Chapter 32 Chapter 32
Chapter 32
DEREK
The fight lasted approximately forty-five seconds and not a second more.
I'd been in hundreds of battles over the years, battles since i was a raging teenage with alpha powers that i could barely keep under control and i had honed my fighting ability through decades of wars fought and these two were mid-rank wolves who hadn't expected their target to walk through the door.
The first one rushed me and I redirected his momentum into the wall, the concrete impact leaving a crater and him unconscious. The second shifted fully to wolf form, which was actually less effective in the confined space, and I ended the engagement with a joint lock that removed him from the equation without killing him.
I'd deal with them later. Right now, I needed Selene.
She was in the far corner of the room, on the floor, unconscious. Someone had draped a rough blanket over her, which told me that at least one of Blackwood's wolves had basic human instincts about keeping captives alive. Her dress was torn and stained with blood, her hair matted and wild, scattered and disarranged in a way that i had never seen before.
Even from across the room I could see the unnatural angle of her left arm and the way her breathing moved too carefully like it did when there were cracked ribs added to the equation.
I crossed to her in three strides and crouched beside her. Up close, the damage was worse.
There was a cut along her hairline that had bled heavily, already beginning to crust at the edges.
A bruise was forming along her jaw. Her left arm was definitely broken, and when I carefully assessed her ribs, the sharp hitch in her breathing even unconscious told me she had at least two cracked.
She needed a hospital. She needed it twenty minutes ago.
I slid my arms beneath her as gently as I could, lifting her from the floor. She made a small sound at the movement, her brow furrowing even through unconsciousness, and the sound did something to my chest that I didn't have language for.
Above me, I could hear the fight starting. Marcus had taken my twenty-minute timeline seriously, and the sounds coming from the upper floors suggested that Blackwood's pack had discovered they had a significantly larger problem than one Alpha coming through a basement door. Good. The distraction would give me time to get Selene out before anyone thought to check the basement.
I moved quickly through the corridor, heading ouut the same way i had gotten in.
The night air was cold as it hit us once we emerged onto the dock and Selene made that small sound again, her head turning slightly against my chest.
Two blocks away, parked in the shadow of an abandoned building, was the car I'd left on my way in.
I got Selene into the back seat as carefully as I could, positioning her so her broken arm was supported, her ribs as uncompressed as possible.
I pulled out my phone and called Dr. Ananya, our pack physician, before I was even back behind the wheel.
She answered on the first ring. "Alpha."
"I'm bringing Selene in. She was in a serious car accident. Possible cracked ribs, broken left arm, head laceration, blood loss. She's been unconscious for at least ninety minutes that I know of."
"I'll have everything ready. Bring her directly to the clinic."
I drove. I was still wearing blood from the fight—two wolves whose names I didn't know, who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, fighting on the other side of a war they apparently knew nothing about, except the jobs that their alpha sent there to. i was thinking of it, in an abstract way, filing it away as a problem that needed to be dealt with later.
Right now, the only thing that mattered was the shallow breathing in the back seat.
Dr. Ananya and two assistants were waiting at the clinic entrance when I pulled up, a private medical facility the pack maintained for exactly these situations. She took one look at Selene and started issuing quiet, precise instructions to her staff, and I stood back and let the people who knew what they were doing work.
They moved Selene inside, and I followed as far as the waiting area before Dr. Ananya stopped me with a look.
"Let me assess her. I'll update you as soon as I know anything." Her eyes moved over the blood on my clothes and hands with professional detachment. "You should clean up."
"I'm fine."
"You're covered in blood that isn't yours and you're using your Alpha voice on every word you speak. You're not fine, you're operating on adrenaline and wolf instinct, and I need you to step back so I can do my job." She held my gaze with the particular fearlessness of someone who'd been treating Alpha wounds for thirty years and had long since stopped being impressed by the growling. "Selene needs the doctor right now, not the Alpha. Let me work."
I stepped back.
The next hour was the longest of my life. I cleaned up in the clinic bathroom, changing into the spare clothes someone had thought to bring, and then I sat in the hallway outside Selene's room and waited.
Marcus arrived twenty minutes in, looking disheveled and satisfied in the way that meant the operation had gone well enough that he was willing to count it as a success. He updated me in a low voice, standing beside me in the hallway with his hands clasped. Blackwood's wolves had been subdued. Vincent Blackwood himself had been taken into custody by pack enforcers, and he would face the Council of Alphas for the attack on a protected human. Three of his wolves had escaped into the western district, but they were being tracked. The territorial demand had been neutralized.
Clean. Efficient. The way I preferred things to go.
"There's one more thing," Marcus said, and something in his tone made me focus more sharply on him. He reached into his jacket and produced an evidence bag. Inside it was a card, black with a single silver letter embossed on the front. "This was in her purse. Among the items we recovered from the crash site."