Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

“You’re the Alpha?”

The white wolf came to sit at the redhead’s ankle and lean against her leg. The big black continued to circle the room in a slow lope. Thing One and Thing Two had fallen back to lean against the wall on the edge of Grace’s vision, arms crossed in exactly the same way.

The woman buried her fingers in the white wolf’s ruff. “This surprises you?”

“Well, yeah, you’re like three feet tall.”

The white wolf growled, but the Alpha just laughed, a throaty chuckle that was equal parts humor and sex. Perhaps that was how she ruled. With sex.

Hugo had said the Alpha’s name was Wayland, but rulers were toppled all the time in shifter communities. That wasn’t what made this hard to swallow. It was her. She was impossible.

It wasn’t just her size that made her an unlikely Alpha. She was young—probably upper twenties—but many Alphas were young because they needed to be in peak physical condition. In nearly every pack and pride Grace had ever heard of, the Alpha needed to be able to fight all comers to hold the position.

This woman wasn’t a single inch over five feet. Sure, there was an aura of power that pulsed off her—not unlike the way Greg used to project his Alpha-ness over the pride—but Grace had almost fifty pounds of solid muscle on the little princess and could probably take her with one hand tied behind her back.

There were no female Alphas. None. Because to hold the position, princess here would have to be able to take the big black wolf in a physical fight. Grace just couldn’t see that happening.

Which meant one of two things. Either this chick was lying about being Alpha, or she held the post some other way—like by fucking the strongest men and making them fight for her. But the big black wolf wasn’t acting like a lover. The two of them didn’t even look at each other, let alone touch.

The “Alpha” continued to stroke the ears of the white wolf—but that one was too small to be much use as a pawn.

“Size isn’t everything,” Red murmured.

For a moment Grace thought she must’ve said something aloud about the white wolf being too small to be useful, but then she realized the woman was responding to her previous statement.

“That’s not a sentiment you hear very often in shifter communities,” Grace said conversationally.

Red just smiled.

“What happened to Wayland?”

Red’s smile died. “Old news. Not even worth the breath to discuss him.”

“You got a name?” Grace asked, tired of thinking of the woman as Red.

“How rude of me,” the woman cooed, for all the world like she wasn’t speaking to a prisoner chained to a chair. “I am Amala.” She inclined her head regally. “You’ve already met River and Cadence.” Thing One and Thing Two smiled creepily in unison. “Behind you is my second, Dare.” The big black wolf continued his circuit. “And this is Melissa.” The white wolf growled. Amala smiled, stroking the furry white head. “You’ll have to forgive Melissa. Your friend there almost killed her mate.”

Dominec chuffed with what sounded a lot like pleasure and the white wolf came to her feet, snarling.

“Soren is an artist by trade,” Amala went on, soothing Melissa. “A lover, not a fighter.” Her amber eyes hardened. “We hope he regains the full use of his arm.”

It might have been smart to grovel and apologize, but Kelly was the diplomatic one and Kelly wasn’t here. Grace glared. “We just wanted to talk. You attacked us, remember?”

“We don’t take chances on our land,” Amala said. “I would think a Lone Pine lieutenant would appreciate that.”

So the wolf knew who she was. Or had guessed. Kelly had mentioned Lone Pine and Three Rocks. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out the details.

“We aren’t in the habit of handcuffing our guests at Lone Pine. Or putting them in cages.” She let her anger flash in her eyes.

“Guests are invited. You were not.” The amber eyes were unforgiving. “And he savaged Soren.”

“I don’t think he liked your welcoming committee’s tranquilize-first-ask-questions-later policy.”

“He was quite resistant.” Amala’s glittering gaze locked on the cage where the tiger paced. “What is he?”

“What does he look like? He’s a fucking tiger.”

“No, he’s more than that.” The woman who called herself Alpha walked toward the cage, the white wolf moving at her side. “My wolves shot him up with enough tranquilizer to take down a herd of rhinos and he still kept coming. And he woke up hours before the rest of you. Now, why is that?”

“Pure ornery stubbornness would be my guess,” Grace said with a sugary smile.

“No,” Amala said, so close to a purr she could almost be feline. “I think there’s more to it than that.”

“Where are the others?”

Amala flicked her fingers dismissively, amber rings flashing. “They’re fine.”

“I want to see them.”

“Tell me about your friend and perhaps I’ll bring them here,” Amala said. “How did he fight off the tranquilizers? What makes him so special?”

“Ask him yourself.” Irritation was snapping in her blood. She was getting pretty fucking tired of playing with little Amala. They didn’t have time for this bullshit.

“I can’t. He’s stayed in this form since he was captured. I don’t suppose you know why.”

“He’s not really tame, you know,” Grace said dryly. “And I think you might be pissing him off. Maybe if you took the choke collar off, he’d be a little more inclined to chat.”

“If he shifts he can remove the collar himself. The clasp is simple enough if you have thumbs. And yet he doesn’t shift. Why is that, Grace?”

Grace jolted. So Amala knew her name too. Okay. Kelly or Zoe or Tyler could have told her. Or she could have intel on Lone Pine. Black Lake was all about the intel.

“Haven’t the foggiest. I’ve given up trying to figure him out.”

Amala smiled. “So he
is
your mate.”

Grace snorted. “Wow. That’s quite a leap.”

“Is it? Would you like to see something?”

“I have a feeling the safe answer to that question is no.”

Amala just smiled and turned her gaze to the creeper twins. She gave them a slight nod and they pushed off the wall. They walked behind Grace and she fought the urge to twist around to try to see what the hell they were doing back there. Having those two at her back was almost as wrong as seeing Dominec locked up.

They came into her field of vision again carrying a large screen, which they proceeded to place between Grace and Dominec’s cage.

She couldn’t see what happened next, but she could hear it. The snarling. The roars. The scraping of claws across metal and awful hacks as if the tiger was choking himself on that goddamn collar. Christ, he was killing himself.

“Stop!” she shouted over the racket—not sure whether she was shouting at Amala or Dominec.

The she-Alpha, who had dropped back so she could see them both at the same time, gave a nod and the twins collapsed the screen, putting it back wherever they’d found it.

“Now.” Amala smiled smugly. “Do you still want to try to tell me he isn’t your mate?”

Grace glowered at the Alpha bitch. “Release me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re as bored of this stupid game as I am.”

“Am I?”

“You know who we are. You probably even know why we’re here. You only put me in chains because you figured out it would rile him up and you wanted to poke at the tiger to see what he would do.”

“He did bite my wolf,” Amala said with cool reprimand.

“Your wolf tranqed us.”

Amala studied her, the black wolf still circling. “What makes you so certain I know who you are?”

“Other than calling me by name? You’re Black Lake, aren’t you? Aren’t you supposed to know everything about everyone?”

“I do try.”

Grace decided she just might hate the uber bitch of Black Lake. “Why do you have an artist doing patrols?” She was wagering it was the same reason they had half-trained soldiers who were barely old enough to shave guarding the perimeter at Lone Pine.

Fear.

Amala arched a brow. “Pardon?”

“You’ve expanded your perimeter and now you have artists running patrols. Big fucking patrol groups too. Did you have a few sentries get snatched? Has the Organization been visiting?”

Amala’s superior expression faded into icy rock. “Our security isn’t your concern.”

“It is when you’re playing fucking
games
when we’ve come to talk to you about taking down the bastards once and for all.”

The black wolf had been moving steadily throughout the room the entire time. At those words, he suddenly stopped, several feet behind and to one side of Amala, his head cocked toward Grace.

At least
someone
was listening.

“We don’t have time for this bullshit,” Grace snapped, jerking at her cuffs. “We need to move quickly. Unify all the shifters together and attack the bastards at their bases, all over the world. Get our people out.
Including
your wolves.”

“No one knows where their bases are,” Amala said.

“Your intel sucks,” Grace snapped. “We’ve been going after their bases one by one, but we need more fighters to do more. And you are fucking
playing
when you should be helping us.”

The black wolf moved, but only made it two steps before Amala whirled toward him and growled, the sound surprisingly deep for someone so small. She bared small teeth and the black froze like he was facing the bogeyman. His tail tucked down beneath his legs and he lowered his bulk to the ground, creeping forward in a crouch.

The white wolf whimpered, cowering from them both.

Amala covered her teeth, but continued staring down the black as she spoke. “Release the cuffs,” she snapped, and it wasn’t until Grace felt a presence at her back that she realized Amala had been speaking to the twins, not to the black. When the cuffs fell away, Grace rotated her shoulders, rubbing at her wrists with hands that were already starting to prickle with a thousand pins and needles.

Amala dismissed the black with one last growl, turning to face the twins. “Get the tiger some clothes.” The twins headed for the door and with a flick of her hand Amala sent the white and black wolves scurrying after them. She turned to face Grace, amber eyes dark. “When your friend is civilized again, we’ll reconvene.”

Grace didn’t bother to tell her that Dominec would never be civilized.

The she-bitch left the room, the door snapping shut behind her. A lock slid home. Grace didn’t care. She was already on her feet, running toward the cage.

“Dominec.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Being in a cage was like acid on his nerves, bubbling and boiling. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. The shards of his thoughts kept sliding back and forth between memory and reality, past and present.

One second he was in the pit, his own blood making the dirt into a macabre mud that clung to his paws, the next he was watching the wolves prop Grace’s limp and helpless form in a chair and cuff her hands behind her back. He threw himself against the bars, choking on the sudden pressure at his throat, but his rage at seeing her restrained and unconscious was a violent, uncontrollable thing, feral and incapable of reason.
Failed.
He’d failed her.

He blinked and he was in the narrow wooden box that had been his primary residence for two years, splinters digging into his chin whenever he dared to lay down. Another blink and metal bars surrounded him on all sides—and there was Grace, lifting her head. Not dead. Thank God not dead. He tried to hold onto the present. Tried to focus on the words flowing around him. Her blue eyes glittered with rage as she yanked against her chains and he growled with wild pride. Of course she wouldn’t be whimpering and weak, undone by her fear, not his Grace. Pride tempered the rage. She may be bound, but she wasn’t helpless, wasn’t looking to anyone else to rescue her. She was a warrior in her own right—

The warrior slashed at his face, blood splashing as the acid—sweet holy
fuck
, the acid—felt like it exploded inside each wound, an eruption of pain in his brain destroying all other thought and sensation.

“
Dominec.
”

Grace knelt in front of his cage, free, her gaze direct and urgent as she worked the locks. How had she gotten the keys? And where were the wolves? They were alone, though the heavy canine stench still saturated the room. Hadn’t been alone long, then.

His fragmented thoughts started to slide again, but he ruthlessly yanked himself back to the present as the locks clanked, the cage door creaked, and Grace bent to step into the cage.
No, not inside with me. Out. We have to get out
.

But he couldn’t form the words. His lips and teeth and tongue were all still feline and only a rough cough of irritation escaped.

Grace’s hands sank knuckle deep into the fur on either side of his neck. Winter had made his coat thick and itchy and the feel of her fingers digging in was heaven. She fumbled with something and the chain above his head banged against the bars of the cage, the clang of metal against metal reverberating oddly in the dreary room.

The choke collar
, he realized a fraction of a second before Grace’s clever fingers found the catch. The constant pressure against his wind pipe eased and he sucked in air.

She flung the collar away, practically hissing at it, then knelt so her face was on the level with his and plunged her fingers into his ruff. “Are you all right?”

He wanted to say no. His psyche was fractured. He’d been chained and caged and kept away from her, unable to protect her. His human side was sliding wildly between one nightmare and the next, leaving his animal side in complete control. He wanted to say all that, but all that came out was a low, snarling growl.

She bent forward until her forehead pressed against his, fur to skin, inhaling deep as if drawing in his scent. “I need you to shift.”

She withdrew just enough for him to see her eyes. The two distinct shades of blue, a pale periwinkle inner ring and the dark midnight outer, were clear with her pupils contracted. Shock or an after-effect of the drugs. It was too dark for her pupils to be little pin pricks naturally.

“Focus, Dominec,” she whispered. “I need you to calm down and put on your human skin. I know you can.”

She knew more than he did. The tiger had broken away from him. Separate. Stronger. It didn’t want to yield control. And he didn’t particularly want it to.

He remembered it now. The way his human brain had retreated during the worst of the pain, leaving the tiger in command. He’d borne the torture, but it had split him in two. No, more than two. A thousand little fragments. But the tiger was whole. The tiger was strong. The tiger would protect her when he failed.

“Dominec,” she said again, blue eyes fierce and firm as she stared him down—never afraid of him, his Grace. “Concentrate. You have to shift for me.” The words were commanding, but her touch was soft. She stroked his fur, past his ruff, over his shoulders and down his flank.

He couldn’t remember the last time someone had petted him. Both his tiger and human thoughts went still, fixating on the movement of her hands. Smooth and steady and soothing. It felt good. Beyond good. She stroked him like she could brush his cares away—and perhaps she could. Grace was magical. She petted him—long, hypnotic strokes, her face pressed close to his—and murmured, “Please shift, Dominec.”

It wasn’t some significant clicking-into-place feeling. He wasn’t even aware of it happening, but while he had been focused on her touch, his split selves had somehow realigned—not a perfect alignment, his broken pieces didn’t fit together perfectly anymore, but enough that he could reach for his human skin and it came to his call.

Slowly. Painfully. But it came.

Her hands were running down his neck and stroking over his shoulders when he came to himself again, crouched in a cage that wasn’t tall enough for a man to stand. Her two-toned blue eyes met his steadily. “Are you all right?”

I’m sorry. I failed you.
“I don’t like this place,” he rasped.

She released a low, humorless laugh. “I don’t blame you.”

He put his hands on her waist, needing to feel that she was all right. But as soon as he felt the taut muscles of her abdomen beneath his hands, his arms seemed to develop minds of their own. They wrapped around her, drawing her snug against him as he knelt to mirror her position. He moved to kiss her—the instinct so strong it was a need—but she turned her head to the side at the last minute.
Yes. Of course she would. Don’t deserve her.

“They could be watching,” she murmured and he buried his face against the soft skin of her neck instead, breathing her in.

She was alive. She was whole.

She was in a fucking cage.

Unacceptable. The thought translated to action and he was surging out of the cage, half-carrying her with him, before he even realized what he was doing.

“Whoa.” Grace broke away from him and he let her because they were out now, though the room still pressed tight against his skin.

He prowled the space, taking in the various scents and cataloguing them, matching them up against the wolves. His thoughts seemed to have settled in the here and now and he used his newfound focus to study their surroundings. Low ceiling, inadequate light, cement and drywall. Nothing fancy. It wouldn’t take long to build a place like this, but this was obviously not a new addition. There was dust in the corners and the beginnings of rust on the bolts that secured the chair that had held Grace to the floor. The cage was also bolted down, but the screws looked newer and there were other studs in the floor where the bars could be attached if they wanted to make the cage larger or smaller. A very versatile torture chamber.

Or that’s what he would have thought it was, if not for the complete absence of even the slightest whiff of blood.

He eyed the cage and the chair. A torture chamber that wasn’t used for torture. “What the fuck is with these people?”

“I think we may have arrived in the middle of a power struggle,” Grace said. He cocked his head, silently asking for more and Grace went on. “The black one. Her second. Did you see how he looked at her? Something is about to go down and I’m not sure it would be wise for us to be here when it does.” She paused in her own circuit of the room, frowning. “If she’s even the Alpha. Have you ever heard of a female Alpha?”

“No,” he said flatly. “But she feels like one.”

“The power. I know. She’s got that. But she’s tiny. And I don’t think Blackie the Behemoth likes bowing down to her will.” She shook her head, dismissing the subject. “Never mind. Hopefully it won’t affect us.” She reached for the hem of her topmost shirt. She was wearing several layers of thin thermal—as they all had been for the hike. She stripped off the top layer and tossed it at him. “Here.”

He caught it against his chest, arching a brow in question.

“She-Bitch told the others to bring you clothes, but this will work until then.”

Shifters didn’t see nakedness as vulnerability the way humans did—their animal form was always just a shift away—but Dominec took the shirt without argument and tied it around his waist like a loin cloth.

He didn’t like this place. He was out of the cage, but the room was still a fucking prison cell. He was tempted to attack the walls just to see how long it would take him to claw his way out—or for one of the guards to come in and try to stop him. But that was Organization thinking. He needed to keep it together and remember that this was a different beast. A different battle. A battle to take down the Organization once and for all.

The chair was in his path. The chair where they’d bound Grace. A growl rippled up his throat.

“Dominec.”

He stopped in his prowl a couple feet from Grace, turning to meet her concerned gaze. “What?”

“Your eyes are still doing that thing.” She closed the distance between them. “Are you all right?”

He would not tell her about the nightmares, about the echoes of the past waiting to drag him under. He wouldn’t mention the blind, animalistic panic he’d felt when he saw her fall or the way his being had splintered with the fear. No one could know.

“I was worried about you,” he said instead. Which was true—in a grossly oversimplified way.

“I’m fine,” she soothed. “It takes more than some wolves on a jumped up power trip to rattle me.”

“I know. But I still want to kill them all for touching you.”

Some emotion flickered behind her eyes, gone before he could identify it. Replaced by a smartass grin. “Did you really bite one of them?”

“Nearly took his arm off.” He shrugged. “I was trying to kill him.”

“You should probably try to sound a little more apologetic when you say that to our new wolfy friends.”

“They aren’t our friends. And it’s not like you’re a shining example of tact and diplomacy.”

Her gaze slid sideways to the door, before coming back to his and when she spoke her words were nearly subvocal. “Do you think they’re working with the Organization?”

“It doesn’t smell like it.” There was a stench to the Organization facilities that wasn’t present. Here there was only the scent of wolves and rock and damp. Even the tranquilizers they used had a different scent than the Organization’s preferred chemical cocktail. “But I still don’t trust them.”

“Yeah,” Grace agreed. “Me either. But what better choice do we have?”

The door burst open and the double-vision twins entered, along with Kelly who surged in, eyes frantic until he spotted his prize. “Grace, thank God.” He rushed toward her, arms outstretched.

Dominec growled.