Accidentally saved a werewolf Alpha

Dominic

Three assassination attempts in one night.

Whoever wanted me dead clearly had commitment issues.

My car had just crashed and exploded behind me. A second car came out of nowhere and hit me at full speed. I should have been nothing but roadkill. Instead, I dragged myself into a dead-end alley with poison in my blood and an arrow in my shoulder.

I was being hunted.

The poison dulled my instincts, dragging my thoughts through wet concrete. My wolf was locked away. I couldn't shift. Couldn't heal. Couldn't even reach the mind-link to call my Beta and tell him where to find my corpse.

I had been careless. There was no one to blame but myself.

Footsteps splashed through the rain behind me.

"Find him. He couldn't have gotten far."

I spat blood onto the asphalt and kept moving.

A hiss cut the air. Something slammed into my shoulder. An arrow. I tore it out and caught the bitter chemical smell coating the tip. Another drug. Because three attempts clearly weren't enough.

"F*ck."

My fingers lost strength.

A man rounded the corner, confident I was too weak to fight. He was wrong. I caught him before he could strike, my fist connecting with his jaw hard enough to crack bone. He went face-first into the brick. Another rushed me. Even drugged and bleeding, I was still a werewolf. Still an Alpha. Today was not a good day. I refused to make it easy for them.

A blade flashed toward my stomach. I twisted, caught his wrist, drove my elbow into his throat. A fist to his face followed.

Another dart flew past my head. A second struck my side. My vision blurred. I ripped it free. More men closed in. Their boots splashed through the rain.

I fought anyway. Threw one man across the pavement. Blocked a metal bar with my forearm. Drove my knee into the next attacker's stomach until he folded.

A blade sliced across my ribs. The burning hit immediately. Coated metal. More poison. They knew how difficult I was to kill. They brought an entire apothecary of toxins to prove it.

I staggered. My breathing was shallow. My limbs belonged to a stranger. I took down one more before the rest stopped advancing. They backed away. They knew I was running out of steam.

I looked around. My brilliant evasive maneuvers had led me to a dead end. Brick walls on three sides. The entrance blocked.

"He's going to be unconscious soon," a voice said with sickening confidence.

My fingers curled into weak fists. Alpha Dominic Daniels, brought down by a budget crew of mercenaries. Deeply insulting.

Two more darts buried into my chest and thigh. Darkness crept in like spilled ink.

Then a high-pitched, deafening screech shattered the night.

A shrill alarm. Then a blaring siren that bounced off the brickwork like a police unit closing in.

"What the f*ck is that?"

"Did his pack track us? We need to finish him now!"

"No way in hell am I standing here to fight a werewolf unit," one barked. Panic cracked his voice.

One mercenary stepped forward. He drove a blade into my side.

It didn't feel like a blade. It felt like an ice pick driven between my ribs by a sledgehammer. The air rushed out of my lungs. The metal forced its way inside. Dense. Impossibly solid. A core of frost bloomed in my side. Then it ignited into liquid fire that radiated outward in pulsing waves.

"Move!" the lead man ordered.

I couldn't die here. Not like this.

Then I smelled something.

Soft. Sweet. Warm. It slipped beneath the stench of blood, rain, and chemicals.

The scent grew stronger. I forced my eyes open. A figure stood at the mouth of the alley, moving toward me.

Was this dying? This sudden ease? Heaven? No. My path was carved in blood. My destination was hell.

Stay awake, Dominic.

The figure came closer. The scent wrapped around me. With the last scrap of strength I had, my body lurched forward. I expected cold pavement.

Instead, I collided with something soft. Warm. I nuzzled against it, breathing in that impossible scent as everything went black.

*****

Hope

Okay. So. There was a man.

A very large, very bleeding, very unconscious man who had just collapsed directly into my chest like a fallen redwood.

I stood there, frozen, arms hovering awkwardly in the air, because what exactly was I supposed to do? Hug him back? Push him off? Scream for help? I had been on my way to rescue a stray cat. Instead, I had somehow ended up with a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound stranger using me as a mattress.

"Hello?! Sir! Don't die... please don't die! Can you hear me?"

My hands shook so violently I could barely keep them pressed against the cold, massive weight of his chest.

I leaned closer, my heart pounding hard enough to vibrate in my ears. "Can you hear me? Sir, please. You cannot just die here. I do not know what I am supposed to do if you die."

The entire situation was absurd. I should not have been out in this alley in the first place. I should have been in my bed, wearing my oversized yellow fleece pajamas, watching documentary clips about deep-sea creatures.

It was because of cats. It was always because of cats.

I ran out of wet cat food, and my brain decided at nearly nine at night that if I did not deliver their salmon pâté on schedule tomorrow morning, Scrapper, Barnbaby, and the rest of the stray gang would revolt. They would starve, judge me, and hold a grudge. Worse, they would line up outside my bedroom window at dawn, meowing in harmony, and completely ruin my entire week.

Never mind my severe allergies making my eyes itch like I had rubbed poison ivy on my eyelids. Never mind that I rarely stepped outside after dark because streetlights made me jumpy. I hopped onto my seafoam-green electric scooter, which tops out at a thrilling fifteen miles per hour, zipped to the twenty-four-hour bodega, and was heading back when I spotted Shortcake.

Shortcake was an ungrateful little orange menace who had been lurking near my building for days. I had tried repeatedly to catch him because he walked with a limp and looked half-starved. The moment he saw my headlight, he darted into the narrow alley behind the old warehouse.

Because I possessed the survival instincts of a suicidal moth flying toward a bonfire, I followed him.

Then I heard the voices and heavy sounds.

I cut my engine and glided into the shadows just in time to see a group of heavy, terrifying men surrounding someone slumping against the brick wall. I crouched behind a rusted dumpster, my heart slamming against my ribs so loudly I was convinced they were going to turn around and demand to know who brought a bass drum into the alley.

Meow.

"Not now," I hissed under my breath.

Shortcake trotted out from behind a wooden crate and sat right next to my polka-dot socks, purring like an unserviced chainsaw. He smelled the salmon treats in my scooter basket, which was the only reason he was suddenly acting like my best friend.

The man against the wall was taking brutal hits. He was in massive trouble, and I could not drive away to call the police because my phone was sitting on my kitchen counter back home, completely forgotten next to an unwashed mug of chamomile tea. By the time I rode back and brought help, these men would be done with him.

My eyes frantically scanned the alley. Mounted on the warehouse wall above my head was an old manual fire alarm casing. Panic made my hands act faster than my brain. I grabbed a loose piece of iron pipe from the gravel, stood on my tiptoes, and shattered the glass.

The warehouse alarm burst to life, a high-pitched, screeching wail echoing down the passage. At the exact same second, I hit the Bluetooth trigger on my scooter's mounted emergency megaphone, blasting a loud, synthesized tactical siren I kept downloaded for personal safety.

The combined noise was deafening, offensive, and wonderfully effective.

"What the f*ck?!" one of the men yelled.

"Did they track us?!"

"Move! Leave him!"

Through a crack in the dumpster shadow, I watched them scramble. My stomach dropped when the lead man turned. He wore a heavy black tactical vest with the word POLICE stamped across the back.

Real cops? Or men pretending to be cops? Either way, they were not safe.

As soon as their heavy boots vanished down the main street, the alley fell dead silent except for the rain and the dying whine of my siren. I crept out from behind the dumpster, my knees trembling with every step.

My boot crunched against something metallic in the wet gravel. A dart casing.

He was not dead, just knocked out.

I hurried over to where he lay slumping forward. I caught him before his face hit the wet pavement, or rather, he fell directly into me. His massive weight nearly flattened my internal organs into pancake batter.

"Hello... sir?" I shook his shoulder gently, wincing at the slick, freezing mixture of rain and blood covering his leather jacket. "Sir?"

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

I pulled back, my breath coming fast and shallow. Okay, Hope. You saved his life. The bad guys are gone. Now go home, feed Shortcake, lock the door, and pretend you were never here.

I turned and walked back to my scooter, gripping the handlebars, but my boots felt glued to the concrete. I looked back at his still, battered shape lying in the dark drizzle.

What if those men returned to finish the job? It was freezing out here. I could not just leave a giant, bleeding stranger to turn into a human ice cube on the pavement.

Hope

Come on, Hope. He is hurt and unconscious. You might have saved him, but he is exposed out here. If he stays, he could die of hypothermia before morning. What if he gets bitten by a rat? Or a raccoon?

I had been bitten by a raccoon once. That bite was nasty. I had to get three shots and my wrist swelled up to the size of a honeydew melon.

What if he gets raccoon rabies on top of everything else?

A thousand and one absurd what-ifs were hunting me down.

"Ugh, God help me," I whimpered.

I marched back over to him and hooked my hands under his armpits. "Okay, big guy. We are going to get you up. One... two..."

I lost my balance immediately, falling backward onto his broad chest with a soft oof.

Getting him off the ground was brutal work. He felt constructed entirely of solid lead, wet iron, and bad choices.

"You are heavy," I panted, bracing my boots against the wet ground.