Page 96 of Resisted
My pack.
Mine.
Once the thought hit me, I knew it was true. They may not have always been mine, but they had never treated me differently. I’d never felt less than in their presence or treated like an outcast. I was raised in their pack, as their pack, and whether I had family elsewhere would never change the fact that I was one of them. I was pack.
As if finally admitting that to myself set something free inside of me, suddenly, my chest swelled and I felt something snap before my wolf rubbed gingerly against my skin. The feeling was liberating. I felt free, capable, able to do whatever I damn well pleased, and I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that this feeling, it would be big. Important. Vital to my life with these men.
The man standing before Roth took his throat in his grasp, and I knew Roth could take him, but he wasn’t fucking moving. He let him. He let the man’s grimy, unwashed skin touch his near pristine flesh, and he didn’t even flinch.
“Have them drop their weapons.” The man’s teeth gritted as he pushed the words out.
Drop their weapons? Roth motioned to his men to drop them, and they followed his command with all the faith in the world that he knew what he was doing. It killed me, metaphorically gutted me to see any bit of hope slip away. I tried not to panic, because logically, weapons were a human tool, and I knew my men were capable of destruction without a tool made by man to eliminate their own. But with the weapons, they had an additional level of power, more strength than the men standing in front of them could ever dream of. If the balance of power was going to tip toward anyone in this room, I wanted it to tip toward the men I’d come with.
“Why isn’t he doing anything?” I hissed, my fingernails digging so deeply into Rig’s arm, I knew his forearm would bleed. I didn’t care. It was painful to watch.
“It’s more complicated than that, cub.” His eyes were glued to the men in front of him, not even sparing me a glance as he spoke. “He has a plan.”
I kept hearing about a plan, but there was no way anyone could plan for this. No fucking way. I refused to buy it. I—
My eyes caught on Roth as his hand skillfully slipped into the man’s pocket, retrieving the device while the man attempted to cut off his air supply. The movement was quick, and if I hadn’t been watching at this exact angle, I would have missed it entirely. But I saw him grasp it in his hand before tossing it to Boyce, all while hardly flicking his wrist, and for the first time in so many seconds, I’d lost count, I felt hope bubble up inside of me.
With a single snap of his fingers, the pack had weapons in hand again and Roth’s fingers were digging into the wrist at his throat until the human was writhing in pain. He pulled at his wrist as Roth released it, causing the man to stumble back from Roth’s looming height. Without taking his eyes off him, Roth tossed a set of keys he’d stolen from the human’s other pocket toward Vincent before stepping forward.
The man fumbled for his gun, aligning it and pointing it directly at Roth, and though the angle could be deadly, Roth seemed unafraid to meet death. “Your attempt to take what is mine and hide away on this island was admirable. Vaguely so, but still admirable just the same. However, your execution was weak. Why would you not prepare?”
The man in front of Roth, the one nearly cowering as he realized he didn’t have such a strong upper hand, licked his lips, his hand with the gun growing unsteady. “Prepare for what? I’ve got you all where I want you!”
“Is that so?” Roth knelt down, even as all the humans’ guns pointed at him, and leaned down close to the man’s ear. “Then where is your detonator?”
Chapter 42
SILAS
Russ’eyes widened as the realization that us wolves once again had the upper hand dawned on him. Well, at least my pack did. Me? I was as weak as a newborn kitten, and I suspected that if I managed to escape these chains, I wouldn’t be able to walk very far, if at all. My body was worn out, my strength shot. That last zap of electricity had been so fucking painful on my already beaten body that for a moment, I’d thought it was the end. Maybe I was close. If the shock had gone on any longer, I knew I would have been. But when the electricity had drained from my body and blackness crept in to the corner of my vision, I refused to let it fully take me.
She was close. I could smell her, though my limited range of motion made it nearly impossible to see where she was at. I knew she was near, and the feeling of her presence calmed me.
I watched as Roth’s height loomed over Russ, and I didn’t feel an ounce of sadness, absolutely no fucking remorse for what I knew would come. Maybe if it were a few days ago, I would have made the human’s death quick and painless. But now, when every cell I had ached with a ferocity I’d never felt…well, I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to bleed. I wanted him to feel what it was like to have every part of your body ache in such a way that you knew for a fact that you might never be whole again. Then I wanted to watch as his spirit left his body before I held the ash of his burned heart in my hands.
Beside me, Boyce’s chains dropped as Vince successfully opened the lock. They loosened and fell into a heap around his feet before he stepped out of the metal circle and turned toward me, a look of concern I’d never seen burning bright in his eyes. Vince’s chains fell next before he was on his knees in front of me, working at the lock.
“What did you get your stubborn ass into?” His words were playful, but I could hear the tension behind them. He was worried. Despite his usually confident mood, he was shaken.
“You didn’t get the party invite?” I said, trying to joke, but my voice was so raw, I feared he may not have heard it.
“Party invite? No. And here I thought you were just trying to get out of telling Bella our sec—”
At the shot that rang through the room, echoing off the walls, Vince’s torso jerked before he fell forward, his body landing limply in my lap. With the little strength I had, I struggled to finish releasing the chains, trying to free myself from the restraints, because I had know how bad it was, if it was more superficial than deadly. As he lay in my lap, unmoving, the fear began to creep in. Blood blossomed through a hole in his back, his once dark green shirt turning black as the material soaked it up.
Boyce was on him in seconds, forgetting about my restraints as he pulled him off me, checking over his body. Vince’s eyes fluttered open as Boyce stated, “It’s going to fucking hurt, but I don’t see that it’s fatal. He’s lost a lot of blood from his other wound though, so he won’t heal from this one fast.”
Before us, chaos erupted as wolf and man collided. It was no longer about who would survive this ordeal. The pack was determined that anyone who couldn’t shift would die, and they made no secret of it. They sprang on the men with death on their minds, their teeth bared as their animals came forth, ready to chew on the bones of the humans who’d harmed them. The humans they’d spent their whole lives fearing. They made no secret over who the enemy was here, and though one might think it was the beast, it was only the man. Always the man.
Their weapons were no match for the power and strength of the animals, their vision and speed not nearly as precise. In comparison, the fact that the humans had thought they’d had a chance this whole time was laughable, because once Roth deployed the strength of his pack, once he pushed his will onto his people, they were unmatchable.
Among the chaos, Vince began to stir, squeezing his eyes shut before popping them open, trying to shake off the pain. “It’s just a fle—”
His words fell short as the whole room grew to utter stillness, and the clank of my chains finally falling to the floor only served to amplify the silence. I looked up, my vision blurry as I tried to focus on the scene in front of me. The human? Russ? How the fuck did the human get the upper hand on Roth? I couldn’t fathom the situation, the prospect of it unreal. The moment Russ got a knife to Roth’s throat, his sidekicks, Jason and Jesse, were there, flanking the pair as if they’d suddenly grown all the balls in the world and hadn’t been cowering mere seconds ago, trying to avoid being ravaged by wolves.