Page 14 of Alphas Never Hide (Willow Lake Supernaturals #5)

Chapter Fourteen

RYLEY

Hayden went to put his hand on my neck again, but I swatted it away. I didn’t want to be lulled into a feeling of safety and security. I was not safe or secure, and I needed all my senses so I could protect myself.

He pressed his lips together but dropped his hand.

My heart was pounding a bazillion times a minute. The last time I’d been in this tunnel system, I swore I’d never go back, that I’d die fighting anyone who tried to make me. And yet, here I was, less than twenty-four hours later, traipsing through the door like I was an eager guest with an embossed invitation.

Reckless . That was the only word for it.

Still , I followed Hayden into the hole in the ground like I wasn’t living through my worst nightmare. I left the hatch open. It was our means of escape, and I didn’t want anything blocking it. Lights flickered on as we neared the bottom of the ladder, and I figured they were motion- activated because they’d done the same thing when I broke free of my cage last night.

As soon as my feet were on the ground and the tunnel walls were pressing in all around me, I regretted all my life choices that’d led to this moment. Okay . Maybe not all my decisions. I didn’t regret leaving my herd. But I absolutely regretted not rolling over in Hayden’s bed this morning and letting him come out here on his own.

What had I been thinking? I was a faun. We weren’t known for our heroics. My kind also weren’t meant to live underground. We were a one-hundred-percent above-ground kind of being.

I shifted into my faun form to give myself a little more strength, but even that didn’t give me a lot of comfort. My shifted form didn’t come with armor. My bare-assed chest was very vulnerable to bullets and bites and knives of all kinds.

I eyed the ladder going up to the surface. I could be up those rungs in a matter of minutes and run back to the truck, like Hayden had suggested. From there, I could call Van and let him deal with Hayden’s single-minded and foolish quest to confront Robbie .

Yeah . But I wouldn’t do that, would I ? Because that’d mean going out there into the woods. Alone . Again .

Van could already be on his way. He seemed like the guy who’d come running as soon as he opened the text I’d sent him marking our location. Of course he would, and he’d bring the rest of his merry little gang, too. Because , unlike me, Hayden had people who seemed to care where he was and what he was doing. I just had to stick close to him until they arrived. So , I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. Out of the corner of my eye, a shadow flickered up by the ceiling. I scanned the tunnel, but everything was quiet and still.

“ What ?” Hayden asked.

“ Did you see that? Something moved?”

Hayden shook his head and scanned the ceiling. “ What did it look like?”

Great . Now I was imagining things. This place was messing with my head. “ I guess it was nothing.”

“ But it might not be,” Hayden said, looking around for threats again. Nothing appeared. “ I smell…” He hesitated, like he wasn’t sure if he should finish his thought. “ Death .”

Yeah . That wasn’t a troubling thought at all. And , obviously, that wasn’t the source of the movement I saw because dead things didn’t move. “ Let’s go. I think it might have been a moth.”

“ If you’re sure…”

“ I’m sure,” I lied, because saying that I was seeing shit that wasn’t there wasn’t a comfort to anyone.

He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. He spun in a circle, taking in the less-than-luxurious accommodations. We were in a room of sorts with tunnels leading away from it. The wall sconces were the cheapest motion-activated outdoor lights you could buy at the hardware store. The light was bright white and made my eyes water. Two -by-fours and plywood crudely supported both the walls and the ceiling, though the earth floor remained bare. Based on the haphazard spacing of the posts, I doubted they complied with any kind of structural engineering standards. None of those observations eased the impending sense of doom clinging to me like burrs on my faun’s furry ankles.

Dark tunnels led away from the room. I couldn’t remember which one I’d used, but Hayden sniffed the air and chose one. I shuddered and tried to peer down the ones we weren’t taking. If only they led to something interesting, like a stash of gold or a wine cellar or… What else did people store in creepy underground bunkers?

“ You sure this isn’t a trap?” I whispered.

“ Nope . But I can’t sense wolves in here. There are other scents though, so stay close. I can’t tell if they are new or not. The lack of fresh air is messing with my nose.”

“ Great , just great,” I mumbled, but I followed him anyway.

No way was I letting him out of my sight; splitting up was how people died in slasher movies. Statistics showed that more women than men survived horror movies. Yes , yes, I knew this was my real life, but it felt like one of those fictional movie sets, and I was determined to be the exception to the survival statistics. I also wanted Hayden to survive too, because I was generous like that.

As we walked into the tunnel, more lights came on. Our footsteps scuffed against the bare ground loudly enough I could hear them over my thundering heartbeat.

Nothing in the hall was straight. The walls tilted a few degrees this way or that. The ceiling wasn’t level either. Whoever installed them clearly didn’t understand how to use a plumb bob, a level or, you know, just their eyes. The only other explanation was they really liked those creepy human fun houses, except this one didn’t have mirrors or the weird circus music. And if we were lucky, nothing lurked behind corners waiting to lunge for us, either.

We got to the first door. It was ajar. I hadn’t thought my heart could beat any faster, but it tried anyway.

“ Wait a minute,” Hayden whispered. Then he shifted, not fully, but enough that his face changed into a wolfish configuration, and he grew bigger. He sniffed at the gap. When he didn’t stiffen or shout at me to flee, I figured we were safe.

“ I don’t scent anyone,” he said, confirming my brilliant deduction.

He nudged the door open to reveal a small room of shelves filled with garbage. Upended , empty boxes and plastic food wrappers were strewn across the surfaces.

“ This must be how they hid from us for so long,” Hayden said. “ They had food stockpiled. Looks like they are getting to the end of their supplies, though.”

Then he peered into the hallway, one way, then the other. He motioned for me to follow him, as if I needed the reminder. We explored room after room. We didn’t find anything, and I can’t say I was disappointed, especially when Hayden had talked about smelling death earlier.

At the first fork in the tunnel, we turned right. If we continued to turn right each time, we should make it out again. Wasn’t that the trick for mazes and labyrinths? I hoped it was. I’d never been in one before. The next door we found was closed, but the doorknob turned easily under Hayden’s hand. As soon as it opened, Hayden froze. He looked at me.

“ You don’t have to come in here,” he whispered, and I knew we’d found the place where I’d been kept. I shoved him aside and walked in. When was he going to figure out I wasn’t letting him leave me behind anywhere? Not even in the hallway.

I ground my teeth together so I wouldn’t gasp or curse or scream.

The room, with its cage, looked the same as when I’d left it. The pot I’d been given to piss in was still in the corner. The water bottles I’d rationed were in the other corner. The bars protruding from the ground and the ceiling should have made it impossible for a faun like me to break out. Except , luckily for me, they hadn’t given nearly enough thought to the locking mechanism, which hadn’t survived being kicked repeatedly by a hoof.

“ You see that? I did that. I broke out of there. Ha ! Fuck them and the turtle they rode in on!” I pointed at the broken bits of lock scattered across the ground. In amongst the debris were chunks of my hooves and a few splatters of blood too. My gaze skittered away from those.

“ Good job.” Hayden nodded.

I didn’t need his approval, but I still liked the acknowledgement that for once in my life I’d been badass enough to break out of a cage, all on my own. I’d rescued myself. I wasn’t a weak-assed dimwit in distress who needed someone to save him. I’d saved my own damn self. Fucking A . Oorah , or whatever it was that marine dudes said in movies. Was I saying that right? I’d never enlisted, so what did I know about those things? Fuck it. I was going to say it anyway. Oo -fucking-rah.

“ I’m glad my head is tougher than that lock.” He laughed, so I knew he was teasing me. “ You did some pretty good damage in here. ”

I grinned back at him, feeling better about this whole situation than I had just seconds earlier. We left the room, and I didn’t look back.

Behind the next door, we found my backpack. I couldn’t believe it. I ignored everything else and ran for it. A quick search confirmed everything was exactly as I’d packed it. Even my laptop was still in there. Fucking awesome with coconut on top. My phone and my shoes were beside my bag like they’d been tossed there and never looked at again.

When we got back to town, I was buying a lottery ticket.

I shoved my phone in my pocket, and I tied my shoes to my bag. If I hadn’t been wearing my hooves, I would have switched shoes right then and there. I tugged the backpack over my shoulders, and everything seemed right with the world.

Except … My backpack wasn’t the only one in the room.

There had to be at least another six or seven sets of belongings in here. Son of a corn-filled turd. This was bad.

“ Let’s finish our search,” Hayden said. “ If we don’t find anyone else, we’ll come back and search for IDs .”

I nodded. I had no desire to rifle through someone’s belongings. If they were caged like I had been, they’d been violated enough already.

After finding the next several rooms empty, I wasn’t holding out much hope of finding survivors. Our luck didn’t improve. When we arrived back at the place we’d started from—only making right-hand turns had worked—we decided we’d found all we would. The cages had all been empty. There were no survivors, but thankfully there weren’t any bodies either. At least I hoped that was good news.

Then we doubled back to the room where we’d found my backpack.

I eyed the heaps of other bags.

“ I guess we need to look through them.” I swallowed.

We couldn’t carry everything back, but we couldn’t leave it here either. What if Robbie came back and found his brother’s scent in the tunnels? I wouldn’t put it past him to destroy everything.

Hayden nodded. “ You can stay outside if you want. You don’t have to do this.”

I appreciated the offer, but I wasn’t standing out in the hallway by myself. I didn’t care if the tunnel complex was empty; the place gave me the creeps. The sooner we got out, the better. If we went through the bags together, we could leave faster.

I took my bag off my back and set it beside the door, then I got to work. Hayden started at one side of the room, and I took the other.

“ Look for wallets, identification, phones, that sort of thing. Anything we can use to identify who this stuff belongs to,” Hayden said.

“ It feels wrong to go through their stuff,” I said as I dumped out a bag.

“ I know.” Hayden grimaced. “ We can come back and collect it later, when we have more people, but I don’t want to risk having this stuff go missing before we can return.”

“ So , we’re leaving after this?” That was even better news than finding cinnamon buns on the menu this morning.

“ Yeah ,” Hayden agreed as he shook everything out of a toiletry bag. “ Let’s put the stuff in here to carry out.”

I tossed the two wallets to him, and he shoved them into the bag beside a phone and a wallet he’d found.

Three wallets. So , that was at least three people so far. My hands shook as I grabbed the next bag. From the corner of my eye, I saw Hayden scoop up another too.

There was a click.

It must have been loud if I could hear it over the pounding of my heart.

Hayden was closer to the door, but he spun toward me faster than I could register with my eyes. He grabbed me and hurled me toward the door. I went flying into the hallway as a loud clang resounded behind me. I rolled over to see what’d happened.

Oh , fuck a puck.

Where in the Magic had those bars come from? We must have triggered some kind of booby trap. What was worse? Hayden lay sprawled across the floor on the other side of the bars. Trapped . He wasn’t moving.

“ Hayden !” I ran over and grabbed the bars. They didn’t even wiggle. “ You better be alive. You hear me? You are not allowed to die in this place.”

He groaned.

“ Thank fuck.” I should probably thank the Eternal Magic too, but right now she didn’t seem to be on my side, so she could damn well wait.

Hayden rolled to his side and gingerly probed the top of his head. “ Why’d you kick me again, Ry ? ”

“ I didn’t kick you.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“ You sure? Because …” he slurred.

“ I think the bars conked you on the head when they dropped out of the ceiling. Why did you do that? You were closer to the door. If you hadn’t tried to save me…” Tears welled in my eyes.

“ Bars ?” He blinked like he was having trouble focusing. He rubbed his unusually pale face in an uncoordinated way like he was drunk. “ Where did they come from?”

“ You look like shit. If you’re going to throw up, aim away from me, okay?” I wouldn’t win any awards for my bedside manner, but if he was concussed enough to toss up his breakfast, I’d really lose it. I didn’t do well with sick people. And it should have been me in there. He was the big, huff-and-puff-and- I’ll -blow-your-house-down werewolf dude. He should be out on this side so he could figure out how to get me out. Instead , everything was all wrong, and I had to save him. I was not meant to be a hero.

“ Think , Ryley , think.” I scrubbed my fingers over my scalp.

Where was the lock? I scanned each bar. No fucking lock. Son of a turd-filled twit.

So there had to be a lever. Something to make the bars pop back to where they’d come from. We hadn’t found a control room. Had we missed something? I hated the idea of leaving Hayden to go looking for one, but what else could I do?

I tugged at the bars again. They didn’t even rattle. Criminy , we were lucky the bars hadn’t landed on either of us. That would have been messy. Skewered by a boobie-trap wasn’t how anyone would want to go .

Nope . Don’t think about skewering. I needed to twist this narrative around. Embrace the power of positive thinking. Wasn’t that the trick Hayden had pulled on me in the woods earlier? And how did I do that exactly?

Think , Ryley .

“ We aren’t as bad off as we could be. No one is a shish kabob. Yay , us!” I flashed two thumbs up toward Hayden , who still looked dazed. “ I can do this. I can get you out. I got myself out, so this will be so much easier because there are two of us.”

In other news, I was also brilliant at lying to myself.