Page 20 of Pack Kasen, Part 1 (Caught #1)

19

AREN

F inan steps out of the cabin we built to house the generator.

I scowl at him, annoyed when I see he’s not holding a cell phone.

I hadn’t wanted to leave the feral, especially now, but a part of me had been relieved to hand that chain off to Marisa for a few minutes. I’d wanted to have an excuse to walk away so I wouldn’t have to keep smelling her scent or looking at her throat and remembering my dream.

I’m not even sure why I let her out like that.

No. I know exactly why I did it.

I’m frozen in this state of knowing I need to kill the feral, but I can’t bring myself to do it. As I wrapped the end of the chain around my wrist, I hoped for the feral to show the slightest sign of aggression and I’d act.

I’d have a reason to kill her.

But I shouldn’t need a reason. The four dead bodies in Gregson College are all the reason I should need.

“Is it Tagge again?” I ask.

Finan frowns at me as he closes the cabin door behind him. “Is what Tagge again?”

“The phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“Marisa said Tagge was calling.”

“No,” he says firmly, “Marisa said there was a problem with the generator and asked me to look at it. That she would get you to bring a part.”

I look at Finan, and I remember how jealous Marisa can be. I’ve been shrugging her off, dodging her, and outright avoiding her.

And after I practically tossed her out of my room midway through our date, she’d started to ask me something about the feral.

Marisa isn’t stupid and I’m not usually so gullible, but I have a feeling I just did something really fucking stupid.

A woman’s scream comes before I can spin around, and my wolf growls at me to move .

I tear the clothes from my body as I sprint toward the house, and I’m a wolf a second later.

Finan follows.

When the decking comes into view, I take in a sight that is like a punch to my gut.

The feral is hanging from the balcony, the end of the chain caught on the railings, and it is strangling her like a modern day hanging.

Marisa is standing a few steps back, her hand over her mouth as Silas and Cruz yank at the chain in an effort to release her.

I take it all in as I run. And as the chain comes loose from the railing, I spring up, shifting on the move.

I catch her as she falls.

The silver chain is unpleasant against my bare skin, and it would have stopped my shift, returning me to my human form if I’d still been a wolf.

When I have her on the grass under the decking, I stare down at her face, frozen as my heart thunders in my head.

Her face is ashen white, her lips are blue, and she isn’t moving.

What if she’s dead?

I’ve always known what comes next, what to do next.

Except now.

What if I was too late?

Finan reaches past me, loosens the chain from her throat, and she drags in a deep breath and starts coughing.

Now she’s breathing, I start breathing. I nudge Finan aside, rip the chain off her and snarl when I see the black and red bruises from it biting into her throat.

She’s impossibly lucky that the chain didn’t snap her neck when she fell.

“Kat?” I lift my fingers to touch her face. They hover inches from her skin when I can’t bring myself to touch her.

Not because I don’t want to.

I have the opposite problem.

After the dream, and after I carried her out of the cage and didn’t want to put her down, something tells me I might not want to stop touching her.

Her eyes are closed, and her skin is still pale as her coughing slows and her body relaxes.

I put my ear to her chest and listen to her faint breathing. There’s a slight hoarseness and a rattle, so the chain must have done some damage.

She needs Gregor. Now.

As I scoop her into my arms and head for the bunkhouse, Marisa is still on the decking, telling Silas it was an accident, that the chain slipped out of her hand and the feral fell.

“ Gregor !” I bellow when I’m feet from the bunkhouse entrance.

I hadn’t needed to run with the bunkhouse so close, but what if she stopped breathing on the way?

The door flies open before Finan, who had followed, was reaching for it.

Gregor, our pack healer, an older, husky man in his fifties with a gray beard and a surprisingly angry demeanor for one of the best healers in the country, glares at me. “Give her to me.”

My arms tighten around her and it takes brute force to relinquish my hold on her.

“What happened?” he demands, carrying her into the bunkhouse as Finan holds the door open.

The infirmary is just inside, the first door on the left in a long hallway that leads to the rest of the living quarters.

“She fell from the deck. She was dangling from her neck.”

Gregor shows no sign he heard me as he lays Kat down on the bed and examines her neck. Like most of the pack, he dresses casually in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He listens to her breathing, studies the marks on her neck, and pulls a blanket over her.

And all the while, I hover.

I’ve done what I’m here to do.

“I can watch her. You can get back to your task,” Gregor says as he riffles through a drawer without looking at me.

I take a seat on the hard wooden chair just beside the door. Gregor says he does his best work when people aren’t standing at his elbow, watching him. The uncomfortable seat encourages people to leave who might want to linger. “I’ll stay.”

He arches his eyebrow.

“In case the feral attacks,” I say.

He snorts. “The feral won’t be doing any attacking. You can leave.”

From the emphasis he places on a certain word, I can guess what he thinks. “You’ve been speaking to Finan.”

“I’ve been using my eyes and my ears,” he says, taking a small bottle from the drawer and walking over to Kat’s side. “Which is a damn sight more than you’ve been doing.”

I snarl at him.

He doesn’t react. “If you’re going to be snarling and growling, you can do it somewhere that won’t disturb my patient. You know the rules, Aren.”

This is Gregor’s domain.

He is an omega. He functions, as it were, outside of pack hierarchy, which means my snarls and growls have little to no effect on him. There’s no out dominating an omega. They do whatever the hell they want.

I sigh. “How bad is her throat?”

“Bad enough,” he says. “She crushed some bones.”

I get up from what has to be the most uncomfortable seat I’ve ever sat in my life, rubbing my lower back. “But she’ll heal?”

“She will. What happened?”

I give him the condensed version of taking the feral from the cage and leaving her with Marisa near the decking with a promise to return quickly. He raises his eyebrow when I reach the point in the story where Marisa was telling Silas that the chain slipped out of her hand, but he shakes his head when I ask him what he’s thinking.

I’m almost positive he catches me looking at Kat’s neck. Not on the bruised part. The part of her throat I want to bite.

He studies me, and his stare is nothing less than disapproving.

“The chain was to keep the rest of the pack safe,” I tell him before we can get into an argument.

His eyebrows pull together as he frowns at me. “I understand why you think you need it with a feral, but this girl does not need to be chained. Since you’ve decided you don’t want to listen to me, you can go. I’ll watch over her as she rests and heals.”

“She needs to go back in the cage, Gregor.”

“Does she?”

He gives me a long, probing look that almost tempts me to break eye contact.

I’ve seen that look when I was not quite a pup out of the schoolroom, but close. He isn’t just a healer, he’s the pack teacher who has taught almost all of us.

Here, in Burning Wood, life is relatively easy. We have little to fear, few enemies, and trouble easily handled by my enforcers and me. We know what the rules are and we stick to them. But in the cities, it’s different.

Humans do not always follow rules, so it’s important the young read the same history books the regular humans do, and know, not only what they are capable of, but of how dangerous they can be.

It’s why shifters stay in packs. To be a lone wolf in a city is to be a potential prey to so many different kinds of predators.

Which reminds me, I have to tell Finan to stop sharing so many of our secrets with Kat.

And then it hits me.

I called her by her name and this is not the first time I’ve done it. I did it when I thought she would die.

“I take it from your unblinking stare that you’ve had an important revelation.” Gregor's amused tone pulls me from my thoughts. “Or perhaps you are finally beginning to listen to me.”

I scowl at him and point my chin at the feral. “How long will it take her to heal?”

He shrugs. “Perhaps an hour. She will heal slowly because of the chain and the cage.”

More disapproval hardens his tone.

I ignore it.

The last time a feral got free here, people died. I’m Alpha here. This is my pack, and I’m responsible for protecting them. I can’t afford to take a chance and make the wrong call.

I back up, pulling the door open. Finan is standing just outside, in the hallway. He straightens when I stick my head out. “Finan. Get the chain.”

Gregor sighs loudly as Finan walks away.

I don’t have long to wait before Finan returns with both pieces of the chain.

As he hands it to me, his palms are slightly reddened, a result of the silver in it that is just bearable to hold but is uncomfortable to hold for long.

I take the smaller piece and loop it around the ferals wrist and the bed frame. I do it tight. She won’t be able to shift while it’s touching her skin. When I’m finished, I look at Gregor, who is doing nothing to hide his disapproval. This is his domain, but this is no ordinary patient of his, and I’m not taking any chances.

“I’m leaving a couple of enforcers outside the bunkhouse. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“She isn’t a threat, Aren,” he says.

I walk away. “That’s not a risk I want to take.”

I take the longer piece of the chain that Finan brought with me.

Outside the bunkhouse, I howl. Less than a minute later, Cruz and Wes jog toward us from the house.

I point directly outside the bunkhouse door. “Stay guard. The feral is unconscious and chained to the bed, but if she wakes, she will try to escape out of this door or the window. Watch both.”

They nod and I walk toward the house, Finan falling in beside me.

“Where is Marisa?” I ask him.

“Inside with Silas.”

“Good.”

I intend to discover what the hell happened on the decking, and something tells me I won’t like what I find out.