Chapter Eight
Sam watched her go, fighting the urge to run after her, to make her stay, to make her understand. He loved her and she didn’t believe it.
But what reason did she have to believe him? He’d lied to her, he’d kept her in the dark, he’d been exactly the asshole she accused him of being. He’d spend the rest of his life making it right. But now, he had to make sure she was safe.
He caught up and followed Callie down the mountain at a discreet distance—someone was going to have to teach her how to pay attention to her surroundings and spot other wolves—and when she was picked up by a pair of friendly middle-aged hikers, he breathed a sigh of relief before he shifted and ran back for his truck.
He drove back into town and parked outside her apartment. He sat across the street, waiting, watching, as she turned lights on, her silhouette in the windows padding from room to room as the afternoon turned slowly to evening. He’d been so scared of losing her that night, it had never occurred to him that he might lose her anyway.
Still, he couldn’t regret it. A world where Callie was alive to be furious at him was better than one without her in it at all. Those moments when he thought she would die, the endless waiting for her to wake up after he’d changed her, the past two days alone with her looped through his brain. Nothing would ever compare to the way it had felt to hold her while she slept. To know that she trusted him enough to let go and rest. Trust she felt he didn’t deserve. He’d do anything to fix this.
His butt was numb and he was struggling to keep his eyes open as the force of the exhaustion of the past few days hit him. He texted Colin to take watch for him so he could get a few hours of sleep. They couldn’t leave her alone. His eyes drifted closed as soon as he put down his phone.
He woke up to Colin shaking his shoulder and shouting. “Sam, wake up! She’s gone. Callie’s car is gone.”
He told himself she’d probably gone to get something to eat. “Call Ryan, tell him to start calling bartenders. She can’t have gone far.”
The need to shift, to scent her out, follow her, find her flooded his system. He gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white, fingernails digging into his palms. She was gone and it was all his fault.
* * *
In the few minutes he’d been asleep, Callie had disappeared. No one had seen her leave town, no one knew where she went. When she didn’t come back after closing time, they went into panic mode.
Sam had been spiraling through a series of worst-case scenarios for hours, each one worse than the last—car accident, shifted and lost or hurt or both in the forest, Dunphy. He couldn’t tell if the sick feeling in his gut was plain fear or intuition. He wanted to ignore it, but his father hadn’t been able to track down Bren either.
“Where is she?” Sam ran his fingers through his hair and pulled, a better alternative than punching a wall, but a lot less satisfying.
“We’ll find her, Sam.” His mother handed him a cup of coffee and forced him into a chair at her kitchen table.
He was running on little sleep and adrenaline, he couldn’t sit still. It had to be Dunphy. His father was on the phone with the council, reporting Callie and Bren missing. Either Dunphy was utterly confident of his support on the council, or he was utterly stupid. The only two people who could speak for Sam and they suddenly went missing within a day of the hearing? Only an idiot or someone who’d been generously bribed would believe that was a coincidence. Sam prayed Dunphy didn’t have that kind of money.
His father hung up the phone, looking grim. “They’re still calling the hearing.”
“What about Callie? Even if they want to see you kicked out of your seat and whatever they’ll do to me, are they going to let a newly changed wolf roam free in the meantime?”
“They’re ‘looking into it.’ Dubois knows more than he’s saying.”
“And Bren?”
“A grown wolf disappears for a few days? ‘Not their concern.’”
“Fuck.”
“What the hell were you thinking, letting her leave?”
“What was I supposed to do? Chain her to the stove?”
“You were supposed to keep her safe!” his father yelled.
His mom stepped between them before they could attempt to strangle each other. “Stop it, both of you. Callie and Brennan don’t have time for this.”
“I can’t lose her, Dad. I know I fucked up, but I can’t lose her.” The only thing keeping him from running out into the woods to try to find her was the careful control he’d learned from the man standing across from him.
“I know. She’s one of ours, always has been. We’ll find her and bring her home.”
His brother slammed into the kitchen looking more than a little wild around the edges. He’d been driving around for hours, looking for her car, calling every bartender and waitress he knew between Pullman and the Canadian border. The MacTires would have known if she’d been seen anywhere in town and they had friends to the south.
“She was in Chiswick. I found her car.” Ryan tossed Callie’s spare set of keys on the table. “They left those behind. No other signs of a fight, but that doesn’t mean anything; she might not have been conscious enough to struggle.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If there had been some kind of fight in a bar in Chiswick on a random Friday in July, we would have heard about it. And the bartender is Dunphy’s cousin. He probably drugged her.”
“I swear to God, when I find that rat-faced little motherfucker, I’m going to wring his neck.”
His father was already murmuring into the phone, updating the council on Callie’s car being found with the keys on the ground, outside a bar run by one of Dunphy’s goons.
Ryan accepted a steaming mug from their mom and unfurled a local map on the table. “I’ll be next in line, Sammy. And you can kick my ass when we’re done.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was the idiot sharing a bottle with her until she blacked out. If I hadn’t—I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have cut her off.” His brother didn’t wear guilt well, he looked miserable sitting there, waiting for Sam to condemn him for what they’d all been doing that night.
“Help me bring her home and we’ll call it even.” He clapped him on the shoulder and cleared his throat. “Do we have any idea where he might have taken her?”
His father walked back into the room. “Durand. He’s got a place on the old hotel land. Hugh Sutton came around when I told him Ryan found her keys and his nephew has been missing for two days.”
“What about Dubois?”
“Too far in Dunphy’s pocket. The last thing we need is for him to move her before we can get there. We leave in a half hour. Sutton is leaving Vermont now, he’ll meet us there.”
Sam and Ryan raced back into town to round up Colin and whatever weapons they could, then rode back to their parents’ in grim silence with a trunk full of hunting rifles and bear mace. Mace or a bullet wouldn’t put down a wolf for long, but it would have to be enough to get in and get Callie out. His father and his uncles were assembled outside the house, and for once, Sam believed the legends that said they were descended from warriors, gifted by the gods with strength and determination in battle.
“Sam.” His father pulled him aside. “Are you prepared for this?”
“You’re not leaving me here.”
“You haven’t slept in days and you’re so full of caffeine and adrenaline you’re shaking.”
“You can’t leave me behind, she’s my—I love her.”
“I know. She’s yours. Has been since you were seven years old.” He breathed a heavy sigh. “Let’s go get her.”
Sam nodded once and got in the truck. He’d bring her home or die trying.
* * *
Callie woke up with her head pounding. It should have been impossible for her to feel worse than the morning she’d woken up after being literally hit by a truck, but her head hurt like it was trapped in a vice and her eyeballs were being squeezed out of their sockets with every throb of her pulse. She rolled to sitting on the packed dirt floor and opened her eyes warily. A shaft of dim light made its way through a grimy window on the other side of the room. She wasn’t alone.
He sat with his back to the wall, knees up, hands in his lap, with his head tipped back and his eyes closed. His breathing was deep and even; she couldn’t tell if he was asleep.
“Bren?”
His eyes popped open. “Callie?” He rushed to her side. “I wasn’t sure you were going to wake up. They must have given you enough to take down a fucking elephant.”
“Where the hell are we?”
“No idea. They shot me with a fucking tranq dart while I was hiking out on Wednesday. I didn’t come around until I was already here. They dropped you sometime last night.”
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”
How could she have been so stupid? How could she have doubted Sam? Whatever lies he’d been forced to tell to protect his family, he never would have intentionally hurt her. Ever. Yes, his protective streak and keeping things from her because he didn’t think she could handle it was frustrating as all hell, but what had she done? She’d gone rushing into danger in a snit when he’d told her what was happening. She should never have left the cabin. She definitely should never have left town, where everyone knew her, where there would always be someone who would keep her safe and out of the hands of creepy old men who had no problem almost killing her in order to what? Get a seat at the table with the other wolf clans?
“I don’t get it. Why? I know they came after me to get to Sam, but why?” If she could focus on untangling whatever twisted reasoning Dunphy had for this, she didn’t have to think about how she was trapped in a basement and had no idea what they were going to do with her.
“I don’t know. He wants that council seat, badly, he always has. He thinks Angus is soft, that we shouldn’t have to live in secrecy, play by human rules, but he’s never done anything about it, just grumbled about us being a superior race. Someone smarter than he is has to be pulling the strings.”
“He wants to start some sort of race war between wolves and humans?”
“I don’t know. There aren’t enough of us left for that.”
“Not now. But if it doesn’t take much to make more...”
“Then he’ll have a small army of unstable, newly changed wolves.”
“Whose aggression he can use.” Callie shivered at the thought of a ragtag bunch of young men, newly changed, feeling all the hair-trigger anger and frustration and sexual need of puberty all over again, being set loose on the towns and villages she’d grown up in. Add the giant chip on the shoulder some of them had from living in a land ruled by the almighty tourist dollar now that logging and the paper mills were long gone—It would be mayhem. “How do we get out of here? Can we shift? Aren’t we stronger that way?”
“Even if we could break down the door, they can shift, too. And they have guns and enough large-animal sedatives to take down a zoo. We’d both end up dead that way.”
“There has to be a way. We can take them by surprise.”
“They’ve probably been listening to this entire conversation, there will be no surprises.”
“No. There has to be some way to get ourselves out of here. I’m not waiting around for whatever that—” she pitched her voice louder “—fucking asshole is going to do to me.”
“I know.” Bren dropped his voice to barely a whisper. “But you’re not going to go barreling up the stairs. You’ll get yourself killed. We have to be smarter than they are. Which shouldn’t be that hard, especially with two of us.”
“They’re probably going to kill me anyway.” Or force her to—She couldn’t let her mind go there. She’d never be able to get herself out of the ball of sick horror she’d be if she did. “I might as well die on my own terms.”
“The council will know you’re missing by now; no one will believe it’s a coincidence. They’ll come looking for you.”
“They’ll probably kill me and dump my body somewhere to make it look like I ran off and fell off a cliff or something.”
The door from upstairs opened. “Well, well. Thank you, sweetheart. That isn’t a bad idea.”
Callie backed against the wall, as far from the stairs as she could get in the tiny room. Bren sat where he was and kept his eyes on the floor. Her stomach roiled and she fought the urge to shift and lunge for Dunphy’s throat. She’d never get out of her clothes in time. And Bren was right. Two men followed Dunphy down the stairs with guns at the ready. She wouldn’t make it two steps before one of them shot her.
Dunphy stepped closer to her and she wanted to shrink into the wall, but she forced herself to stay upright, defiant. He gripped her jaw in one hand, pressing her cheeks painfully into her teeth, like she was a rebellious toddler. She trained her eyes on the ceiling, anything not to look into Dunphy’s eyes, the cold, slippery, pale brown of the silt-covered rocks in the frigid mountain rivers.
“Look at me, sweetheart,” he crooned and squeezed her face harder.
She met his gaze. “I am not your sweetheart.”
He turned his head and said to the men at the bottom of the stairs, “I like this one, she’s got spunk.” He sniffed her and Callie’s stomach roiled. Sam was the only one she ever wanted to know her that intimately. “Yes, Callie, you could be quite useful. If you behave. If you don’t...” He shrugged. “Well, the council might find your body dead and broken somewhere. Such a shame for a girl with so much—” he paused and flicked the corner of his thin mouth “—potential, to have an accident like that.”
Her skin crawled. She wanted to close her eyes and shut out the sickeningly avid look on his face. She would die first. She belonged to Sam, he’d marked her, claimed her. “What are you going to do to me? Why is Bren here?”
He let go of her face and stepped back. Callie took a deep breath to steady herself now that she had room to do so without her chest brushing his.
“The boy’s hearing will go on as scheduled. Neither of you will be there to support him, of course.” He carefully brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. She couldn’t help her cringe. “You were so angry, Callie, when you left him. He’d betrayed you, lied to you, forced you to become one of us. You lost control and took off running. Got turned around in the woods, poor thing. We found you, patched you up, took you in. You won’t go back to him, not after the way he used you so you would cover up for his lack of control. The boy’s obsessed, dangerous, it would be foolish.”
He knew. He’d been watching them somehow. Callie didn’t think she could want to crawl out of her skin and disappear any more than she already did. Finally, he turned to Bren.
“As for you, Brennan, always the second fiddle. You couldn’t live with yourself if you let him get away with it. You saw what he did. How he plied her with alcohol, then brutally attacked her. You tried to intervene, but it was too late. You feared for your own life if you didn’t play along, so when your uncle told you to disappear for a few days? You did as you were told.”
It almost made sense, if he planned on keeping them both in this basement for the rest of their lives or killing them both. “And what happens when you trot both of us out to prove there was no foul play? What’s to stop either of us from telling the council what you did?”
“Angus MacTire’s seat will be mine. You’ll be reporting these supposed transgressions to me.”
“And the others?”
“Now, Callie, sweetheart, you’ve been through so much. No one blames you if you’re a little confused.” His voice was soft and slimy, like a caress from one of his clammy fingers. “And you,” he said sharply to Bren, “you might try to get back into the family’s good graces after betraying your cousin. But as a young man of upstanding morals, you could be rewarded here.”
Bren growled in the back of his throat, his muscles tensed, but he didn’t move. “Never. Shoot me, throw me off a cliff and get it over with. I will never be one of you.”
“Suit yourself.”
They trooped up the steps. The solid wood door came to rest in the frame with a heavy thump, the locks turned and clicked, and feet creaked over the old boards above them. She slumped onto the floor and pressed her palms to her eyes to stem the burning sensation. She swallowed the lump in her throat. She was going to die in this basement and have her body thrown into the forest, maybe never to be found. But she wasn’t going to sit there and cry about it.
Bren scooted next to her and took her hand. “He’s coming. You have to hold it together until he does. We’re getting out of here.”
“What if that’s what they want? We can’t let them walk into a trap,” Callie whispered as quietly as she could.
Bren looked around. “I could probably boost you through the window, but I don’t think I’ll fit. You’d have to go alone.”
“Then I’m not going through the window.”
“It might be the only way out. You could find your way back to Sam and help them figure out how to get in here.”
“No. I won’t leave you behind. I don’t want to know what they would do to you for helping me escape. And Sam would never forgive me if I got you killed.” He probably would never forgive her for getting herself kidnapped in the first place, but she didn’t say it out loud. He would come to her rescue, put himself in danger for her, because she’d been too stubborn and stupid to believe him when he’d said he loved her. She couldn’t let him risk his life for her again. She went to the steps and began feeling for loose planks. “We’re getting out of here. I don’t care if I have to beat Dunphy to death with a board to do it. This one’s wobbly, get the other end.”