Rhyannon Byrd - Dark Wolf Returning

No matter how crazy desperate for him those little suckers turned out to be.

And I doubt going without will kill me, she thought dryly, running her brush through her hair. If that were the case, I’d have dried up and died a long time ago.

A glance in the mirror over the dresser showed that she was still sporting a few yellowish bruises, had dark circles under her eyes, and the tight pinch of fatigue in her facial muscles. She might be only twenty-eight, but she felt eighty. Damn near looked like it, too. But what the hell? It’s not like she wanted him to be attracted to her. Zipping up her pack, she tossed it on her bed and joined him outside.

As they walked to the crowded diner next door, where they were meeting the others, he asked, “You ever hear from your mom?”

Nicole had finally given up on the pack a year before Eli’s banishment and left Shadow Peak, claiming she needed to find a place where she could make a new life for herself. “No,” Carla replied in a flat tone, wondering if her mother had ever managed to succeed with her dream. If so, she was obviously too content there to worry about contacting the daughter she’d left behind.

He didn’t say anything more, and the guys kept the conversation light when they joined them for a quick breakfast. Afterward, they all headed back to the room she and Eli had shared to discuss the situation in private. Once everyone was settled, Eli explained to her what the men already knew: that his father had had a maniacal plan to take over the Silvercrest. A bloodthirsty plan that had resulted in a significant loss of life, had shattered the pack’s sense of safety, and left an entire group of teens—as well as most of the residents in Shadow Peak—emotionally traumatized. As a result, the town had been left without its leaders, and the Bloodrunners were now handling all elements of security for the pack.

Since it was up to Carla to bring them up to speed on the rest, she explained everything that had happened with the Whiteclaw pack over the past weeks, starting with how Eli’s brother, Eric Drake, had met Chelsea, the human he’d recently married, while she was searching for her younger sister, Perry. Making a bad choice, Perry had gone chasing after the wrong guy and ended up falling in with the Whiteclaw pack who lived to the south of the Silvercrest, and who were now controlled by a man named Roy Claymore. With the Runners’ help, Eric had been able to prove that the Whiteclaw had partnered up with the Donovans, a corrupt local Lycan family, on a number of illegal activities, the most horrific being one that involved human girls. With the Donovans’ support, the Whiteclaw had been drugging the girls and pimping them out for Lycan gang rapes. The drugs not only acted as an aphrodisiac on the girls, but also impaired their memories of the attacks. And Claymore was using tapes of the assaults to later blackmail the participants into aiding the Whiteclaw.

She then told them that the Runners had managed to close down a strip club in Wesley, a human town not far from the Silvercrest’s territory. The Whiteclaw had been using the club to find the girls, and closing it down had only increased Roy Claymore’s power hungry desire to destroy the Silvercrest and take their land. Something Claymore felt would be easy to accomplish, given the state the pack had been left in after Stefan Drake’s failed bid for power.

Later, after an attack that some of the Whiteclaw and Donovan wolves had made on the Runners in the Alley, they learned that the Whiteclaw had also developed a “super soldier” drug that not only made them violently strong, but also camouflaged their scent. Which meant they were damn difficult to defeat.

The atmosphere in the room had been grim during her telling, but the group’s tension only increased when she explained about the plans she’d overheard before making her escape after her and Elise’s kidnapping.

“The Whiteclaw were hoping to blackmail the other packs in our region into helping them by providing foot soldiers. But they haven’t secured the kind of numbers they were hoping for, so they came up with a new plan. They’ve used a sizable portion of the money they’ve made from the gang rapes to purchase help from someone in your line of work. A man named Jack Bartley.”

“Son of a freaking bitch,” Kyle muttered.

“You know him?” she asked.

“We’ve gone up against him before,” the merc explained. “He’s human, but he’s a maniac. Has a small army under his command, and they’ll do anything for the right price.”

“He’s human?” she murmured with surprise.

Kyle grimaced. “Well, most of him is. It’s rumored he has shifter blood somewhere in his family tree, which is how he knows of our existence.”

“You were right to be worried,” Sam murmured. “Bartley and his men will spell bad news for your pack.”

She wanted to argue that they weren’t her pack, they were Eli’s, but bit her tongue instead. She didn’t need to make herself sound any bitterer about the pack’s longstanding treatment of the Runners than she probably already had.

“When you went up against him, did you win?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Eli muttered from his position against the wall, his muscular arms crossed over his chest. His dark brows were knitted with tension. “But it was at a cost. We lost one of our best men. A guy who would often come and work with us when he needed to earn extra money for his wife and kids. Bartley got his hands on him during the op, and by the time we found him, all that was left was a bloody pile of tissue and bone. They’d skinned him alive.”

“Jesus.”

Holding her worried gaze, he said, “He can be stopped, Rey. We just need to outthink him.”

“Can you do that?”

He jerked his chin toward his men. “These guys can.”

“So these different drugs—the ones they were giving the human girls and the ones that they use on themselves to improve their abilities—are still in production?” Kyle asked from his seat on the foot of the bed. Lev had positioned himself up by the pillows, his back braced against the cheap headboard, while Sam had his shoulders propped against the door and James sat in the desk chair. Carla sat on the foot of the other bed by herself.

Answering Kyle’s question, she said, “As far as we know, production has been halted. We have a Fed named Monroe dealing with the drug labs out west, where it was all being made. Monroe’s sister is married to one of the Silvercrest males, and the Fed is someone we consider a friend. But there’s still the problem of the drugs they have stocked in Hawkley.”

“Why did they target my sister?” The quietly spoken question had come from Eli, and she took a deep breath before turning her head to look at him again.

“They wanted to make a dig at the Runners, and saw Elise as an easy mark. We never should have let her stay up in town by herself, because it drew their attention.”

He made a low sound of agreement, but she could tell he knew there was more to the story. Things she wasn’t telling him. But he didn’t push, and she wondered if he was dreading the explanation as much as she was dreading having to be the one who gave it.

“It’s getting late,” he suddenly muttered, pushing away from the wall. “We can talk things over some more when we stop for lunch, but right now we need to get on the road.”

Fifteen minutes later, they had their gear stowed in the backseat of the truck James and Lev were driving, the rest of the group loaded into the other one, and were heading back down the highway.

With Sam and Kyle in the front seat of the truck she and Eli were in, Carla didn’t speak to him during the journey, though she’d carried on some light conversation with the two mercs. For such ruthless badasses, they were nice guys who even managed to make her laugh a few times, while Eli glared out his window, lost in his own thoughts. The hours went by faster than she’d thought they would, and before she knew it they’d reached a little town the men had stayed in before, where they planned to stop for the night.