Page 40 of Never Tamed
Dax
Shefuckingdisappeared.
One second Red was curled up in the pit Mathis dug, tucked against his side, her scent wrapped around us. I let myself close my eyes for maybe a minute—long enough to drift on the sound of their breathing.
Then I jolted awake.
Because she was gone. Not a sound. Not a trace. Just an empty space where she’d been.
My heart lurches into my throat and lodges there, making it impossible to breathe. Nerves skitter to life.
I scramble to my feet with my head lifted to the night sky, dragging in a breath.
She couldn’t have been taken, not with all of us sleeping right beside her. There were no signs of a fight. No blood. No foreign scents. I catch a whiff of her, fading fast, and follow it out of the pit toward a tamped down trail in the snow.
Which means she left on her own.
Fucking reckless move, if you ask me, but no one ever does.
I have no idea how she hadn’t woken us. Not evenme.
Maybe I’m losing my touch.
Impossible.
I shove the others awake, Noble with a well-placed nudge to his shoulder that’s only slightly less forceful than a kick. “Wake up, fuckhead, she’s gone.”
Torin is on his feet in an instant with Mathis only a second behind him. My alpha’s expression lifts the hair on the back of my neck.
“Dax.” He barks out my name. “Can you track her?”
I point to the trail. “What do you think I’m doing? She went this way.”
Torin strides forward. “She can’t have gotten far.”
I know better. Once we’re down the path, my nose is sharper, and the prints I tracked climb the ridge and weave through the trees with purpose. I can see it clearly.
Ren knew where she was going.
The storm picks up suddenly. The snow swallows everything, and we shelter against the trees as the wind picks up. Soon, the fucking snow erases it all—her scent, her trail, my goddamn patience.
Red’s trail vanishes into that whiteout like the forest opened its jaws and devoured her.
“Find her!” Mathis barks the command again and I want to strangle him.
Not for the first time.
The man is doing a fucking stomp on the last bits of my sanity. Within the hour, I’m chasing a ghost up a mountain with three wolves behind me, hoping like hell I will find her before something else does.
What in the fuck was she thinking?
Why would she go off and leave us this way?
I shake my head and howl. The storm steals the sound and carries it away. The others push closer, slightly behind me.
The wind cuts through my fur, and my lungs burn from the cold.Keep going.Keep running.
I sprint in the direction the prints were heading. Although why little Red would want to run up a mountain into the heart of a storm is fucking beyond me.
