Page 96 of Reaper's Pack

Declan was stronger than anyone had ever thought; he had just needed the chance to prove himself.

Well, the time was now—for all of us.

“And what will you do?” Gunnar asked, planted squarely in the middle of the portal. I had no doubt that should it open, he would plunge headfirst into the darkness to find her.

“I…” What would I do? Shaking my head, I looked to the west, to the coastal territory of the other Lunadell hellhound pack. “I’m going to fetch that reaper.”

“Alexander?”

“Yes, perhaps he can…” Everything inside me knotted at the thought of asking for help with this. “Perhaps he can do something we can’t.”

Disgust ripened in the pack bond. Each one of us loathed the idea of someone else, particularly another male, stepping in to rescue Hazel. After all, what sort of hellhound pack couldn’t protect their own mate? Pathetic. Relying on another? Pathetic.

But what choice did we have? If this was blood magic and he wasn’t the demon Heaven insisted he was, then this might be way out of our realm of understanding. Alexander was a pompous prick, probably the kind of reaper to shove a hellhound’s face into its own shit just to prove a point, but right now, he was our only option.

I turned away from the pack, seconds from teleporting, when agony sliced through my body. Up my midback, to the right. Like a blow to the kidney, painful beyond anything I’d ever felt.

As I collapsed to my knees, wheezing, clutching at the would-be wound, I knew in my heart that that pain was hers.

“Knox!”

Gunnar shot to my side, and when I peeled my hand away from what should have been a gaping wound, we found my usual tanned flesh—unmarked, uncut, unharmed.

The fucker was torturing her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Declan jogging in our direction, only to stop at the edge of the road. I waved him off, my order one that needn’t be said: stay with the scythe. Still, his concern rippled through our bond, and I could all but hear his hellhound form’s low whine at my distress.

“It’s fine,” I rasped, my breath slowly coming back, the pain ebbing—but barely. “I’m fine.”

“She isn’t,” Gunnar muttered. His hands skimmed along my forearm, like he was about to help me up, but he retreated at my low growl, leaving me to stand on my own. My beta rose swiftly and looked me dead in the eye. “The pain was Hazel’s… I felt it too—a little, anyway.”

I had been literally sliced open before, cut up and cut open for the amusement of demons; this agony had felt like someone had taken a blade and shoved it in as deep as possible, then twisted, just to make sure their victim was down.

To make sure Hazel stayed down.

Rage threatened to cloud my vision, but I blinked hard, trying to focus on the task at hand and not the fantasy of ripping that cut-up fuck into little pieces with my bare hands.

“Stay here until I return,” I snarled, the shift already upon me. Gunnar clapped my shoulder, a brother in arms to the very end, and stepped back.

“Hurry, Knox.”

Nodding, I dropped from two legs to four, claws hungry for that bastard’s innards. Hazel had told me where Alexander and his pack lived, and we had scented them out every time she took us into Lunadell. Teleporting to the property line would be a breeze.

Convincing him to help us find her, hopefully, would be just as simple.

If not, a certain reaper would taste my wrath long before the fucker who took her.

Eyes closed, I vanished from the scene of the crime, every second precious.

Praying, for the first time in my life, that we weren’t too late.

28

Hazel

I came to with that sickening sense of waking up in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room—the kind where your heart lurches and your mind races the second you regain consciousness.

Groaning softly, I stirred but struggled to lift my eyelids. They had never felt so heavy before, not even after a night of drinking and very, very little sleep.

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