Chapter 54 — Bree

I open my eyes and nausea rises in my throat. With a low groan, I push it down. My head is pounding, my mouth tastes like blood, my hands and feet are bound, and I can still feel the effects of whatever Gage’s goon injected into me.

My wolf is still gone. Silent and unreachable.

We’re moving, the sound of the engine a low rumble. Opposite me, on a seat that lines the side of what looks like the inside of a delivery truck, Emily-Rose and Sheri sit with their hands and legs tied, shiny silver duct tape over their mouths.

I guess nobody bothered to gag me. They just knocked me out.

Emily-Rose nods her head toward the wide aperture to the driver’s part of the truck, and I follow her gaze. The long-haired goon in the jean jacket is driving. Beside him, Hugo is cleaning his nails with a knife. Through the windscreen, I see the dark night sky and the shadows of trees lining the road as we speed past.

Rainn.

I wonder where he is and if he knows by now that Gage and Hugo have taken me. With the way I’ve been acting about our mate bond, I wonder if he assumes I left on my own or changed my mind about fighting with him against Gage and Hugo.

The thought makes my heart ache.

I’m so sorry, Rainn.

I’m so sorry.

Closing my eyes, I search inside me again. Whatever was injected into my system, it has quieted my wolf in a way even my months of suppressing her couldn’t achieve. I can’t feel any of the familiar sense of knowing my identity as a wolf-shifter. It’s almost as if I’ve been transported into a different body.

A human body.

I let out an involuntary sound of protest, and Hugo turns around, a smirk on his scared face.

“Where are you taking us?” I manage. My voice sounds like a croak.

“Home, Bree. Where you belong.” Hugo grins and twirls the knife around his fingers, as if showing off the skill. “Your pack needs you.”

I try to move, pulling against my bonds. Even in human form, I should be able to split the ropes, but now they bruise my skin, and the bruising doesn’t heal. “What did you do to me?” I gasp.

Hugo laughs. “You have no idea what we can do, Bree. Haven’t you ever felt the anger of seeing humans evolve, conquer diseases, the sea, the skies, and even the stars, while wolf-shifters like us, with our strength, our power, are content to run the forest and live ordinary lives, the same lives the first shifters lived? Have you never wondered if the same thing that makes it so you can share your mind with a member of your pack can make it so you can send messages to anyone with the speed of thought?”

“What are you talking about?” I stare at his blazing eyes, genuinely puzzled.

“Defying the impossible.” He chuckles. “We are a scientific impossibility, and yet, here we are. Defying the laws of matter…of life. If a wolf can turn into a man and back again, what can’t he do, Bree? What shouldn’t he? Silencing your wolf with a few drops of a serum, done. Giving a human the strength of a wolf for a few hours.” He glances at the driver, then back at me. “Done. Creating super-wolf-shifters to enhance all the gifts our ancestors gave us. Done.”

He’s raving like a mad man. Silenced my wolf? For how long?

“Are you saying you’ve partnered with Gage against humans because you’re jealous of their scientific achievements?”

“No. I’ve partnered with Gage so that we no longer have to hide our inherent superiority. Human will bow to us. They will beg to live in our world, to taste the world we can open to them. They will beg to be ruled by us. We are learning the gifts in our genes, in our blood, and we’ve found so much. You wouldn’t believe.”

“You’re experimenting on wolves.” The realization is like a blow in my belly. I remember something Rainn said to the Cedar Ridge alpha. ‘You called it the place where wolves go to die.’ I stare at the back of Hugo's head. “You’re capturing shifters and experimenting on them.”

“I am creating the future,” he counters.

“You are mad.” I don’t believe what I’m hearing from him. “You’re a madman. Your hatred for women and humans has made you mad.”

Hugo chuckles as the truck speeds on. “I don’t hate women, Bree.” His voice sounds almost gentle. “I don’t hate women, but there are people who do, and what better way to rule over them than to share their hate? When you profess people’s hatreds, they give you the power to lead them, to use them for your own ends.”

My eyes go to Emily-Rose, then Sheri, both tied, with a bruise on Emily-Rose’s face where Gage struck her earlier. Sheri’s hand is swollen and discolored.

“Easy for you to say, when you have three unwilling women in your possession,” I retort.

Hugo shrugs, his eyes ahead, on the road.

“Suppressing the women in your pack made it easier to control the men who thought it was the right way of things for men to control women. Suppressing humans will make it easy for me to control the shifters, who believe humans are beneath them. Hate is a tool, Bree, and I’ve used it to gain what I love the most.”

“And what is that?”

He exhales, as if the very thought of his desire brings him pleasure.

“Power, Bree. Always power.” He smiles. “And tonight, when your mate comes rushing in to save you, he’ll unlock the dam and open the way for the world to become mine.

Rainn, I think desperately, my heart swelling with both love and pain. Of course, he’s going to come. And they’ll be waiting for him. Desperation floods me, and I tug at my bonds, feeling the futility of my efforts.

I grit my teeth. No matter what happens, I won’t let them use me to lure Rainn into a trap. I won’t let them hurt him. I’d rather die.