The Rule of the Rogues

What do you grab when you have only six minutes to leave your home? Adira was conflicted. Not about leaving, she’d never called this hellscape home anyway, but because she had no idea what to take; everything she owned and was allowed to keep in the dingy basement bedroom she’d inhabited over the past four years was easily replaceable. The labs, doctors and endless experiments weren’t something she would miss but that didn’t change the fact that uprooting her life and taking nothing with her felt odd. Memories didn’t seem sufficient. After all she had been through day after day, hoping and praying the ‘well-meaning’ doctors who worked at the lab would find a cure for lycanthropy so she could be free, was there really nothing to take from it but a collection of sickening nightmares?She owned nothing of significance and yet leaving with nothing felt wrong. There had to be something she salvaged from the neverending sea of suffering inflicted upon anyone and anything which stepped over

Now they were away from the warehouse and appeared to be in no imminent danger, Adira had the chance to fully take in the man she was now responsible for. He was a young man, couldn’t have been any older than twenty five, possibly even Adira’s age. She didn’t know what to think about that. The idea of finding something in common with and relating to a man she may end up having to kill unsettled Adira - it was much better to ignore the fact that he is a person too.“Are you okay?”“Fi-”Her voice game out rough and raspy, the attempted words clearly grating her dry throat in all the worst places. The water she had, though partially satisfying for her dehydration, failed to help with the scratching in her throat. She cleared her throat as best as she could and took another gulp of water before attempting to speak again.“I’m fine.”The man raised an eyebrow and studied her suspiciously. His gaze was uncomfortable, as if he could stare straight through her and into her soul. Adira wasn’t

There was definitely something strange about this woman. Of course that wasn’t Braxton’s main problem as he dragged her out of the water to lay on the rocky edge beside him. There was no getting out of this now; the guards had seen him and he doubted they would stop, especially while she was still free. Whatever the woman was running from was atrocious, he could tell that just by looking at her, but he knew better than to ask any direct questions about it. Even he wasn’t that insensitive.He kept an eye on Adira for a moment as he just sat on the rocks, wanting to make sure she was still breathing, at least. It would have been great to know that she couldn’t swim before he jumped off a ledge holding onto her but he tried to ignore the inconvenience given the circumstances.Once he had established that she was, in fact, breathing, he turned to face away from her. He slipped his shirt off, wringing it out to remove at least most of the water, even if he was just going to put it right ba

For a werewolf, Adira was horrible in nature.“I can handle adventure.”Braxton scoffed at the woman’s attempt at defending herself, amused by her insistence, but Adira simply rolled her eyes and pretended like his scepticism didn’t bother her. She wasn’t sure how successful she was being but she would assume not very if Braxton’s chuckling under his breath was any indication.“I’m just tired.”“And clumsy,” Braxton added with a cheeky smile.“I am not clumsy!”“You are too,” he teased, “I’ve seen you trip at least ten times and that’s only counting the past five minutes.”“Wow, more than once a minute? Some would call me an overachiever for that,” she countered in a dramatically amazed tone.Braxton simply raised an eyebrow at her and she huffed.“Fine, maybe I’m a little clumsy.”“A little?”“Don’t push it.”It wasn’t long before they reached the end of the path and returned to the depth of the woods. The trees provided plenty of opportunities to hide if they needed to and Adira cal

It was tense as the two of them sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. Tension seemed to follow the two of them a lot, lingering in the sidelines to rear its head given even the smallest of opportunities and it didn’t give Adira a great deal of confidence for the two of them working together with any great success.“Listen,” Braxton spoke after a couple of minutes, “I don’t know what kind of relationship your family had with Camden but he will only buy into those kinds of relationships if he has something to gain from them. Even getting into the pack…it’s not about relationships, Adira, it’s about transactions. It’s about what he needs or wants and how he can get it.”Adira looked confused as she tried to process this information, “He was around all the time when I was growing up. My parents wouldn’t do anything to put me and Brax in danger. Maybe they were different.”“Well, you can hope for that but it’s better to plan for the worst. You know, even when we get to Camden, there is n