Page 27 of Lost Wolf (Exiled Omegas #2)

Twenty-Seven

Luke

My awareness returns slowly, the world around me fading in bit by bit as my brain comes back online. The first thing I notice is the smell—a heavy antiseptic scent that almost burns my overly sensitive nasal passages. I smack my lips trying to flush out the nasty taste in my mouth and rub my snout over my leg.

Wait a second. Snout?

My fuzzy mind pulls the situation into focus much too slowly for my liking.

I’m in wolf form. But why? How? I don’t remember shifting.

I wrack my brain trying to recall how I ended up here—wherever the hell here is. What little light there is doesn’t do much to illuminate my surroundings and the chilly air smells only of chemicals. I sneeze, sending my head spinning again.

The dizziness takes ages to go away and I’m left blinking in confusion, still desperately trying to push through the mental fog and figure out what the hell happened to me.

There’s a vague memory just at the edge of my consciousness of sitting at a long table, of eating and drinking, my mate at my side…

Memories coming rushing back.

The dinner.

The wine.

Wanda.

Nausea twists my stomach into a knot as a single panicked thought echoes through my mind— Where’s Ollie?

No longer caring about anything but getting to my mate, I scramble up onto my paws, my nails sliding against the cold steel beneath me as my back rams into the top of what I now clearly recognize as a cage. Shifting won’t be comfortable in this small of a space, but I have to do it.

I have to get out.

I have to get to Ollie.

Closing my eyes, I call up my human form, willing it to come forward. Nothing happens. I try again, but there’s a disconnect somewhere, like my human form is somewhere out of reach.

I sneeze again and my head jerks, something on my neck hitting the cage wall with a clang. There’s some sort of metal circle digging into the skin of my neck, and it’s giving off a current of… something I don’t understand.

But now that I’ve noticed it, I can tell it’s what’s keeping me in wolf form.

What…? How…?

I try to shift a few more times, but eventually I have to face the truth: I’m stuck. Like Ollie was stuck in the lab.

Smith’s voice plays through my head and a cold sense of dread creeps through my limbs. We have reason to believe the Rockcastle pack has ties to the human lab.

What if that’s where Wanda is sending me?

Worse, what if she’s planning to send Ollie back?

I can’t let that happen.

I have to get to Ollie.

He’s not safe.

Everything in me screams that my mate is in danger, and blind panic drowns out everything else. Including common sense.

My movements become frantic, and I slam my side into the cage door again and again and again, the pain of the repeated impacts barely registering. Still, I continue battering myself against the metal, willing the damn door to just give up and open already. With every jolting impact, my heart rate increases, my breath coming in quick, desperate pants as I spiral into a frenzy of anger and fear.

I don’t notice that the light outside the cage has clicked on for a good three seconds after it happens. And I don’t stop ramming my body into the cage door until someone walks over and stops, standing just on the other side of the grate.

“The only thing you’re going to achieve by doing that is injuring yourself,” says Wanda, her voice bland. “And that won’t do you any favors where you’re going. It wouldn’t matter as much if they wanted you for the lab, but they expect the alphas to fight.”

I growl at her, my lips pulling away from my teeth and the hair on my back rising. Letting out a guttural snarl, I snap at the cage door, but my snout is too large to fit through.

Wanda only tsks at me and shakes her head. “Save some of that fight for the ring. It’s not going to do you any good here.” She studies my face for a long moment. “This is your own fault, you know. You should have just stayed gone.”

My fault? How was I to know what I was walking into here? I growl at her again, spittle dripping from my mouth in my rage.

“Maybe you’re right,” she says, her tone mild as if this is a completely normal situation. “I guess most of the blame actually falls on your father. He thought he’d fuck my sister and try to put aside my own son for his alpha bastard without any consequences.”

She stares at me for a beat. “I did try to do my best by you the first time around, selling you off to another pack where you’d be heir, but now you know too much,” she says, continuing the one-sided conversation. “I guess I can thank you for bringing Oliver home at least.”

The sound of my mate’s name on her lips, rips another growl from my chest and I snap at the grating again.

“I can’t say I expected you to have already mated him, but we’ll deal with it.” She gives me a cold smile. “Don’t you worry, I’ll make sure Clay takes real good care of him.”

Rage explodes in my chest and I throw myself at the cage door again, snarling and snapping until I’ve exhausted myself. I drop to my stomach, sides heaving, and continue growling.

She stares at me for a beat, then smirks. “You don’t listen too well, do you? Don’t waste your energy. You won’t be getting out of there.” She laughs to herself. “Even if you could, that collar on your neck won’t let you get far. The ones we use on wolves have a little more… oomph than the regular ones.”

I’m not sure what she means by that, but I don’t like the sound of it.

She walks away, ambling to the edge of my sight line. “It’s a shame the female is a beta. The humans don’t have much use for those, but I’ll find a spot for her.”

Macy. She’s talking about Macy.

A part of me sags in relief. That’s one person I know is safe. Relatively speaking.

Wanda mutters something about a consolation prize, then a phone rings from somewhere, and she disappears through a door on the other end of the room. She returns maybe thirty minutes later with two male humans trailing her.

“That’s the one,” she says, pointing in my direction.

The two men move toward the cage. They lean down to grab hold of the sides, and I snarl.

Wanda laughs when they both take a stumble step backward. She pulls a small black remote from her pocket and pushes the button. A surge of electricity runs through my body, leaving me twitching and panting at the bottom of the cage.

“That should keep him down long enough for you to safely load him up,” she says.

The two men don’t waste any time. Hoisting the cage onto a dolly of some sort and wheeling it—and me—toward the garage door at the other end of the building.

A large truck with a soft-sided cover over the bed idles off to the side and, as the two men load me into the back, I catch a glimpse of Wanda talking to someone through the passenger window. After strapping the cage down to the bed, the two men hop off and disappear.

Nothing happens for a while. The vibrations from the engine rattle the cage, seeming to magnify the aftereffects of the shock from the collar. My muscles twitch with tiny spasms as I grit my teeth trying to regain control over my body. I’m just managing to push to my feet when another human walks into view around the back of the truck.

And holy shit. I recognize her. She’s the human woman who showed up on Doc’s porch.

She pulls herself into the back of the truck and makes her way toward my cage. The hair along my back rises and my lips pull back from my teeth, a growl rumbling from my chest as she grows closer. She only smiles, the expression a mirror of the one she gave me on Doc’s porch when she first realized I was a shifter.

“I told you that you didn’t understand what you were dealing with, puppy ,” she says. “And now look where you are.” She reaches for something at her waist and pulls out a small hypodermic needle. “Now, we can’t have you making a fuss back here the whole way, so it’s time for you to take a little nap.”

I shove myself toward the back of the cage, but the space is too small to escape her reach. Well, the reach of the needle anyway. She jabs the needle into my leg and depresses the plunger, sending what feels like a line of fire directly into my veins causing me to instinctively jerk away. She loses her grip on the syringe and curses as it goes skittering off somewhere.

But the damage is already done.

The drug works quickly, my eyelids drooping as my muscles begin to go slack and I collapse into a boneless lump at the bottom of the cage. The woman watches for a second, a snide twist to her lips, then bangs her hand on the cab of the truck.

“Finish loading up, we’re leaving in twenty.”