Page 1 of Pack Kasen, Part 3 (Caught #3)

AREN

B lood soaks into the grass beside the creek.

Kat’s blood.

The howl that erupts from my mouth isn’t close to human. It’s pure wolf.

A bottle of champagne shatters at my feet, alongside the flowers meant to show Kat I was sorry. I charge toward the dark liquid pooling on the grass as the music behind me cuts out.

A door slams open.

Footsteps pound toward me as I tear the clothes from my body.

My wolf bursts free, and I drag in a deep breath. Kat’s blood and pain almost overshadow her scent of honeysuckle and fresh fall leaves.

Kat is ours .

She’s hurt.

Someone took her.

Two scents mingle with hers as I sniff around the blood pool, the moonlight illuminating the spill.

One scent is familiar, but the juniper sage is not. And it goes… nowhere.

***

“Aren?”

I ignore Finan’s shout behind me as I sniff more deeply, tracking the unfamiliar smell.

My beta’s footsteps aren’t the only ones pounding down the deck stairs now. The rest of my pack and six enforcers are quickly approaching.

On my left, the bunkhouse door creaks open, and I tilt my head toward the familiar scent.

Jasper.

The auburn-haired, brown-eyed new prospect arrived from Indiana a few days ago, looking for a new pack to start over after leaving his.

He was here with Kat. Now her blood soaks the grass, and she’s gone.

A menacing snarl drips from my lips as I turn fully to face him.

He freezes just outside the bunkhouse double doors.

" Aren ..." A warning deepens Finan’s typically calm voice.

I charge.

Jasper is backing up as Finan plants himself directly in front of me.

I like my beta.

Fin isn’t just a friend and an adviser. He’s family. Not blood. There is no one I trust more. Going through him isn’t an option.

I dart around him.

He follows, one hand extended, palm out. “It wasn’t him, Aren. Whatever you think he’s done and needs to die for, it isn’t him.”

I snarl at him to move.

He meets my gaze steadily.

I dart right.

He mirrors me again, still blocking me.

Growling, I rise, shaking off my beast to embrace my human side.

“ Move !” I snarl in his face.

“It wasn’t him,” he says calmly.

Over his shoulder, Jasper is bleeding fear through his pores. He’s trembling slightly.

“You were with Kat. Now she’s…” I can’t bring myself to finish.

Wait .

No longer fueled by rage, my mind is now telling me something I wasn’t hearing before.

I whip around, focusing on Kat’s blood beside the creek, where she came after we argued at the party to celebrate Emilio and Joy’s pregnancy.

“The creek.” I walk back to it.

“He swam across it.” Emilio, one of my enforcers, trails me. He’s in his best clothes. I was too until I ripped mine off to shift.

It’s not far to cross. Deep, but easy enough to paddle through to reach a grassy clearing that leads to pine trees and mountains in the distance.

“There.” I point at the footprint on the other side of the creek. “Whoever took her carried her across. That’s why her scent didn’t lead anywhere I could track.” I start to cross the creek when Jasper speaks.

“We were talking,” he says hesitantly, head down, probably afraid I’ll remember he’s there and rip his head off for existing.

I twist to face him, itching to go after Kat, but he could have seen something important. I nearly killed the guy. The least I can do is listen to him for two seconds. “You left her here.”

He nods his dark head. “She said she wanted to think, and I didn’t want to go to the party.” He clears his throat. “Too many people.”

He’s a new arrival here. Twenty strangers drinking and dancing is a lot for most shifters to handle at the best of times. With pack, it’s different. Pack is family. He’s not pack yet.

Every second I waste here is another second someone takes Kat farther away from me.

Impatient, I prompt him. “ Then .”

“That’s it. I heard you howl, and I came out to find out why.” He lifts his head and looks at me. “But I didn’t hurt her. She was nice. I would never have hurt her.”

I turn to my enforcers. “Joy, Silas, Troy, and Wes, stay here. Watch the pack. Pair up and take turns checking the perimeter. There could be another trap waiting to snap shut. Fin, Emilio, and Cruz. Shift. You’re with me. We’re crossing the creek.”

We could go around it, but Kat might not have time. We need to go now .

“You look shaken,” Dania, one of my packmates, says as she walks over to Jasper. “I’ll make you some tea.”

“Thanks.” Jasper smiles gratefully at Dania, and they disappear inside the bunkhouse. I start to shift when I realize Finan hasn’t moved.

“ Finan !” I snap at him.

He yanks his gaze from the bunkhouse and starts stripping.

Like most wolves, water makes me curl my lip, but I’m faster as a wolf, so I shift.

On the other side of the creek, I spot a few drops of blood heading toward the mountains. Not much, but if Kat is bleeding, then she’s still breathing.

I leave my enforcers behind. They’ll catch up.

Head down and my nose full of the strange shifter’s scent, I follow it until it stops near tire tracks on a dusty road heading into the mountains. We’re in rural northern Montana, so there isn’t much around, and it’ll be miles before we reach the next town.

I run for hours.

The faint light in the distance signals the start of a new day when a large, brown wolf suddenly jumps in front of me. I skid to a stop so I don’t run into him.

My pace must have been slowing for Emilio to dart forward like that, and even though my lungs burn with exhaustion, I snap at him to back off.

Breathing heavily, Emilio shifts back to his human form. Sweat beads on his forehead as his chest heaves from exertion. “We have to stop, Aren.”

Shifting back is tough. Multiple shifts and hours on my feet have worn me out. But someone took Kat. I would go to the ends of the earth to save her. “Would you feel the same if someone took Joy?"

He looks distressed at the idea of someone taking his pregnant mate. “No, but we don’t even know if he took Kat this way.”

“He’s right,” Finan says, having shifted while I was talking to Emilio.

Cruz is nodding, sweat covering his chest as he peers back the way we came. “We’ve been running down this road for hours. They might not have stayed on it.”

I take in my surroundings for the first time since I put my head down and started running.

We’re close to the old Douglas foreclosed farm that’s been sitting empty for the past ten years. That’s not all there is around here.

I curse. “The old mines.”

Finan scratches his brown hair. “This entire area is littered with them. He might have pulled off the road and hidden in one."

Cruz speaks slowly, carefully sorting through his thoughts. “He waited until the party when everyone was inside. Then he watched, looking for the right moment. Whatever he did to hurt Kat was silent. None of us heard a thing.”

He couldn’t have stabbed her. She would have seen him before he got close. Maybe he leaped at her from the water?

I shake my head. No, she’d have seen him on the other side of the creek. Some guns have silent attachments, but it can’t be easy to get one of those.

“He carried her across the creek so we couldn’t track them off our territory or hear a car approaching the house,” Emilio adds.

“And he had a car waiting, which means he must have had a place to take her.” I try not to think about whoever took her stamping his foot on the gas and driving Kat straight out of Montana.

I will find her. But he could be anywhere.

“We shouldn’t have stopped,” I growl, my wolf snarling at me to keep going. “Maybe she got away from him. She could be bleeding out somewhere.”

Finan watches me closely. “He was killing every guy who got close to her back at her old college. He’s not going to let her die if he was trying to get her alone all this time. He’ll have stopped somewhere, if only to tend to her wounds.”

She lost a lot of blood. She will heal, but the bigger the hurt, the longer it takes for a shifter to heal.

“Which is why we need to keep going,” I snarl.

Finan squeezes my shoulder. “That’s why we need to return to the house, map out all the old mines where he could have hidden her, and come back with a car and ideally more people to cover this area.”

I start to complain.

He continues, “She’s your mate, and she is pack. We will get her back, but we need to re-group, Aren. We could have run past their hiding place hours ago.”

Finan has always been the voice of reason. The one who can reach past my rage to get me to think when I’m ready to tear something apart.

It’s why he’s my beta.

There are times I fucking hate that he’s so rational, but there are times I need him to be.

Times like now.

I stare down the lonely stretch of road.

It’s quiet here, like most of this part of northern Montana. There are acres and acres of land all around. Mountains in the distance. Old mines. So many hiding places.

“I know you want to find her, but we need to know where we're running to," Cruz says.

He’s right. They’re all right.

But going home without my mate…

“She’s hurt,” I say, curling my hands into fists, wanting to rip whoever took her into tiny pieces, bring them back to life, and kill them all over again.

“We’ll get her back,” Emilio says firmly. “This is a pit stop, Aren. That’s all this is.”

I consider the road one last time. “Let’s go home.”

Wherever you are, Kitty cat, I’m coming.