Dark Wolf Returning (5 page)

Carla was the result of a short-term affair her mother had had with a human named Antonio Reyes, and he’d
disappeared from her life as quickly as he’d entered it. To her family’s surprise, and disgust, Nicole had decided to keep the child, thinking a baby might help her find some stability. But it was Carla who’d become the caretaker. Nicole’s family had made it clear they wanted nothing to do with their pathetic daughter and her half-human offspring, and so the two of them had been on their own. Though
she’d had the support of her fellow Bloodrunners when she’d gotten older, no one from the pack had ever helped her and her mother, until the night she’d first spoken to Eli, less than a week after she’d turned twenty-two.

She could still feel the hot slide of angry, frustrated tears slipping down her face as she’d struggled with her mother’s limp body that night, the salty taste of them on
her lips. She’d had a call that Nicole was passed out on a sidewalk outside one of Shadow Peak’s bars. Too embarrassed to tell the other Runners, she’d left the Alley and gone up to town to handle it on her own. As she’d tried to get Nicole on her feet, shame had burned in her belly at the thought of the girls she’d gone to school with seeing her mother like this, knowing how horrible they would
be. The derogatory names they would call them. The same names she’d heard her entire life.

And then, out of nowhere, Eli had walked out of the darkness and taken her mother from her arms, carrying her home while a stunned and wary Carla had walked beside him. She’d been amazed to realize that he not only knew her name and where her mother lived, but that she was Bloodrunning partners with
Wyatt. Afterward, they’d talked out in her mother’s backyard, and it had been the beginning. Of their friendship. Of her love. Of...of everything.

Eli Drake had been her hero that night, coming to her rescue at a time when she’d desperately needed him. But now he was her nightmare. The thing in the world that could hurt her most. That could break her.

Her mother had always warned her
that a Lycan male would destroy her heart if she wasn’t careful. How awful to learn that Nicole had been right.

Shattered by the memories flooding through her, Carla closed her eyes, determined to block them out—to block
him
out—hoping it would help her find some measure of control.
Huge mistake
. The sudden touch of his tongue to the sensitive skin over her ribs made her gasp, then whimper,
and she flushed with mortification. God, she couldn’t have sounded more needy if she’d tried, and his hands flexed against her hips, holding her tighter.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she choked out, when she felt the delicious rasp of his tongue gliding higher, until he was licking the flesh of her blood-smeared breast that she hadn’t managed to cover with her arm. Her breath
seized in her lungs, her eyes shocked wide as she stared down at him, too stunned to do anything more than shiver as she watched him lick another smear of blood off her tingling skin, taking the crimson fluid into his mouth, like it was his
right
.

“Christ,” he groaned, the hungry sound vibrating deep in his chest. “Like I could ever forget that taste.”

“Eli?”

* * *

Pulling
his head back, Eli looked up at Carla’s flushed face, and thought
To hell with it
. He needed this. No matter how dangerous it was to his sanity, he
needed
it.
Craved
it. Would have sold his damn soul for it.

Not giving himself time to change his mind, he leaned in close again, wanting her mouth this time, but she jerked back from him, turning her head to the side, her chest heaving. He started
to tell her to stop acting like a fucking child and just give him what they both needed after being apart for so long, then stopped when he caught sight of the tears spilling over her pale cheek.

Shit.

“Rey,” he breathed out, feeling like he’d just been gutted. In all the time that he’d known her, he couldn’t ever recall seeing her cry. Not since the night that he’d helped her with Nicole.

Her throat worked as she swallowed. Then she turned her head to look at him and licked her lips. “From the moment we first realized there was something between us, you told me to wait, so I waited,” she whispered unsteadily. “To give it time, so I did. And do you know what I got for it?
Nothing
. Except your lying ass disappearing without a single goddamn word.”

He wanted to look away
from those tear-soaked eyes that were making him feel like the biggest son of a bitch who had ever walked the planet, but couldn’t. “I was banished,” he heard himself scrape from his tight throat. “What did you expect me to do? What the hell would I have said?”

Years-old fury flamed beneath her tears, so bright it made him wince. “Maybe
Come with me
? Did that ever cross your pea-sized brain?
If you ever meant a single damn word that you said to me, you would have asked—”

“I had no idea where I was going,” he bit out, the familiar rise of frustration nearly strangling him. There’d been no goddamn right answer where she was concerned. No matter what he chose, what he did, she would have ended up hurt. He’d simply tried to choose the path that would be easiest for her. And...
fuck,
maybe easiest for him, as well—at least when it came to his emotions—which just made him sound like a coward. “I didn’t have a home to offer you, Rey. No security or protection. How could I have asked you to give up everything you’d ever known for that kind of life? To leave your friends and family?”

“
You
were my family,” she whispered, digging that knife even deeper. “At least I thought
you were. Fool that I was. You just wanted to screw the girl who’d never bedded down with a Lycan, didn’t you? Was it a bet between you and your friends? Did you all laugh about it behind my back before you left?”

“You know that’s not true,” he growled, wanting to shake her. “I didn’t want anything to happen to you. I was trying to take care of you!”

She gave a bitter laugh. “And what
a stellar job you did. I’d hate to know what it’s like to be someone you
want
to hurt.”

“Carla, I—”

“Stop!”
she pleaded, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her free hand. “Please, just...stop. I don’t want to hear another lie from you. I just want you to leave me alone.”

Shit! This is so screwed up.

Moving to his feet, Eli stared down at the top of her golden
head, and wanted to roar with frustration. “I wish I could make you understand, but everything I’ve done...the reasons...it’s complicated, Rey.”

She didn’t say anything. She just turned and crawled up over the bed, then curled into a ball on her side, telling him without words that she was done listening to his bullshit.

“Sleep fast,” he muttered, moving to sit on the foot of the other
bed. Elbows on his parted knees, he dropped his head into his hands, squeezing his skull, and kept talking. “We’re getting an early start tomorrow. And I still have questions, so be ready to start answering them.”

There was no response, but he hadn’t expected one. He listened until her breathing evened out, then moved back to his feet and stripped down to his fitted boxers. He pulled the
covers over her small, curled up form, forcing himself not to look at her too closely because he knew he’d never be able to stop once he did. Then he turned out the light.

Lying down on his bed, Eli put his hands behind his head and stared up at the watermarked ceiling, wondering what in God’s name he’d been thinking. He’d actually thought he could get his head together before he and the
guys reached Maryland and he had to face her again. What a jackass idea. Even if it’d taken months to get back, it still wouldn’t have been enough time to sort out this messed-up situation.

And he could no longer say for certain if he was still trying to protect her...or if it was his own miserable hide he was worried about. Especially seeing as how she wanted rid of him. Wanted to break
the tenuous bond that tied them together, severing that final connection.

Turning on his side, he stared at her delicate shape beneath the soft streams of moonlight filtering in through the blinds, and pulled in a deep breath of her warm, intoxicating scent. This woman had been under his skin for years, and he wasn’t sure if staying away from her anymore was the right answer...or the wrong
one.

All Eli knew was that it was killing him, not being in that bed with her, holding her against his body, where he wanted her.

And where she’d always belonged.

Chapter 3

A
fter a horrible night’s sleep, and a scalding shower that’d barely made her feel alive again, Carla had changed into one of her last clean pairs of jeans and a T-shirt. There was only so much cash she’d been willing to spend on clothes from the money she’d stolen off the Whiteclaw, and so her wardrobe was limited at best. Life would have been a lot easier if she’d had
her stupid wallet on her when she’d been kidnapped, but hey, at least she’d had her cell phone. And she’d thankfully had another bra and pair of panties in her pack for this morning, as well as a hairbrush. So while she wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests at the moment, it was nice not to have bed head.

Eli had woken her up with a touch on her shoulder about thirty minutes ago, just after
six a.m., and told her he would be waiting outside the room while she got ready. He didn’t mention anything about their argument from the night before, and neither did she. In fact, she didn’t even look at him. She could forgive herself for her momentary lapse last night, but that was her only pass. From now on she needed to stay sharply focused. She had her eye on the prize—being free of him
once and for all—and she wasn’t going to let her stupid hormones ruin it for her.

No matter how crazy desperate for him those little suckers turned out to be.

And I doubt going without will kill me,
she thought dryly, running her brush through her hair.
If that were the case, I’d have dried up and died a long time ago.

A glance in the mirror over the dresser showed that she was
still sporting a few yellowish bruises, had dark circles under her eyes, and the tight pinch of fatigue in her facial muscles. She might be only twenty-eight, but she felt eighty. Damn near looked like it, too. But what the hell? It’s not like she wanted him to be attracted to her. Zipping up her pack, she tossed it on her bed and joined him outside.

As they walked to the crowded diner next
door, where they were meeting the others, he asked, “You ever hear from your mom?”

Nicole had finally given up on the pack a year before Eli’s banishment and left Shadow Peak, claiming she needed to find a place where she could make a new life for herself. “No,” Carla replied in a flat tone, wondering if her mother had ever managed to succeed with her dream. If so, she was obviously too content
there to worry about contacting the daughter she’d left behind.

He didn’t say anything more, and the guys kept the conversation light when they joined them for a quick breakfast. Afterward, they all headed back to the room she and Eli had shared to discuss the situation in private. Once everyone was settled, Eli explained to her what the men already knew: that his father had had a maniacal
plan to take over the Silvercrest. A bloodthirsty plan that had resulted in a significant loss of life, had shattered the pack’s sense of safety, and left an entire group of teens—as well as most of the residents in Shadow Peak—emotionally traumatized. As a result, the town had been left without its leaders, and the Bloodrunners were now handling all elements of security for the pack.

Since
it was up to Carla to bring them up to speed on the rest, she explained everything that had happened with the Whiteclaw pack over the past weeks, starting with how Eli’s brother, Eric Drake, had met Chelsea, the human he’d recently married, while she was searching for her younger sister, Perry. Making a bad choice, Perry had gone chasing after the wrong guy and ended up falling in with the Whiteclaw
pack who lived to the south of the Silvercrest, and who were now controlled by a man named Roy Claymore. With the Runners’ help, Eric had been able to prove that the Whiteclaw had partnered up with the Donovans, a corrupt local Lycan family, on a number of illegal activities, the most horrific being one that involved human girls. With the Donovans’ support, the Whiteclaw had been drugging the
girls and pimping them out for Lycan gang rapes. The drugs not only acted as an aphrodisiac on the girls, but also impaired their memories of the attacks. And Claymore was using tapes of the assaults to later blackmail the participants into aiding the Whiteclaw.

She then told them that the Runners had managed to close down a strip club in Wesley, a human town not far from the Silvercrest’s
territory. The Whiteclaw had been using the club to find the girls, and closing it down had only increased Roy Claymore’s power hungry desire to destroy the Silvercrest and take their land. Something Claymore felt would be easy to accomplish, given the state the pack had been left in after Stefan Drake’s failed bid for power.

Later, after an attack that some of the Whiteclaw and Donovan wolves
had made on the Runners in the Alley, they learned that the Whiteclaw had also developed a “super soldier” drug that not only made them violently strong, but also camouflaged their scent. Which meant they were damn difficult to defeat.

The atmosphere in the room had been grim during her telling, but the group’s tension only increased when she explained about the plans she’d overheard before
making her escape after her and Elise’s kidnapping.

“The Whiteclaw were hoping to blackmail the other packs in our region into helping them by providing foot soldiers. But they haven’t secured the kind of numbers they were hoping for, so they came up with a new plan. They’ve used a sizable portion of the money they’ve made from the gang rapes to purchase help from someone in your line of
work. A man named Jack Bartley.”

“Son of a freaking bitch,” Kyle muttered.

“You know him?” she asked.

“We’ve gone up against him before,” the merc explained. “He’s human, but he’s a maniac. Has a small army under his command, and they’ll do anything for the right price.”

“He’s human?” she murmured with surprise.

Kyle grimaced. “Well, most of him is. It’s rumored he has
shifter blood somewhere in his family tree, which is how he knows of our existence.”

“You were right to be worried,” Sam murmured. “Bartley and his men will spell bad news for your pack.”

She wanted to argue that they weren’t
her
pack, they were Eli’s, but bit her tongue instead. She didn’t need to make herself sound any bitterer about the pack’s longstanding treatment of the Runners
than she probably already had.

“When you went up against him, did you win?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Eli muttered from his position against the wall, his muscular arms crossed over his chest. His dark brows were knitted with tension. “But it was at a cost. We lost one of our best men. A guy who would often come and work with us when he needed to earn extra money for his wife and kids. Bartley
got his hands on him during the op, and by the time we found him, all that was left was a bloody pile of tissue and bone. They’d skinned him alive.”

“Jesus.”

Holding her worried gaze, he said, “He can be stopped, Rey. We just need to outthink him.”

“Can you do that?”

He jerked his chin toward his men. “These guys can.”

“So these different drugs—the ones they were giving
the human girls and the ones that they use on themselves to improve their abilities—are still in production?” Kyle asked from his seat on the foot of the bed. Lev had positioned himself up by the pillows, his back braced against the cheap headboard, while Sam had his shoulders propped against the door and James sat in the desk chair. Carla sat on the foot of the other bed by herself.

Answering
Kyle’s question, she said, “As far as we know, production has been halted. We have a Fed named Monroe dealing with the drug labs out west, where it was all being made. Monroe’s sister is married to one of the Silvercrest males, and the Fed is someone we consider a friend. But there’s still the problem of the drugs they have stocked in Hawkley.”

“Why did they target my sister?” The quietly
spoken question had come from Eli, and she took a deep breath before turning her head to look at him again.

“They wanted to make a dig at the Runners, and saw Elise as an easy mark. We never should have let her stay up in town by herself, because it drew their attention.”

He made a low sound of agreement, but she could tell he knew there was more to the story. Things she wasn’t telling
him. But he didn’t push, and she wondered if he was dreading the explanation as much as she was dreading having to be the one who gave it.

“It’s getting late,” he suddenly muttered, pushing away from the wall. “We can talk things over some more when we stop for lunch, but right now we need to get on the road.”

Fifteen minutes later, they had their gear stowed in the backseat of the truck
James and Lev were driving, the rest of the group loaded into the other one, and were heading back down the highway.

With Sam and Kyle in the front seat of the truck she and Eli were in, Carla didn’t speak to him during the journey, though she’d carried on some light conversation with the two mercs. For such ruthless badasses, they were nice guys who even managed to make her laugh a few times,
while Eli glared out his window, lost in his own thoughts. The hours went by faster than she’d thought they would, and before she knew it they’d reached a little town the men had stayed in before, where they planned to stop for the night.

They ate together at a great little diner that made killer fried chicken, then grabbed rooms at a local motel. Six of them, at her insistence, which had
caused the men to slide curious looks between her and Eli. He went off with Kyle to meet up with a local weapons dealer they’d done business with on several occasions, hoping to score a small arsenal that they could take back to the Alley with them, and refused to let her come along. So she was left sitting alone in her room, with nothing but her thoughts for company. It was still only nine and she
was too wound up to sleep, so when Lev knocked on her door and asked if she wanted to grab a drink at the pool hall around the corner, she was glad for the distraction.

They ordered a pitcher of beer, picked out their cues, and before she knew it, she’d laughed her way through three games and they were starting on their fourth.

“No, no. You’re going at that shot all wrong,” Lev drawled,
coming up behind her and leaning over her back. “You’ve got to move this hand here, and this one here,” he told her, rearranging the placement of her fingers on the cue.

“Thanks,” she said with a smile, when she made the shot. “That was—”

“Slivkoff!”

She jumped as Eli’s guttural shout silenced the noisy pool hall, the back of her head connecting with Lev’s chin. He swore as she
quickly turned to apologize. “Sorry!”

“No problem,” he murmured, casting a funny look over the top of her head. She couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh...or run for cover.

Sensing Eli was close, she turned and found him rounding the pool table, heading right for her. Once again, the scowl on his gorgeous face matched his tone as he growled, “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

Huh. Was it just her, or did he ask that question
a lot?

Squaring her shoulders, Carla slowly arched one of her eyebrows. “What did it look like I was doing? Lev asked if I wanted to play some pool.”

His nostrils flared as he stared her down. “And that meant you had to rub your little ass in his groin?”

Lev started to argue that point, but she lifted her hand to silence him.
Setting her cue on the table, she took a deep breath, crossed her arms over her T-shirt covered chest, and tried not to let Eli see how furious he’d just made her as she carefully said, “Considering the bimbo blonde who was passed out in your lap last night, I don’t think you can cast any judgments here, Eli.”

He opened his mouth, then obviously changed his mind about whatever he was going
to say, because he snapped it shut again. A muscle was starting to pulse at the edge of his jaw, his pupils were nearly blown, and his teeth were clenched so hard she was surprised they hadn’t cracked. Carla recognized the signs of him struggling with his temper, and couldn’t help but shake her head at his outrageous display of jealousy. After ditching her when he was banished, he didn’t have any
freaking right to get pissed about anything that she did!

“We’re getting out of here,” he finally muttered, jerking his head toward the door. “Now.”

She could have argued with him, but since he’d already ruined her fun, she didn’t see the point. Instead, she gave him her snarkiest smile and said, “Sure thing,
boss man
.”

Lev was grinning like a jackass when she turned to tell him
goodbye, so she socked him in the shoulder, which just made him laugh. Turning her back on the goofball, she wondered if he’d set this whole thing up just to make Eli jealous, and if so, why?

Whatever Lev’s reasons were for asking her to play pool with him, it had definitely put Eli in a bad mood. Not that he’d been anything but irritable the entire day. But now she could feel him seething
behind her as she headed back to her room, his glare all but drilling holes in the back of her head. Not to mention her ass. When she reached her room, he managed to push his way in behind her before she could slam the door in his face, which had been her intention. After the way she’d broken down in front of him the night before, the last thing she wanted was to be alone with him.

Instead
of moving deeper into the room, Carla leaned back against the door after she’d shut it, and crossed her arms over her chest again. The graze on her side from the bullet was no longer hurting, thanks to her healing abilities. It’d already scabbed over and probably would have been gone in a day or two, if she weren’t so run-down at the moment.

“Did you get the guns?” she asked, watching him
pace along the foot of her queen-size bed, his big hands braced on his hips. He was dressed like the badass mercenary he was, wearing black boots, a faded pair of jeans that perfectly molded his muscular thighs, and a black T-shirt, its short sleeves stretched tight around his powerful biceps. Wherever you looked, his tall body was hard and sinewed and ripped. Even his hair-dusted forearms were mouthwatering,
with heavy veins and ridges of muscle pressing against his scarred, golden skin. Then there were his thick wrists. And those big, masculine hands...