“Luscinia!” A familiar roar woke me up from my medically induced sleep and I opened my heavy eyes just in time to see Andrey Volkov slump to the floor with three bullet holes in his chest and his blue eyes open and unseeing.
Pack Ricci stomped into the little operating room that was now brightly lit, giving me a full view of the space. In the distance I could hear the shriek of an alarm and the sounds of shouting.
The alpha woman’s table had been overturned at some point and I could hear her sobbing and moaning as she tried to free herself from her bonds while the four alphas surrounded the table with the unconscious beta.
Her skin was so pale that I was vaguely worried that she’d died from whatever Andrey had injected her with.
Elio was already fumbling with her bonds and pulling her from the surface. The man looked terrified as he gave Luscinia a shake. “Cini, wake up,” he said out loud even though he knew the woman couldn’t hear him.
“Come on, El, we’ve got to hurry. The FBI is going to swarm this place any minute,” Dante growled nudging the alpha towards the door.
“Wait—” I called, my voice barely more than a rasp. All four men jerked in my direction, their eyes wide as their nostrils flared.
I’d almost forgotten I was in heat.
“We can’t leave her here. Not after those two helped us find this place,” Ranieri said, taking a step towards me but Dante reached forward and snagged his wrist before he could come any closer.
“She’s in heat. You can’t get anywhere near her,” he hissed at his pack mate, dragging him towards the door.
“We’re sorry,” Elio apologized, still looking down at Luscinia. “But we’ve got to get her out of here.”
I understood even if it hurt. We’d never liked each other, but we had almost been married.
“At least help get her out of her bonds.” I nodded to the alpha who was starting to cry as she struggled to get herself free.
Ranieri glanced between the beta in his pack leader’s arms and the woman strapped to the table before growling under his breath and hurrying over to do as I asked. Once the straps were undone, he stumbled backwards as the woman flipped nimbly to her feet and gave him a feral hiss.
She glanced between Pack Ricci and me with wild, dark eyes before skirting around all of us and slipping out of the door at a dead run.
“They should be coming soon,” Elio promised and then they were gone too, leaving me with a dead body and the sound of sirens filling my ears as my eyes closed and I once again gave in to the medicine.
Thirty Two
“And you’re fucking sure it’s here?” I asked Romey who looked worse for wear than when we’d found him at the airport waiting for a flight out of the country with his little girlfriend.
The kid had two black eyes and a split lip thanks to yours truly, but the bruising on his arms and torso were all thanks to Vladimir-fucking-Volkov and his men.
In the four hours since we’d come home to find Perrie missing, I’d been running nonstop. It had taken almost thirty minutes to talk Edison down off of the ledge of bombing Volkov until all that was left was a black smudge and another two hours to put together what had actually happened.
Never before had I been so happy that I was a paranoid motherfucker because I’d put thirty-two new cameras up around and outside of the mansion after Pack Ricci managed to get in on Edison’s wedding day.
Thirty-two cameras that no one knew about but me.
The rest had been tampered with by the person who I now knew was our mole. Rory Flannagan hadn’t burnt to a crisp with his father. In fact, neither of them had burnt to a crisp because search and rescue had called us two hours ago to inform us that no human remains had been recovered from the wreckage.
The cameras didn’t have audio, but Rory’s face had been plain to see and so had that of Perrie’s little brother.
It had been easy to find the little weasel after that.
“This is where they took us when they let me have Kailey back,” Romey insisted, his expression twisting with pain as I gripped the back of his neck. “Volkov told me that nothing would happen to Perrie. That he just needed her to negotiate.”
Edison, who had been silent the entire car ride over, snorted. “Negotiate my ass. Do you even know what they did to their last hostages decades ago?”
“N-no?” Romey stuttered as he flinched back into me at the sheer rage in Edison’s face.
“They cracked her like a fucking egg. They are going to torture and experiment on your sister until everything that makes her her is gone and it will be all your fault.”
“I didn’t mean… they had Kailey,” Romey finally muttered pathetically. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Anything but sell your sister down the fucking river,” I spat. The kid didn’t even know that Volkov had his men waiting on the other side of that damn plane ride ready to make him and his little girlfriend disappear permanently.
It was a wonder he was related to Perrie or his father at all seeing as he had the intelligence of a damned ostrich.
And Ethan Chandler wanted this idiot to be the next president. Unbe-fucking-lievable.
The car pulled to a stop in front of the old, worn down house that served as a shell for Volkov’s prison. The place where he took all of his product and beat the human out of them until they were soft and compliant enough to do his business.
I’d only ever heard stories about it and most people were convinced it was a myth. But now as I stood staring up at it, a chill ran down my spine.
My girl—my omega—was in there being exposed to who knew what the fuck what and it was all our fault.
“Edison,” a familiar voice came out of the darkness and I turned to find Pack Ricci stepping out of the woods.
Our phone call to them earlier had been enlightening seeing as they were also missing someone important.
Luscinia Amante had been missing for days, though, and Alessandro Amante acted as if he had no clue where she’d gone and hid her disappearance from Pack Ricci for nearly as long.
