Page 32 of Never Submit (Bad Wolves #2)

Chapter 32

Ren

I ’m so mad I’m shaking.

He forces me out of his office, into the cold, still reeling from his intrusion, and then takes off? Like he’s got something to outrun?

Yeah, me. It’s me.

Torin left, stalking out like he’s some kind of one man show, when he’s the one who needs to get his head in the game. He has no idea what’s going on. He’s willingly pulling on the blinders and for what?

His pride?

His ego?

I don’t get it and I’m not sure I ever will, but his decision impacts all of us. I know that much.

My limbs tremble, the rest of me vibrating with barely suppressed fury, and if I give in to it then I’ll erupt. If I don’t, I’ll start to cry. I’m not sure which one is worse.

The last thing I want is for him to see me cry.

Something vibrates against wood, the sound oddly strange amid the roaring in my head .

The sound comes again, close enough for me not to be able to ignore it. What in the?—

I head toward the sound rather than away, spotting a small light glowing in the shadows of one of the cabins. Anything to get my mind off of Torin and his alpha games.

But the moment I realize what I’m looking at, rationality leaves the building.

Torin had tossed his cell phone. I thought I’d seen him throwing something but chalked it up to blurry vision—definitely not caused by tears.

Going on instinct, I bend to grab the cell, the screen miraculously intact and still lit with the last incoming call and the picture of the person on the other end. A pretty light-haired woman whose smile falls short of her eyes.

No doubt she’s the bitch fiancée. She looks familiar, too, with her haughty eyes. My fingers tighten around the cell. I want to tear her apart. I want to damage her and rip out those horrible, glacial eyes?—

It takes me way too long to piece it together.

I know that blonde. I know the curve of her face and the sounds of ecstasy she makes when she’s doing the kind of riding I just did.

She… Andras…

I slap a hand against my mouth to keep from making a peep. My spine snaps straight, horror piercing through the fog in my brain.

Catarina, the traitor…

She’s using Torin.

Hell, she’s using all of us. She’s been a mole on the inside this entire time. Am I the only one who knows? Yeah. Fuck .

A ball of ice forms in my chest where my heart should be. Unable to think straight, my eyes still burning, I bolt away with the phone still in my hand. Clenched between my fingers until it finally stops vibrating and the call ends.

Noble. I have to find Noble. He’s the only one who will know what to do.

Andras… and Catarina .

The picture clears in my head and my chest compresses further as my wolf goes crazy. Catarina is fucking Andras!

Noble’s voice is in my head. Baby, what’s wrong? You need me?

He’s at a distance. I’m not sure how I know but I feel him closing in, coming for me with every heartbeat.

Something just happened. Noble, I figured it out. Laughter bubbles up. I’ve figured everything out and…we’re in trouble.

My head spins and I stop, slamming a palm against the wall of the nearest cabin to steady myself. Fuck . This is too much. This is all too much and I’m spiraling out of control. My body throbs from Torin and his humiliation, head too full of him too, and he just took off to god knows where.

Except I know where. He’s going to her . He’s about to marry the one who tried to kill us all, and I have to stop him.

Andras is so much sneakier than we suspected. Is this what he’s been planning the whole time? What else is in play?

What other fresh hell is he planning to rain down on us?

By the time Noble reaches me, he’s breathless, and I’m shaking with a combination of trepidation and rage.

“What’s wrong?” His arms come around me, and he stops, going still. His nostrils flare, and his eyes darken as he takes in the change in my scent. His face twists. “His scent is all over you.”

“I promise we’ll talk about it soon, but right now, we’ve got a massive problem, Noble.” I clench the back of his shirt, dragging air into my lungs. “We need to call everyone together and stop this wedding. Immediately.”

Torin is about to marry a traitor .

I send the thought screeching down the mate bond for both of my men to hear.

Noble gathers himself, struggling to regain his composure, and his eyes narrow as he pulls back to look at me. Without a word, he nods.

I deflate, held in place by his hands alone. My knees wobble.

There’s no order to my thoughts. Nothing cohesive about them. Torin’s phone shakes with another vibration then goes still in my hand again. Noble maneuvers me back to the cabin, and we’re shortly joined by Mathis and Dax.

“A traitor?” Mathis says. “Ren, what’s going on?”

How could I have been so stupid? I’m the one with blinders, too, or else I’d have been able to put it together sooner. I hope.

Dax prowls near the door, uncomfortable and already on edge. A muscle near the corner of his eye twitches. “Red?”

I hand Torin’s cell to Noble and gesture toward it. “We have to stop the wedding,” I repeat. “Look at the picture. Look at Catarina. Have any of you seen her before?”

Mathis and Dax share a look before the former says, “He hasn’t exactly paraded her around for our approval, sweetheart.”

“But you have to know the pack she comes from,” I press.

My heart slows, sluggish, before skipping a beat when none of them answer.

Even Noble looks lost. “I’ve seen her during meetings, the discussions between the Briar pack and ours, but she wasn’t familiar. Blonde and pretty,” he supplies.

“This is her though, right?” I take back the phone and hold it up but the screen is locked and only shows the expansive line of missed calls. “Damn it!”

Noble gently pries the cell from my fingers. He types in Torin’s passcode and brings up the last missed call, clicking through until he finds the photo again.

“Her,” I press. “Have you seen her before?”

Dax spends an inordinately long time staring before he growls, his hair lifting.

I rush on. “Because I have. I’ve seen her before. It was only a glimpse, but not something I can forget. It’s seared into my memory. I was trying to escape, in the mountains, and I thought someone was screaming, a woman in trouble. Instead I saw her—” I point. “ With Andras . It’s her. I saw her as I was escaping the cave.”

They have to believe me.

“Catarina is a double agent. She’s working for Andras.”

Mathis goes painfully still. “You’re sure you saw her? You have to be sure, Ren, otherwise we’re inviting more trouble none of us can afford.”

Yet I catch the glimpse of victory in his eyes, as though he’s been handed the last missing piece to the puzzle.

Mathis understands, instinctively, immediately, what this means for us. And what might happen if we’re too late.

“I’m positive. I saw her and Andras together…intimately. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“They were fucking,” Dax clarifies unnecessarily.

I huff a half laugh. “I thought he was killing her. The sounds she made…” I trail off, shuddering and shaking my head. “Now she’s going to do something to Torin.”

Kill him. Or worse, crush him .

But the memories are there. Catarina—now that I know it was her—with her head thrown back and Andras ravaging her. How long has this thing between them been in play?

“Now it makes sense how his pack was able to break into Torin’s building so easily,” Mathis says.

“Catarina gave them the in they needed,” Dax adds with a nod.

“Whatever it takes to stop the wedding, we need to do it. Between the three of us…” I trail off, working my hands until my knuckles pop. “We should be able to do it, right?”

The three of them stare at me until I’m keenly aware of how small I am in comparison. How much bigger the world is than I thought it was when I was purely human, when I worried about surviving to middle age.

Now there are so many other things to worry about and it’s startling. Frightening.

“What?” I ask in the silence.

“He’s not going to listen to us, sweetheart,” Mathis explains. “Even if we somehow manage to get to him, Torin isn’t the type to take advice from anyone, especially people he doesn’t respect. Make no mistake. We have our truce, but he doesn’t consider us to be on equal footing.”

“Then we have to make him listen.” I dig deeper into my resolve, the sensation mingling with the all-encompassing terror that Torin is about to be taken from me. Irrevocably. “Noble, you have to be able to do something.”

A wedding is one thing. Priming himself for slaughter by the Blood Moon pack? Totally different.

Noble holds his arms out to the sides. “I’ll try, baby, I swear I’ll try. We didn’t exactly leave off on friendly terms, though.”

A chill slides over me. “If he goes through with this wedding, then we’re all at stake here. ”

I can’t let anything happen to Torin. He’s important to me. Even when he makes me crawl across the floor, even when he forces me to choke on his dick, he’s…

“Come on ,” I struggle to say. “What aren’t you getting ?”

The last word ends on a yell I’m not proud of and Mathis and Noble step forward in tandem reaching to hold me, soothe me, calm me down. They pause only a moment before their bodies shift to my right, my left, sandwiching me between their warmth and scent.

Dax prowls to check the doors and windows, his beard crazy and his hair standing on end around his head. He’s human again and trapped as surely as we all are but he’s the only one letting it show on the outside.

“We need to make sure we have all the information we need before approaching Torin,” Noble says, the voice of reason. “If we go in there without a plan, then he’s going to be even more stubborn. He’s a real asshole that way.”

“You know him better than the rest of us. Can’t you make him see?” I’m scrambling.

Dax grunts out something that can kind of be categorized as a laugh. His expression is strained, his eyes bloodshot. “If Catarina is involved with Andras, then she will be a loss for him. Kill her. Make a statement. It’s the easiest way to deal with this bullshit. Without Catarina, Andras will be off balance. Hell, kill them all and be done.” He jerks his head toward Noble. “This one can lead the Steel Claws.”

Noble stiffens at my side but it goes beyond a physical, visceral reaction. “I don’t want to lead.”

“Stop being a fucking pussy. You’d be fine.” Dax runs his hands through his hair, mussing the strands even more. Barely here with his attention fractured. Will he have another episode ?

“You’re aching for an attack, Dax.” It’s clear that Noble is hanging on to his composure by the tips of his fingernails. “If Andras has really manipulated the situation, then we need tact, not brutality.”

“We always need brutality,” Dax argues.

“Mathis, please.” Noble’s grip tightens on my hand.

I pull away and hold my arms out, bridging Dax and Noble and their stupid feud, which has no damn place in this room. Or anywhere. “This is about Torin and his people and the suffering Catarina will cause if they go through with this wedding.”

“Maybe the wedding itself is a trap,” Noble suggests.

“There’s no way the Steel Claws can go,” Mathis adds.

Tomorrow. Oh god, it’s tomorrow, isn’t it? He won’t be coming back tonight. I’m breathing heavily, my chest aching and the rest of me uncomfortable and heavy in the worst possible way. What will I do if we lose Torin?

Not only is he the next domino in the line to fall, taking the rest of us down with him, but he’s?—

I’m—

How do I start to explain what I feel for someone who has never done anything except push me away? Until tonight. Until the glorious moment he gave in to the hunger.

Maybe it’s some kind of masochistic thing where I like being dominated by him. Or maybe it’s more. Don’t we deserve to have the chance to figure it out?

But this goes beyond the craving for him. I don’t want him to be hurt. He’s already killing himself to make this wedding take place, because he’s trying to do the right thing for his pack. He doesn’t understand that he’s been manipulated.

It’s wrong, wrong, wrong ?—

“Breathe, baby, breathe.” Noble is there, and Mathis .

Dax isn't touching me, but I sense him, ready to explode.

“You have to breathe, Ren, otherwise you’re going to pass out,” Mathis growls. “Let us handle this.”

“We’re going to take care of you. That’s a fucking promise, baby, okay? I’ll go talk to Torin.” Noble smoothes the rough edges. “If there’s anyone who can get through to him, it’s me.”

“You don’t need to take care of me. Just help him. Please.” Oh, god, I don’t want to break down. It’s literally the last thing I want, and it won’t help at all. I want them to focus on Torin, not on me.

Get it together .

I suck air into my lungs, struggling to fill them completely, then release it in one gust. “Please. Help him. Keep him safe.”

“I’ll see what I can do about investigating these claims.” Mathis straightens. “One way or another, we’re going to figure this out.”

He’s worried. No matter how hard he tries to hide it from me, Mathis is thinking about the women who have already been stolen from his pack, and what it might mean for the Steel Claws. Whatever he feels for Torin is meaningless.

Mathis isn’t the type of man to let the powerless be hurt. It’s in his DNA.

He swoops down to press a quick kiss to my lips before he and Dax leave. It’s no easier to breathe with them gone.

I hollow out, cave in, collapsing forward, and Noble is there to catch me. “Are you going to be all right if I go?” he asks gently.

“You have to go. Make him see reason. I’m sure about this, Noble. I know what I saw,” I insist .

“Then I’ll stop him.” Noble is adamant, and before he leaves I catch his shirt, lifting onto the tips of my toes to kiss him.

“I can see myself falling in love with you so easily.”

It’s a whisper and a promise and I feel his heart beating in the same rhythm as mine.

He winks but his expression is strained. “Oh, baby, make no mistake. You’re already in love with me.”

He’s not wrong, and I watch him leave, hoping we haven’t let this go too long. Hoping it’s not too late to save Torin.