Page 30 of Broken Arranged Mate (Badlands Wolves #4)

“I’m telling you,” Veva says, looking up from the crude map in her hands, eyes cutting to Kira in the driver’s seat. “We are lost .”

“We were supposed to go left at the weird cactus,” Emaline says, glancing backward, her fingers digging into Veva’s headrest.

“The one that looked like it was flipping us the bird?” Raegan asks, from her spot wedged next to me, eyes wide. I hadn’t realized she was added to our group chat, but when she saw the text about getting me out of there, she was immediately on board.

“It looked more like a peace sign,” Emaline says, brow wrinkling.

“We’re not lost,” Kira cuts through the din. “I can get us home. You can trust me.”

“I trust you,” Veva says, eyes falling back down to the map. “But I do not trust your navigational skills.”

“Can’t you look at your phone?” I try speaking for the first time from the backseat. Kira’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror, and I watch the flush rise on her cheeks.

“I, uh—” she gives a little chuckle at herself. “I forgot it.”

“You…forgot your phone?” Emaline asks. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Mom brain,” Kira says, like that explains it, and the other two women nod knowingly. I ignore the twisting in my stomach, the urge to be in on this joke. Raegan, next to me, shoots me a glance, and it makes me feel better.

“What about yours?” I ask Veva. She pulls it from her pocket, then laughs incredulously, shaking her head.

“It’s dead.”

When I look at Emaline, she shakes her head, flashing the screen at me. “I tried already. No service for me out here. Do you have yours?”

“No,” I admit, dropping my gaze back to my hands. “I thought…I thought Oren might be able to track it.”

The car falls silent, then Veva asks, a hard line to her voice, “Ash, do you think he’s going to hurt you? Has he hurt you?”

“No,” I say it quickly, hating the idea that anyone would think him capable of that. “ No . It’s just—that premonition, or whatever it was—it was so realistic. The blood was everywhere.”

“My brother wouldn’t do that,” Raegan says, the confidence in her tone reassuring. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to the way you feel about it. It will be good to take a break, I think.”

Kira nods and meets my eyes in the mirror again. “Trust me,” she says, voice low, and she refocuses on the road. “Your first premonitions can be tricky. Either simply incomplete, or you just don’t really get how to read them yet.”

Silence falls over the car. I don’t know how much Emaline and Veva know, but Kira has first-hand experience with misreading a premonition. One of her first came when we were still in high school together, and when she tried to tell everyone an attack was coming, she got the details wrong.

Gramps died that day. As a teenager, I’d blamed her, just like everyone else did. But as I got older, I realized she was just a kid, like me. A kid that this pack hadn’t treated too well to start with.

I’d had the luxury of being insulated by my family, the granddaughter of the alpha leader, and the sister of the incoming alpha leader. Kira did not have that luxury.

“Lately, it feels like there are two sides of me,” I say, knowing I’m being more vulnerable with them than I’ve ever been before. “The side that’s logical, and understands reason, then this side that just… wants all the time, and makes my brain a hurricane when she doesn’t get what she wants.”

“Aidan would probably call the second one your wolf,” Emaline laughs.

“My wolf?” I raise an eyebrow—I’ve never bought into the idea that our animal forms are a different version of us. When I shift, I’m still me, just in a different body.

“Yeah,” Veva agrees, twisting in her seat to look at me. “When Emin and I fight sometimes, we’ll blame the wolves. Like the wolves are hungry, or the wolves are just tired of changing diapers .”

“Maybe marrying Oren brought that out for you,” Kira says, shrugging. “But, even if that’s not the case, this situation is just a lot, too. It makes sense that you would be feeling a little more emotional—”

She cuts off when something appears ahead of us on the road, slowing down. It could be an armadillo, or one of the many other animals Oren warned me would be easy to hit while driving these roads at night.

But it’s not an armadillo.

It’s several shadowy figures, standing right in the center of the road. A makeshift barricade of rocks and dried cactus husks is piled between them, and Kira reluctantly brings the car to a stop.

“Call Dorian,” Kira says under her breath.

Emaline shakes her head, whispering, “Still no signal.”

“Me either,” Raegan says, checking her phone. “What do we do?”

“We can take them,” Veva says, already sitting taller in her seat, something almost eager in her expression. “There are five of us, and only three of them.”

I glance at Emaline, who looks a bit green.

Veva and I might be up for fighting, and Kira has been training since marrying Dorian, but Emaline is not a fighter.

When she and I were captured in Grayhide territory before Aidan and Oren killed Jerrod Blacklock and Mhairi Argent, Emaline managed to free us by talking to the other prisoners, not by launching an attack.

And I have no idea what Raegan’s fighting ability is.

As we pull closer, though, it reveals several more of them sitting around behind the blockade. All betas, none of them particularly powerful, but still outnumbering us by a considerable amount.

“Play along,” Kira whispers, as one of them approaches her window, grinning from ear to ear. She cracks it only a fraction, enough to let in sound and nothing else.

“Good evening,” the man says, peering into the car, his large, bulbous nose brushing against the glass. “Step out of the car, please, ladies.”

“We’re just passing through,” Kira says, surprisingly well composed, given the situation. I glance at Veva, whose hands are balled into fists in her lap, like she’s ready to start swinging. “We took a wrong turn.”

“Yeah, you did,” the guy laughs, his eyes shifting and catching on me in the backseat. “This is a toll road, now.”

“Toll road?” Kira glances at me, and I shake my head. There’s no way this is official—Oren wouldn’t charge tolls. And if they had implemented some sort of toll system, it wouldn’t be using a barricade of old cacti and branches.

“Pay up,” the guy says, pressing forward, and when I glance at the rearview mirror, I realize there are men surrounding the car on all sides.

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Emaline says, her voice shaking as she digs into her pockets.

We empty our bills and change, and Kira lowers the window a little more to slide the money through. The guy stands there, taking each coin and dollar, then spreading them out in his palm and shaking his head, looking up at us with a pitying expression.

“Sorry, ladies,” he says, “it seems like you don’t have enough. We’ll have to take our payment some other way.”

Emaline screams when the guy next to her window swings a hammer toward her, shattering the glass and reaching through. Veva twists in her seat, grabbing the guy’s arm, and he yelps, trying to pull back, but she reaches forward and grabs the back of his neck.

The smell of burning skin fills the car, and Kira brings a hand to her mouth, looking green.

I’m so busy trying to pull Emaline away from the guy that I don’t see one gearing up next to my window to crack it open, and a second later, glass rains down over me, a larger shard lodging in my thigh and slicing through the flesh painfully.

“ Fuck.” I turn, and when I see the goon’s face in the window, his hand reaching for the door lock, I feel something snap inside me.

All the anger and frustration from the past few months have built up enough, and now I have the perfect target on which I can take it out.

Grabbing the handle, I surprise him by pushing the door open quickly, catching him in the ribs.

“Ash, no!” Kira’s voice is high, shrill as she tries to twist against her seatbelt and keep me from leaving the car. “Don’t—”

But it’s too late—I’m already outside the car and tackling the guy to the ground.

Either he has no idea how to fight, or he’s just incredible shocked by the fact that I’m fighting back, because he just stares up at me as I pull back and punch him in the face, my other hand balled in the front of his shirt to keep him where I want him.

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 your personality at 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 to Oren 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’re stupid !”

“No,” Raegan mutters, looking to the sky as they grab us and start loading us into the back of an unmarked van. “But we clearly are.”