Page 37 of My Fugitive Wolf
"No." Leo shook his head as he followed Kellen and stood up, branch still in hand. "Now that we know what to look for, aside from the smell, we can better see the trap from this angle rather than lower to the ground."
Kellen reached back, grabbing Samara's hand again. "Okay. The mansion is straight ahead, and the terrain doesn't change much between here and the backyard. I think if you and Stephen can find any traps in front of us and no further than fifty feet from the sides, we should be okay. What do you two think?"
"Sounds good to me." Leo bent down, swinging the branch forward. "Cover your ears."
He meant her, but covering her ears meant she had to let go of Kellen's hand. She did as asked anyway. Despite doing so, she could still hear the sharp snap of the branch, when Leo poked the trap. Kellen took her hand back. "Stay by my side. We're going to walk a straight line, but if you see any sort of indentation in the ground, say something."
She nodded as Kellen took a step around the sprung trap, then another, then another. As he walked, he turned his head from side to side, his eyes wide as he searched the ground from the left to right, his nose flared while he checked for more scents meant to throw them off.
For the first time since she escaped, Samara wished for the preternatural senses of her wolf shadow. They would be helpful in the moment. When she had inhaled as a wolf shifter, all the smells from the compound assaulted her at once—the food from the kitchen, the rotting meat from the garbage, the bathroom, the wet grass outside. It was gross and she hadn’t been able to make it go away. Still, now it might be worth the trade off if it meant not getting her foot shattered by stepping into a wolf trap.
Maybe.
Kellen kept her pressed close to him as they slowly walked forward. In the background she heard one, two, three loud cracks of wolf traps snapping shut. If Leo or Stephen got caught in the traps, she would hurt for them just as much as she would for Kellen. In less than two days, those two had made quite an impression on her. The genuine concern between the three reminded her that bringing her into their brotherhood would change the dynamics of their group. Could she live knowing that everything for the three brothers would change because of her? Leo and Stephen were Kellen's family and had been for almost a century and a half. He'd known her for only a week. For whatever reason wolf shadows needed each other, but he wouldn't commit if her shadow was anything other than an omega.
What a tangled mess she'd dropped herself into.
Another two wolf traps set off in the background almost simultaneously, but after what felt like hours, the trees cleared and the ruins of the Riverstone Pack's home, Josiah's prison for her, stood in front of them.
She couldn't suppress a shudder. It was so powerful that she had to wrap her arms around herself.
"Shhhhhh," Kellen whispered in her ear. "It's okay. There's no one here who's going to hurt you."
If only she had his confidence. At that moment, Stephen and Leo came to stand next to them. "All the traps have been sprung."
Kellen dropped his backpack and started to loosen his clothes, removing his jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. "Let’s all get ready to shift. If anyone shows up here, we're all shifting." He wasn't stripping down, but she guessed loose clothing made it easier to change shape. "Leo, do you have the keys?—"
Leo handed him the keys to the van before he finished the sentence.
"Stephen did you?—"
"The tank is full."
Kellen handed her the keys to the van. "Samara, you'll have one job if things go south: Run back to the motel and don't look back no matter what you hear. From there, take the van and get yourself somewhere safe. Stay on the back roads and just don't stop until the tank is empty."
God, she hoped it wouldn't come to that, but she nodded her understanding, because she was pretty useless otherwise.
"All right, let's go."
She grabbed onto Kellen again as he started across the unkempt lawn toward the mansion. Even though it was little more than a husk of what it once was, she couldn't help but take just a little satisfaction knowing she caused all of this. Josiah might not be dead, but losing the safety of his house—and it was just a house to him, not a home—had to be enraging for someone who lashed out at whatever was in reach when things didn't go according to his plan.
The debris on the ground made walking almost as hazardous as the woods. Random bits of wood and stone and brick crunched under her boots, making her thankful Kellen thought to buy them for her.
When they reached the edge of the outer east wall, they stopped.
"What should we look for?" Leo asked.
All three of them looked toward her for an answer. Feeling more pressure than she needed right now, Samara looked at the ruins. Okay, time to put all the little pieces of information she'd been ignoring together and pray for a clue. "I think we should look for a safe. If Josiah had secrets, he wouldn't keep them out in the open. He probably had a safe in his office. Something that wouldn't have burned. I know his office was on the second floor, but I never went in there."
"Then we'll look for anything that might have been a desk." Leo took a tentative step into the rubble.
Kellen motioned Stephen and Leo to follow him. “Let's go."
They stuck together as they walked and sometimes crawled through the ruins, their clothes turning black with soot. Ignoring the empty garage, they focused on the west side, where it looked like the second and third floors had fallen on top of the first.
"This looks like the remnants of a desk." Leo pulled what appeared to be a drawer. The wood fell apart in his hand. Pieces of smoke-damaged paper appeared slid out and onto the ground, but Stephen dove and caught them before they got too filthy to read.
"I'll keep these so we can look at them later." He tucked them into the inner pocket of his jacket. "I see another one here..."
