Page 2 of Caught By the Wolf

“Boys,” he said. He didn’t even raise his voice, and that was the part that would stay with her longest—that a man could say one low word and five armed strangers would move like he’d fired a gun.

Ella ran.

She was not built for running. She was a curvy girl, so God knew she was not built for running. She was built round and generous. A lot of woman. The kind men glanced at once and then politely looked elsewhere. Curvy girls did not sprint through the forest. Curvy girls walked briskly and with dignity, and there was no dignity anywhere in this—not in the wheezing, not in the bouncing of her breasts as her sports bra failed to live up to the promised high impact support, not in the way her stomach and wide hips slowed her down while thinner women would have already been gone.

She ran anyway.

Branches grabbed her shirt. One caught her cheek and stung deep enough that she knew it drew blood. Behind her, she heard them moving, unhurried, methodical.

“Oh, God,” she whimpered. What should she do?

Her lungs were on fire, and her legs were only minutes from giving out. But Ella kept going, down a slope half on her feet and half on her backside, using words her mother didn’t know she knew.

Somewhere behind her a man called to another. Calm. Unhurried. Like they had all day.

That scared her more than anything. Panicked men crashed around and made mistakes. These men were working.

Worse than that, they were hunting.

Hunting her.

The trees quit in front of her, and she nearly ran straight off the edge into a small ravine. She skidded, arms out, her sneakers sliding in loose rock. Twenty feet down, stone all the way, a creek at the bottom. She turned and ran to her right—straight into a dead end.

She’d run herself into a stone pocket with cliffs on two sides, because of course she had. Thirty-one years of walking into situations she shouldn’t have, and she’d saved the best one for last.

Last as in if the men found her…

She desperately looked for somewhere to hide, some way out. There wasn’t one. She picked up a rock and turned around to face the men.

They came out of the trees. Spread wide. Rifles low. Taking their time, because they had it.

The man named Pruitt walked in front, and he wasn’t even winded.

“Ma’am.” Polite. That was the worst part, the politeness. “That was a good run.”

“I didn’t see anything.” Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. Nursing gave you that, at least. Years of look at me, stay with me, you’re okay built you a voice that held even when your legs didn’t. “I got turned around on a hike. I don’t know what any of that was and I don’t care.”

“And nobody knows where you are, do they, girl.” Pruitt let out a chuckle.

And the thing was—he was right. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody was waiting on her. If Ella Scott disappeared into these mountains, the first person to ask a single question would be the nurse who didn’t like her anyway and would report her for being late. And when she didn’t show up, her supervisor would mark it as an unexcused absence and find someone to cover. Another shift would pass and then another before anyone became concerned. No one would come looking until it was far too late.

Because quiet, curvy women who kept to themselves rarely got the dramatic search party. They just… faded. And the world kept spinning.

The men had herded her into this granite corner on purpose. She understood it all at once. The slow, patient momentum of them following her. They’d known she’d have nowhere to run, and exactly where she’d end up. She’d never been escaping. She’d been livestock, herded into a chute.

Pruitt took a step toward her. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

The forest answered him before she could.

A wolf came out of the trees to her left. A black wolf, huge, and silent. Nothing that big should have been silent, but he’d made no sound at all, and now he stood between her and the guns.

Ella had seen wolf shifters. She’d patched one up after he’d lost a fight with a pickup truck. He’d been a big man in human form, and a little bigger than an ordinary wolf when shifted.

This wolf was nothing like that. This wolf was the size other wolves told scary stories about. Black from ears to tail, heavy through the chest, and standing dead still.

Waiting. Watching.

He didn’t look at her. He looked at the men. A sound came up out of him, low and steady, more felt than heard, and Ella watched grown men with rifles forget how to move.