The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (20 page)

‘Much as I’m aching to spend
the night flirting and ego-stroking with you girls,’ Connal said, ‘I’m here to
speak with Ash.’ His words turned from taunting to something softer when he
spoke her name and she looked up to find his steel-grey eyes settled on her
face. Ash couldn’t decipher the emotions in his gaze and they were gone when
she blinked. ‘Dance with me, Ash,’ he said gravely. It was more than a request.

He demanded and it cranked
her chin a little higher, levelled her glare more solidly on his face. Let him
burn in the laser heat of her anger. ‘I don’t like this song,’ she retorted. It
wasn’t quite a lie, the trance beat was tripping up the rhythm of her heart.
‘I’m busy, getting acquainted with these gentlemen. They actually
talk
to me.’ She stressed the word into an almost growl.

‘Research for your thesis, I
presume?’ His tone was laced with sarcasm.

‘I don’t want to dance with
you.’ Ash steeled her spine into titanium defiance, but his gaze was softening
and she could feel her resolve melt with it. The song switched in the strained
silence that followed, slowing and morphing, a mood ring to her turbulent
emotions.

‘Please.’ He spoke to her
with his eyes.

No
... It was in her head yet the word wouldn’t
translate to her tongue. Ash swallowed, the daggers in her eyes starting to
turn inwards. She hated him, for leaving her on her knees, for withholding
something her entire being knew was linked to her. Yet she still contemplated
going with him, that voice that had told her to run from the hospital was back
and urging her to give in, to trust, to get away from the couple of beefcakes
effectively caging her in. She was weakening the longer his gaze held hers.

It was the briefest second,
logged in time by the tensing of the powerful males at her sides, and then her
decision was made. Ash stood and took the easiest, less bulky path, around the
silver-haired gentleman. There was no resistance save for the rumbling growl
she told herself was just the hum of a ... generator? ... and then Fite’s
gloved hand circled her wrist, cool points of metal tapping on her pulse as his
fingers tightened.

‘You really don’t want to go
to him, Miss,’ he said. ‘He can’t be trusted.’

Ash narrowed annoyed eyes on
the hand that restrained her and, one by one, pulled up his metal fingertips.
Not that it did any good, she still had to murmur to him to please let her go.

His acquiescence was
immediate but reluctant, tamed only by the manners he managed to retain in the
company of his Ice-Age friend. Ash tripped hastily from the booth and circled
around onto the dance floor.

As she did, Fite, his face
cloaked in shadow, slowly drew two fingers across his neck in a cut-throat motion.
Connal flipped him the bird then walked backward onto the dance floor to stand
opposite Ash.

Time froze, the few inches
separating them a vast chasm of unvoiced antagonism. Connal was the first to
move, closing the distance between them while she stood rigid. He rested his
hands on her hips and Ash struggled not to soften beneath his palms. He circled
her waist and drew her closer. She let her eyes drift closed when his mouth
lowered to her ear, the scruff of his jaw grazing her flushed cheek. The
contact was incredibly intimate and loaded with tension. ‘You have to get out
of here, Ash,’ he breathed.

Ooohhh
... Tempering the urge to bite him, she snarled her
whispered anger against his ear. ‘Get out? The way you ‘got out’ of the
forest?’ Snapping mad, her nails dug into his shoulders. ‘You left!’

‘I came back, you were gone.
I can explain everything, if you just let me take you away from this place.’
His voice was rough with something unknown and she swallowed.

‘Explain? There’s a lot of
things you have to explain and I’m not going anywhere with you until you have.’
They were moving slowly, swaying an instinctive beat to the music that swelled,
hypnotic, around them.

Her body knew his. Raw
flashbacks to the forest flared in her mind, reminding her exactly how they had
fit together, how her spine had bowed in his hands. Hands that moved now to map
the curve of her ass and the backs of her thighs. The memories pulsed through
her like electrical echoes and her heart-rate rocketed.

‘I had to go, Ash. I could
have hurt you.’ There was a strain in his voice that made it husky and cracked.

‘Hurt me? Yeah, ‘cause I
remember, I was screaming for my life.’ Sarcasm dripped from her tone,
concealing a purr.

He raised one hand, the backs
of his fingers brushing her cheek, and swept her hair around the shell of her
ear. ‘I never left you,’ he said, ‘not really.’

His lips moved against the
silky heat of her skin as he spoke. It was such a contrast to the savage
collision of flesh that had brought them together in the forest only hours
before. His howl of pleasure still rang in her ears.

‘These men will hurt you.
They haven’t brought you here to give you answers.’ Urgency laced his harshly
whispered words. ‘Your friend, the doctor, is arranging your abduction as we
speak.’

‘He’s ... huh? He’s a
doctor.’
As though that makes everything better
. ‘He’s more likely to
put me in a straightjacket and settle me in a crazy cell than kidnap me.’ The
whole thing sounded ridiculous, but an underlying doubt crept in to tell her
she was missing something crucial.

‘A doctor on the surface,’
Connal said. ‘These men are traffickers, Ash. They traffic women. They hurt
women.’

‘The way you thought you’d
hurt me? Oh my God, you’re one of them, you’re a ... trafficker.’ The
accusation was a tremor in her voice. It didn’t ring true, because he was so
much worse. She was caught in a room full of devils, and he was the deep blue
sea, liable to drown her as soon as save her.

‘If I’d wanted to kill you,
we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

She wasn’t sure how they
were
having this conversation, spun so quickly on its head. From sex trade to murder
in the span of a few choice words. Ash wrapped her fingers in his dreads, the
coiled strands dark, wooly and soft. She tugged, harshly, demanding his
attention.

‘Kill me? No, you don’t want
to kill me, you just, what, need me to help you bury another body?’ She hissed
the end words, fisting his hair tighter until they were as close as they could
get with clothes on. She sizzled. Snapped in the tension that had gathered them
into their own bubble of angry frustration. ‘What do you want with me? I mean,
really. Who am I, some girl from across the sea, to you? Who are you? The Big
Bad, wolf-killing stalker. Who am I to every guy in this country who suddenly
decides he wants me? Wants me enough to pin me in an alley, or touch my coat
and invite me home? Is it just here? Or am I suddenly beautiful everywhere?’
She scoffed, paused to draw a breath heavy with his scent. ‘Ever since I set
foot in this place, I’ve been attacked and stalked, buried a giant fucking
wolf-thing, been left in a forest and now you’re telling me a doctor and his
Storm-trooper macho-men want to kidnap me? Who the hell are you?’ Her voice
rose in temper.

‘I am your worst nightmare,
Ash, and your only hope of getting out of here alive.’ Even in the face of her
anger, the breadth of his large hand fused to the base of her spine, dragging
her closer. His arm wound up in her hair, mirroring the grip she had on his
dreads and arching her throat. He forced her gaze back on him and she allowed
it, tears of frustration brimming.

‘I need you to see, Ash. You
coming here was no accident. There are no coincidences. Everything that’s
happened, everything, is connected. I told you the truth. I am a hunter. You
saw that beast with your own eyes. Look around you now. There is only one
predator here, Ash, and right now, you are the prey.’

Ash didn’t want to look. If
he wasn’t crazy, if she wasn’t crazy, then there was a real possibility of her
turning her head and being plummeted into a nightmare.

To look now would break this
heated intimacy between them that was rapidly coalescing into something more
than anger.

Risking a glimpse, it was
nothing more than a fluttering of her lashes over her shoulder. His
tsk
of disapproval sounded close to her ear.

‘Look closer, use your
vision. Look beneath the shell. Check out your new friends now, Little Red.’

Her fist clenched in the
falls of his hair, bracing against his body, stoking up some nerve to just
look. ‘Dude, you’re whacked, they’re just ...’ She took one hand from his hair
and waved it at the table. Her voice trailed off, eyes following the path of
her dismissal to catch and look closer.

The club could have dropped
out of existence, the world could have exploded, Connal could have grown
another head and she wouldn’t have noticed. The universe stopped.

Nightmares flickered where she’d
been sat. The males were human in looks, broad and tall as they had been. There
was just something amiss. Like a second image superimposed and living over the
first. Not human. So far from it, the figures beneath could have been stick men
in comparison to the bestial visage. Huge, furred with thick pelts and long
limbs, handsome faces disappeared under the long wolf-like muzzle of a creature
she shared her sleeping mind with. The thing they’d buried could have been a
smaller cousin. It had lacked the bulk of these males, hadn’t the wicked talons
curving from hands that were more paw than human appendage. They were
monstrous, as monstrous as her nightmares had shown her. More upright, with
squared jaws that crushed like a wolf’s couldn’t.
Fuck no.

Ash scrabbled at Connal’s
chest, clawed into his shirt, her blood ice-cold and dragging any colour she
may have had from her face. She could feel shock setting in, her vision
blurring, choking on the frantic words she threw at him.
‘Getmethefuckoutofhere!’

 ‘S
hit, I can hear them following.’ Panic leached into
her voice as he steered her through the maze of corridors, hustling past the
thralls
who wandered the halls of Form like stoned stripper extras from a zombie flick.
She did a terror-clouded double take at a couple; the female’s foggy eyes
lighting up a split second before she sank her teeth, with a throaty,
sex-filled moan, into the neck of the wolf grinding her through a wall.

‘They can’t touch us until we
get outside,’ he replied.

She threw him a puzzled look
as he pushed through a set of double fire doors.

‘This place is what you might
call neutral territory.’

‘Territory? What is this,
some gangland turf war?’ she asked. ‘Why don't we just call the police?’

He cut her a look that could
have iced Hell over and he saw her bite back another question. Connal marched
her forward and rewarded her patience with a brusque answer.

‘These things have no respect
for the law, Ash. They don’t have an issue with collateral human damage. You
want to sign some beat cop’s death warrant? Be my guest.’

‘Well not to be Captain
Obvious here, but what exactly happens when we do get outside?’

‘Liath is waiting in the
alley with a car.’ Connal was all focus, his jaw set with grim determination.

‘Liath?’ Ash grabbed his
bicep in a vain attempt to divert his attention to her, but he pushed on and
she stumbled behind him with a huff.

‘She called me when you went
below deck with Dr. Frank-N-Flirter,’ Connal replied.

‘Fuck, is there anybody here
not stalking my every action?’

The petulance in her voice
got his hackles up. ‘Liath is risking her ass to get you away from here.’

Ash fell silent. Connal
punched through the emergency exit and they spilled out into the night. The
beat-up yellow Ford Fiesta was there, engine idling, coughing up tarry fumes
that tainted the air. He popped the passenger door and Liath’s blonde head
dipped, jade eyes met his, betraying the urgency they all felt.

‘Take her home Liath. Don’t
stop for anything, and when she’s locked inside, you pick up Josh and head on
over to your mother’s. You’ll be safe there.’