Page 23

Wilder

I was the first one back at the bath store and, when I went inside, I didn’t immediately see her. After calling her name and getting no response, I followed her scent, only to have it lead straight to an emergency exit.

My heart raced. My wolf freaked out. I pushed the door open, and an alarm blared.

“I told you to keep that door shut!” the woman behind the counter yelled.

“Who?” I asked. “Who needed to keep this door shut?”

She looked from her task. “Oh. Sorry. I thought you were those other guys.”

“Other guys?” My wolf was so close to the surface I feared the employee would see him.

“Yeah. They came and got their friend.” She went back to labeling the bath bombs she’d been working on.

“Their friend… Was their friend a beautiful woman?” Please let it be another guy and Rumor was just in the bathroom.

“Yes, with long hair and a red shirt.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Before I could ask for more information, Vargas came in. “Where’s Rumor?”

“I think we have a problem.” I told him what the woman had said, and the two of us ran straight out the back door, not even caring that the employee would be pissed. Let her be.

We followed our mate’s scent through the door, out to the alley and then, just like that, the scent ended. The only thing left of her, her phone.

She was gone.

“We need to find Penn,” Vargas said. “And we need to get our mate back.”

Vargas told me to get Penn from the bakery across the street. He’d go back in and talk to the woman.

My heart was pounding so hard, it echoed in my ears. My thoughts spiraled to the worst places. I grabbed Penn and came back, and by then, Vargas had a few details: number of people and what they were wearing. But her description of their faces? Pretty much useless—they were handsome, whatever the fuck that meant.

Vargas had asked about cameras, something I’d not even considered. But, of course, they didn’t have any. That would’ve made our next step too easy.

We were fucked.

“We need help. We have no clues, no trail to follow, and no tracker to trace.” Vargas sounded as defeated as I felt. “Not the police.”

We were all in agreement on that. Without any proof she actually was taken, they wouldn’t care anyway. Not until more time had passed, and I wasn’t willing to wait.

“What about the Black Wings?” Penn asked. “They control a lot of this area. And they’re all, like, fancy-pants with their tech.”

He was right. They were our best bet. We didn’t want to lose a second’s time and went straight to their pack lands, not even bothering to ask permission to be on their land. This was an emergency…an ask-forgiveness situation. We didn’t have time for formalities.

They technically did owe us a few favors. Wilder had helped them with a livestock issue, and Vargas had helped rebuild one of their buildings after a tornado. We didn’t usually get along with other packs or interact with them at all, for that matter. We kept to ourselves, wanting to avoid the looks and treatment we got from others. But, if we had friends? These were them.

We pulled up to the gate and one of the wolves was standing there on all fours. I stepped out of the truck.

“We need help,” I said. “Our mate…our mate was kidnapped.”

He growled, and I thought we were screwed, but then he shifted to his skin, and we told him what happened.

“I’ll meet you at the main house. We can discuss this situation there.”

He arrived before we did and brought us into their dining room where a handful of wolves joined us, all listening to us tell them what happened and asking questions. Some felt irrelevant, but maybe they knew something we didn’t and they mattered.

There was a lot of back-and-forth on how to figure out who took her, especially without store cameras. Those cameras, or lack thereof kept coming up, and the alpha who greeted us at the gate, Ray, called for the pack’s tech guy—his name was Max.

Max looked more like a linebacker than a tech nerd, but he grabbed the computer and started typing. From what I could see, the screen was filled with more numbers than words. I had no idea what he was doing, but then again, I wasn’t a tech specialist. He was.

My packmates and I stood there. We didn’t ask questions. None of us wanting to break his concentration, which appeared intense.

Max slammed both palms onto the table. At first, I thought it was in frustration, but then his smile grew. “I’m in.”

“Not your fastest,” the pack alpha teased. Is that what we were doing? Having a good time?

Vargas didn’t think so. His wolf was growling in his chest.

I placed a hand on his shoulder to calm him. This wasn’t the time to get angry and reckless. If there was ever a time Rumor needed us to use our brains, it was now.

“So…this is actually the bakery across the street,” Max said. He blew part of it up so we could see the reflection of the baked goods in the glass. “But if we look across…is that the alley?”

I nodded.

“Okay. Exactly how long ago was this?”

We gave our best estimate. He rewound the footage.

A van pulled up. Men got out—their faces obscured. Even the one who walked around to the front to open the door for the others had his head down and a hood up. They were prepared. This wasn’t spontaneous.

Less than a minute later, the alarmed door opened. Two men went inside, and the three of them came out a minute later carrying our mate. She was struggling. Fighting. Good girl.

Then the driver’s side opened, and the woman who had been behind the wheel walked around to open the back doors.

Unlike the others, she didn’t hide her face.

It was Reyna.

Reyna had taken our fucking mate.

Reyna had stolen her own twin.

Reyna needed to die.

“What does she want with her?” Penn asked.

“Remember when she texted? How she asked questions about Rumor’s heat?” I hated to even think the two were connected, but it was the only thing that made sense.

This time, the growl in Vargas’s chest turned into a deep, rumbling sound. I could smell his fur—he was right at the edge.

So was I.

“We need to get her,” I barked. “We need to bring her back, and we need to do it fast. Her heat’s almost here, and I don’t know what they’re going to do to her.” My voice cracked. My eyes blurred. “But we can’t let it happen.”

We hadn’t even told her we loved her yet. Not in those words. And already we’d let her down.

We’d failed her.

But we wouldn’t do it again.

I refused.

We were going to get her back. We were going to make her officially our omega. We were going to mark her and let the entire world know that she was fucking ours. And that anyone who even looked at her wrong would pay the ultimate price.