Page 136 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
Standing over Vale’s dead body, I throw my head back and howl.
The sound rips out of me raw, a call no alpha can ignore. Across the dirt, Darius’s gray head comes up sharply from where he is finishing off a fighter at the south wall. We lock eyes, and he begins running in my direction.
The shift takes me as I stride toward him. The change rolls through me hard, paws turning to bare feet on bloodied earth. The cord at my ankle tears as I pull my trousers on. Darius has just shifted back.
“Lydia.” My voice is wrecked. “It’s Lydia.”
He looks at me in confusion as he follows my lead and starts to dress.
“She’s the traitor. She’s inside with Sienna and Violet!”
Darius’s eyes go past me toward the central building, and when he looks back at me, they have filled with a terrifying rage.
We break into a run.
Wolf form would be faster across open ground, but the corridors will choke us. A wolf trapped in a hallway cannot turnor strike. I have been in plenty of skin-to-skin assaults before. So has Darius. Our boots hit the dirt in unison.
The bond pulls tight in my chest. I can still feel Sienna. Her anger comes through, hot and bright, the familiar spike of her temper when someone has wronged her.
But it’s all layered over fear.
Something’s wrong.
The front of the holding building yawns open ahead of us. A few of my men see us heading inside; they shift back and follow us, no questions asked. Darius’s shoulder bumps mine in the doorway, but we don’t break pace. The corridor is gray concrete, streaked with blood at shoulder height.
“Down,” I tell him. “Holding cells will be sub-level.”
“I smell Violet.”
He doesn’t say where. He doesn’t need to. He follows his bond, and I follow mine. Our two compasses are pointing at the same heading.
Stairwell.
We take it three steps at a time. My ribs are screaming from Vale. I shove the pain back behind this urgency. Darius has a cut above his eye that has bled into his stubble. Neither of us comments on the other.
The sub-level corridor opens at the bottom of the stairs.
Bodies.
Ten of my men in a tangle along the walls, fatigues torn, throats opened. Kessler closest to me, eyes still open, his hand reaching for nothing. The smell hits me a half second after the image. Copper. Bile. Underneath both, the sour wrongness of the operatives who killed them.
I do not let myself think about it.
“Go,” Darius rasps.
The bond is stronger now. Sienna is ahead and to the left, dimmer than she should be. Iron. They have her in iron. My wolfsnarls inside my ribs, and I tell him not yet. We have to get to her with our human hands free, or we may not get to her at all.
At the next junction, Darius stops. His head lifts. His nostrils flare. “Right.”
We turn, and then, I hear it, too. A faint scuffle, far ahead. A shout, cut off.
Violet.
Darius is flying now. The corridor narrows, bends, ends at a steel door with a keypad. Violet’s scent is layered on the metal, fresh, mixed with the static-burn of her magic. Darius hits the door with his shoulder. It does not give. He hits it again. The third strike puts a crack in the frame. The fourth tears the bolt out of the wall.
The door slams open.
The chamber on the other side is wider than it should be, ceiling pulled high, the floor a wide circle of poured concrete that does not belong to a corridor system. Walls bare. Lights overhead. An arena, built into the heart of a holding facility for a purpose I do not want to know about.
