Chapter 3 Looming Threat on the Way

Looming Threat on the Way

Nyla's POV

“Get away from me.” I said it as firmly as I could, though my voice cracked halfway through. I tried to move, but my hand only tightened uselessly on the throttle. The tank was empty. There was nowhere to go.

One of them stepped down from his bike and came forward, smiling like he'd caught something he intended to eat.

“Hey! Bitch,” he said.

They climbed off their bikes slowly, taking their time, like men who already knew nobody was getting away. Six of them at first, then two more. Their leather vests were covered in patches I didn't recognize, sewn over older ones that had been torn off.

Cold crept down my spine.

It was the smell that reached me first, lingering under the engine oil and road dust. My wolf wasn't reacting with recognition. She was reacting with unease.

Then I understood. Wolves, but wolfless. Rogues, the same as the man who'd left me here not ten minutes ago.

My wolf caught the fading trace of what they'd once been, like a memory that refused to disappear completely. Wolves who'd lost their packs, and somehow lost the ability to shift with them. Stripped of rank, of bond, of the part of themselves that made them whole.

They were fearless because they had nothing left to lose, and that made them the ones to fear the most. 

“Well, look at this damsel.” One man had a scar pulling his mouth permanently sideways, like he was always half-smiling at something cruel. He circled my bike, running a finger along the tank like he was deciding how best to take it from me. “This is a hell of a machine for a girl alone on a dead road.”

“It's not for sale,” I said. “Move out of my way.”

“Didn't ask if it was.” Another one laughed behind me, ugly and low. “We don't really do asking out here, sweetheart.”

And that was when the doubt hit me, worse than anything the men circling me could do. Damon had left. He walked off into the dark and told me to wait. What if this was exactly what he'd planned? What if the second he was out of sight, he'd called his own men down on me, so he could stand somewhere close by and watch me squirm before he decided what I was worth to him?

Why had he stopped at an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere instead of taking me straight to wherever the Iron Veil lived? Why leave me alone in a place like this when he knew people were hunting me?

A shiver ran through me.

Maybe none of this had ever been about protecting me and I had been fooling myself from the very beginning.

To Damon, I might not have been a woman who needed help. I might have been nothing more than a stranger who had stumbled into his territory by accident. A new toy to keep him entertained for a while.

I hadn't trusted him but some small, stupid part of me had let my guard down enough to believe he wasn't going to hand me straight to something worse than Calder. Maybe that had been my mistake all along.

More of them moved closer, spreading out unhurried, and every step made my heart slam harder against my ribs.

“See how daring she looks,” one of them murmured, close enough that I felt his breath. “Out here all on her own. She must have a good thing to feast on.”

“Christ, Tully, look at her face.” A heavyset man near the pumps grinned like he'd stumbled onto something rare. “She's perfect. We don't get pretty things like this out here.”

“Maybe the moon goddess is finally being kind to us,” the scarred one said, and the others laughed like starving men who'd finally found a meal. “An expensive bike and a pretty woman, all in one night. Boys, I think we just got rich. She's gonna keep us all warm this winter.”

They all laughed again.

I forced my back straight, forced my face calm even as my pulse roared in my ears. My wolf snarled beneath my skin, pacing hard, desperate to break free and tear through every single one of them. Instead she was trapped, same as me.

“Touch my bike,” I said, “and you'll lose your hand.”

That only made them laugh harder.

“She's got fire,” the scarred one said, delighted, stepping closer. “I like women who play hard to get. The harder you resist, the more it turns me on.”

Hands reached for the handlebars. Another man's fingers stretched toward my arm. They closed in so fast my chest locked up completely, and behind them, engines revved into a wall of noise. I could smell cheap liquor on someone's breath, feel the heat of too many bodies pressing in where there should have been an open road.

They spoke over each other, over me.

“Sweetheart.”

“Pretty thing.”

“You're ours now.”

The words blurred together into one long, ugly sound. I could barely tell one voice from the next anymore.

My head was already pounding before they'd closed in. I was exhausted, the nausea that never fully left no matter how many times I told myself I was fine, the grief I hadn't let myself feel yet, and now this… it was all pressing down on me at once, and I felt the world start to tilt. I hadn't eaten since the small breakfast I'd forced down that morning because I was filled with joy, back when the biggest thing on my mind had been whether my hair would hold its curl through the ceremony.

Everything lurched sideways. The gas station lights smeared into long streaks. The faces around me blurred into one shape I couldn't separate anymore. I tightened my grip on the handlebars.

Then, behind the circle of bikes and men, another engine tore through the night.

“Let her go!”

Damon's voice rolled across the gas station like a storm breaking overhead, and the effect was instant. The men around me went silent, their voices dying mid-word, like an invisible hand had closed around every throat at once.

They stepped back.

“Alpha,” one of them muttered, and then another, the word passing through the circle until every one of them had said it, backing away with their heads bowed like they'd forgotten themselves for a moment and just remembered who owned this stretch of road.

My mind should have caught on that word. I already knew what he was. But hearing it said out loud, watching grown rogues fold like that in an instant, and the sound of his wolf when he told them to let go was the last thing I understood clearly… Damon might not be completely wolfless.

The streetlight above me swayed. I couldn't tell anymore where its weak light ended and the dark began. The engines melted into one long roar pounding behind my eyes.

My fingers loosened on the handlebars without my permission. My strength drained out of my hands all at once.

The world tilted hard, and then it was gone.

I fell, and the darkness swallowed me whole.