Page 65 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
Leave, Sienna. Go back. Go back now.
I turn around slowly.
A body comes flying out of the dark to my left. Too broad. Too fast. I hurl myself off the path and into the ferns, and it misses me by a hair’s breadth. I hear teeth snap shut on air.
I scramble to my feet. I hold my breath and listen, but there is nothing to hear.
I run.
I am not a fighter. I am not trained for this. I know how to spar, but I’m a strategic advisor, not a warrior, and right now, I am fleeing down a forest path in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs and my wolf screaming at me.
Shift! Shift! Shift!
Another wolf separates from the trees ahead. I veer off the path again, crashing through bracken, branches whipping at myface. My backpack snags on something; I tear free and keep going.
Where are the patrols?!
Another wolf. On my right.
I count five. Three are moving through the trees—not running at me directly but fanning wide. My stomach drops because I understand what that means. They are not chasing me. They are herding me.
I stop. I press my back to the nearest trunk and breathe. Four seconds in. Four seconds out. My wolf is not snarling. She is whimpering. A low, desperate sound that I have never heard from her. It terrifies me more than anything moving in the dark.
One of the wolves steps into a slant of moonlight.
His eyes are…wrong. Flat. Lightless. The same stare I saw during the convoy when those rogues attacked us: like the life has been emptied out of them. My legs go liquid underneath me.
He lunges.
I shift.
It is not graceful. The backpack rips and falls to the ground. My knees hit the moss, and I am done before I even finish falling, my wolf wrenching control from somewhere deep and furious. I come up on four paws, shaking.
He is already on me.
His teeth rake my shoulder before I can turn. I yelp. But the sound that comes out of me next is different. It is something older and uglier. I twist and get my jaws around his foreleg. I bite down until I hear a crack, and he jerks back, screaming.
Good.
The second wolf hits me from behind, and I go down under his weight. My legs scrabble at the moss. I have no training for this, no technique, nothing but the rage that has been sitting in my chest for weeks with nowhere to go.
I let it out. All of it. I buck and thrash and get my teeth into the nearest piece of him I can reach. I do not let go until he does.
I get up. My shoulder is agonizing. My ribs don’t feel right. I do not care.
I spin toward the next wolf before he can reach me. I rake my claws across his muzzle, and he pulls back, reassessing. I feel a mean, furious satisfaction at that. At making a creature that came here to kill me think twice about it.
But all of a sudden, there are six of them.
I’m running on anger instead of skill, and anger has a bottom to it. I feel myself reaching it.
My wolf is not whimpering now. She has become vicious and fierce and very focused, stripped of everything except the will to stay on her feet for one more second. And one more after that.
I brace myself for the next attack, and as I’m thrown to the ground, I see a figure watching me. For a moment, I can’t make out any features, and then, he moves. It’s a man, and I know him. I’ve seen him before.
Shock overtakes me. What is he doing here?
I don’t have time to think about it because one of the wolves gets his teeth into my flank and drags downward. The pain is blinding, and I fall to the forest floor.
