Page 39 of Pack Rage
“You really aren’t from here.” Her eyes were fixed on the metal tag at the top of my ear. “Why are you…How?”
“You smell that?” Mama whispered, interrupting us. She slid across the floor toward the girl, who went very still as Mama held out a hand. She offered her own after a second, and Mama gently lifted the blood-streaked arm to her nose, sniffing. “It’s him.” I moved a step closer and sniffed, too, his familiar sour odor with hints of tobacco and menthol wafting up not only from the girl, but also the laundry piled on the floor by my feet. I glanced at Mama, hoping she wasn’t losing grip on her lucidity with the stench of her mate so close.
“That asshole Callaway? You know him?” The girl let out a soft sob, and I padded across the room to sit beside her. This close, I could smell more than blood and laundry detergent. I could smell other things. Sex and sweat. Her thighs were marked, too, with blood and semen.
“Yeah, he’s my father, unfortunately.” When she flinched, I went on. “I might not have been honest about not killing people. If I see that fucker, I’m going to make the time to end him. What’s your name?”
“Vanya,” she whispered, her lips tightening as she shifted position and straightened her back. “I’m Vanya Volkovskaia. I was given to this corrupt pack four years ago. My father was told I would be a foster daughter here. But they only wanted me as a hostage, and a slave. I haven’t been outside this house since I was left here.”
“You work in the lower levels?” I asked quietly.
“I do. There and the kitchen. I take meals to the prisoners, and to the ‘guests.’ Your father?—”
“Call him Callaway, or the Rat Bastard. That’s what I did.”
She didn’t smile. “He’s the worst guest we’ve ever had. He sent two girls to the hospital. Twoshifters. I’d be down there now, if I hadn’t gotten locked out taking his laundry.”
“The doors automatically lock?” She nodded. “When they open, will you help us get inside? I need to rescue my mates from the lower levels. And my mama here?—”
Vanya’s eyes went wide. “He’s her mate?” Any normal wolf would want to rip out the throat of a woman her true mate had touched. Would demand revenge for the pain it would have caused. She must’ve known that, since she tried to scramble away.
I raced to reply. “He is, but you see her scars? All of those? He gave them to her. She knows what he is. Her wolf knows. You don’t need to worry; she won’t hurt you. We just need a way in, and when we leave, you can come with us.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” she whispered. “But if you promise to kill him… Him and as many of the others you can—Enforcers, all of them. Not the Alpha Heir, if you can help it, though. He’s the only one who’s ever kind.” Her nose wrinkled.“I’m not sure how those two evil ones had a son like that, or a daughter that’s even kinder. She got out, though. That’s why we’re locked down. She escaped, and her parents went to find her. I bet her brother helped her run.”
“Tana, right?” When she nodded, I grinned. Tana being safe made our own escape a little bit easier. “I wish I’d met her. I know her brother pretty well. He’s kind of stuck up, but he grows on you after a while, right?”
She gave a tired smile, as she slumped back down. “Sorry, I’m tired. I have to rest to heal.”
“You’ve never shifted?” Mama asked quietly, moving even closer. She raised an eyebrow, and when Vanya nodded curiously, she placed a hand on the center of the girl’s chest. “You have a very strong wolf. Very powerful.”
Vanya did smile then. “My mother came from a royal line, she used to tell me. Kings and Queens, in the time before Alphas.”
“Alphas and Alpha Mothers,” Mama whispered. For a moment, I thought she was going to do something else. She pressed her other hand to her own chest and inhaled, but then her eyes got hazy, and she shook her head like she was clearing away cobwebs. “We’ll kill them all, princess.” Lifting one finger to the girl’s face, Mama traced the path of a tear down her cheek. “We’ll do the moon’s justice for you and all the others.”
She tucked Vanya under one arm, the rumbling dryer behind her back as we spoke softly about what we needed, and made a far better plan than the one I’d come up with. There were maid’s uniforms in the room, real ones with the Eastern crest, though there were black trousers as well as skirts. Small favors.
Vanya would be sent back to the lower levels with food as soon as the locks opened. “I can’t get you in,” she admitted. “They only let one in at a time, and only a few of us have clearance. The guards have silver, by the way. There’s a lot ofsilver down there; some of the rooms stink of it. Anyway, once you get inside, even if youcanget past the guards, there’s no hope that you can get back out, not alive.”
“No hope, huh?” I murmured absently, closing my eyes and thinking of my mates as the rumbling of the dryers and the warmth of the room began to lull me to sleep.
“Hope is a trick,” she replied, her voice sharp. “Hope is the thing that traps girls like us. Makes us think there’s something better around the corner. That someone will save us.”
My eyes snapped open, and I turned my head to her. She sounded so much like me, only a few months ago. Certain that the only thing that lay ahead was more of the same torture I’d known up to then. Sure that I had no friends left in the world, once Del had been killed.
“Hope is the thing that’ll save us,” I said, tasting the truth in my words for the first time. “We have to hope that the moon is with us, and that we can change this shitty world the older shifters have stuck us with. If we don’t have hope, we won’t have energy to move the mountains of bullshit out of our way, and start making the packs do what they were always meant to do. What they’re fucking for, in the first place. Toprotect.”
“The pack protects,” Mama agreed, moving between me and Vanya. “And a pack can be small. Two wolves, even. Or three. Come on, now. We’ll need our rest for the fight ahead.” She held out her free arm to me, and I inched closer, moving carefully to keep from jostling her wound. Then I rested my head on Mama’s shoulder, and Vanya half-crumbled against her chest as she began to hum the lullaby she’d sung to me.
We woke a few hours later,though we’d taken turns getting up to switch the dryers back on when they finished their cycles. The noise and smell of them protected us as much as anything. Most of the day had gone, and we took turns in the small toilet, then put on the maid uniforms, waiting for the lockdown to end. I had to help Mama into the black trousers and shirt, since she was weak, and her wound had bled an alarming amount. She swatted my hands away when I went to check it, though.
“Mind yourself. We don’t have time to fuss.” I liked her scolding me. It felt like the kind of thing a normal mother would say, a thing she’d never really said before. “Now help me stick this to my back,” she told me, picking up her sword from the floor. I’d almost forgotten she had it; I’d left my own with Sergeant.
She turned around, lifting her white maid’s shirt. The scars went all the way around her ribcage and up and down her back. A brand-new surge of hatred for the Alpha who’d done this to her—beginning when she wasn’t even as old as I was now—had me tasting bile. I pushed the rage down, storing it with all the rest of my hatred for him, as I made sure my own steak knife was hidden under my clothing. He’d answer for his crimes soon enough.
I shoved my backpack under some dirty clothes, and had no sooner buttoned up the too-loose white shirt than a bell in the house rang, and a voice from inside shouted, “Back to work.”
“Gotta hurry or they’ll come looking.” Vanya quickly sprayed some fabric softener on Mama’s clothes to obscure the scent ofblood, then splashed some on me. It smelled awful, and far too strong. “So no one wants to get close, if they see a new girl,” she explained. “That’s it. We can go in now.”
