough to follow the fading scent trail, it led weakly to the end of the driveway, then to the end of the road, where it seemed like she crouched in the shrubs for a while before leaving.
And the only other scent I could catch was her brother’s—the unmistakable smell of him and gasoline. His truck.
It carried with it that earthy, almost minty scent of the Ambersky territory. I’d recognize it anywhere—I rode aroundenough in that thing while I was staying over there. Dorian’s truck was here, and he never lets anyone drive that thing.
If it was here, that means he was, too.
“What?” Dorian asks now, voice thick with exhaustion. The man is always tired, which makes sense, especially considering the fact that he has two toddlers and three infants to care for. I can practically picture him rubbing the sleep from his eyes, trying to pull himself together. “Who’sgone?”
“Ash,” I spit. “My wife. Your sister.”
I know it would be good to keep the anger from my voice, but at this point, I’m a little beyond caring. If an arranged marriage to Ash was meant to keep the peace between our packs and bring the shifters together, then Dorian showing up in the middle of the night and ferrying her away is the opposite of that.
Worse than that, it makes me feel like the monster I’m desperately trying to convince myself I’m not.
On the other side of the line, I hear the sound of sheets rustling, movement, something like a pillow dropping to the floor.
