Page 18 of Into the Fire: After
Fuck, my eyes and throat were burning in just seconds. We tried our best to cover our mouths and noses, but we stood no chance.
Red faded from my vision, replaced with black. As I slumped in my seat, I made sure to call each of the four most important faces to mind.
Strong Brea. Smiling Brooks. Serene Lin. My sweet Taryn.
We were gonna make it out. We were gonna be pack. And when we did, I would skewer every damn person who’d tried to stop us.
IwokebeforeLin.No telling how long we’d been out, but the moving road outside the back windows was black, so hours at least. Maybe longer.
My head throbbed like a motherfucker, somehow at once feeling fuzzy and agonizingly sharp behind my eyes. My stomach roiled, but no telling if that was from the knockout gas or the twists and turns as we drove on.
And on.
And on.
A ribbon of pink glowed just over the back horizon when we finally entered a city. Not Farendale. New Gilden, maybe? Or Serenity Falls? Hard to tell in the dark outskirts.
It was the weirdest sensation, strapped in the back of the windowless van, swaying with the vehicle’s motion, mine and my pack’s lives hanging in the balance—all the while, even the few other cars we passed at this hour reminded me that everyone else was just…living theirs. Someone’s brakes squealed as we slowed and stopped. Engines revved right as we got moving again. The muffled sounds of a radio escaped through someone's open window.
Maybe the person in the next car over was on their way to a job they hated, cranking up the music to give them the strength to go in at all. Or maybe they were excited, on their way to the airport to go on a trip they’d been planning for ages. Whatever they weredoing, they were basically right next to me—six feet away, some sheets of metal and glass separating us.
How many times had I moved through the world, blissfully unaware that six feet away from me, someone’s life was in shambles?
Lin stirred as we made our way to an underground parking entrance. We paused a moment before pulling through. A security gate lowered behind us as we pulled into the sparsely occupied lot. We went down a level, two levels. No openings to the outside, a dank gray cavern.
Finally, we pulled to a stop and the engine cut. Lin groaned as he sat up, cradling his head, and I moved as close to the back window as I could, but I couldn’t see anything. Our captors rounded the back of the van, standing and blocking the view.
In the small openings around their heads, I could see more people approaching. One of those figures had a deep voice, muffled through the doors but clear otherwise. “You were expected days ago.”
“Yeah, well,” one of our captors said, and I heard the click of another set of van doors opening, “the little rabbit was a tough catch.”
Taryn.
I wrestled my alpha down even as I searched the air for a hint of her scent. Was she scared? Hurt?
Dead?
No. Wouldn’t be dead. The lab wouldn’t pay for a dead omega.
My stomach threatened to revolt again.
“Her heat’s passed,” the dispassionate voice said. “My men will see you paid the appropriate amount.”
“Thing is, we caught a few more rabbits we thought you may be interested in.”
Then our van’s doors opened wide, and her bitter scent punched me in the face. I lunged for the opening, desperate to get to her, but my shackles held me back again.
Before us stood an older beta male, thin, with gray hair and a melted-looking frown. He wore a white lab coat and held a clipboard as he looked over the tops of his thick glasses at us. His eyes flicked to our captor. “And why would you think that?”
“Gotta think three rabbits is better than one,” Asshole Number One piped up. “Plus, you know an omega will do anything for her alphas. Gotta figure that opens up new…ah…optionsfor you.”
My blood wasn’t hot. It wasn’t boiling. It was pure molten lava beneath my skin.
White Coat walked to the right side, out of my range of vision. “She only has one bond bite,” he said. The thought of him touching her, looking at Brea’s mark on her neck, had me growling. “Only one of them is her alpha, at most.”
They continued to talk and negotiate back and forth, like the three of us weren’t sitting here, with beating hearts and working minds. Like we were cuts of meat in a market stall.
“Breathe, Caine,” Lin whispered soft enough only I could hear it. But I couldn’t obey.
