chapter 24

The way she smiled at him. The trust.The love.

He was going to get her back and there was no way he was going to allow himself to even think for a moment that he wasn’t going to see her again. The second he got her back, he was never letting her go.

“Stop!” Joe’s call came out hard and sharp.

Caleb stopped and turned to see Joe’s head lifted, and he took off to the left. He followed.

“What is it?” Caleb asked. “I can smell something.”

They came to a rundown house that was better suited in a horror movie than in real life. Paint on the wood panels was chipped off, some parts a dark gray, others black. The scent of decay was heavy in the air. Somewhere around there was stale water as well. Underlying, he smelled something else.

Joe took off.

Entering the house, the door crumbled as he burst through it. There was no way the house was stable. Entering the house behind Joe, he froze. Someone was dead in the house, but there were also people living.

He heard them.

At the back of the house, there was a fresh bolt on one of the doors in the kitchen. Joe grabbed the handle pulled. The door was no match for his strength, and it disintegrated.

“Okay, the crazy bear had to have been the one to do this, but how?” Brian asked. “There’s no way he could have done this.”

“Unless it was what he wanted,” Joe said.

Caleb handed him a torch from the counter. Going down the steps one at a time, Caleb sensed the despair.

“Help.” The voice was vacant and hoarse.

Caleb didn’t need the torch to help him see. He saw the entire fucked- up scene. There were at least five women in the basement, all of them bear shifters. Two of them were dead. Three more were chained to the walls.

It looked like the two dead women had torn off their arms and tried to get to the bucket of water in the center of the room.

“What the fuck?” Caleb murmured.

“He said if we wanted to live, we had to be strong,” a voice said from the corner. She sniffled. “I begged them to stop, but they used their teeth and tore through their own flesh.”

Caleb looked at Joe. The bear struggled, his eyes going feral. “We need to get them out of here.”

He nodded at his men and helped the women out of the house and into the sunshine.

The one who’d spoken to them cried out as she got in the sun. All the women were so pale. They hadn’t been in sunlight for a long time. They were also painfully thin, their bones showing through.

“You can take them to my place,” Caleb said. “I can’t stop to understand this right now. I need to find her.”

“Do you know where he went?” Joe asked. Two of the women had passed out.

Caleb looked at the one who’d been carried out by Reese, the one who’d spoken to them. Out of all of the women, she appeared to be the strongest of all of them.

The woman shook her head and groaned. “No. He … he wants a mate. We’re not good enough. He wanted a wolf mate as he believes it will make him strong. He kept talking about being reborn. How no one will know what he means.”

“Tell me you know what that fucking means,” Caleb said. “I do,” Joe said.

****

“You know, when we’re born, we’re surrounded by water,” the crazy bear said.

Bethany didn’t say anything. He’d tied her hands behind her back once she’d tried to escape. She had no doubt her face was bruised from his backhand. It certainly stung, and it was getting harder to see out of one eye. Looking at his face though, it made her feel even happier because he had nice little scratch marks as well.

If she was a wolf, his face would be gone. When had she gotten so bloodthirsty?

He shoved her forward. She tripped over a fallen branch and cried out at the shot of pain rushing through her body. Her shoulder ached, having taken the brunt of the fall.

She hadn’t expected the intensity of pain, and she gritted her teeth.

“Fucking useless human.”

She screamed as he lifted her to her feet like a ragdoll.

“I don’t know what he sees in you.” He punched her back, and she went stumbling again. Pain exploded in her chest.

He wasn’t trying to be gentle. “Do you know what I do to useless women?” he asked. He stepped on her back, not too hard, but the threat was there. He grabbed her hair and lifted her head up.

“Fuck you,” she said.

He laughed. “No, I don’t fuck them. Well, sometimes I do. There’s no better feeling in the world than a woman wriggling. Do you have any idea what it’s like for a woman to hate you being inside them? I know.” He licked her cheek. “It’s fucking heady. They can’t do anything about it, and they hate you for it.”

“Get off me.”

“Be careful. I need you alive. When I’m reborn, I’m going to take you, Bethany.

You’re going to wriggle. I wonder if you’re going to hate it more because you’re a mated woman or mated to a wolf. They’re possessive, you know.”

She gasped for breath. There was no way she was giving this monster the satisfaction of seeing her squirm or fear him.

Caleb was going to rescue her. She had no doubt. There was no way in hell this bear was going to win this.

He pulled her to her feet again. “I can’t wait for our games to begin. Anyway, you need to get to know me better. You see, I’m a man of fair choice.

The bears, the bitches, they were so fucking weak. So I found this abandoned house and locked them in.

They had no right to have anything real, anything pure. I starved them. I only gave them food for good behavior and the food I gave them was rotting.”

He burst out laughing. “Can you imagine going day after day with only rotten food after doing something you hate? That was so much fun.”