Hungry Wolf - Aidy Award Page 0,45

joining the dark side just because it was too hard or it hurt too much to do what was right, that simply wasn't the wolf way.

“I'm no longer a wolftress, and you aren't a wolf. You'll see, Troika. You'll see.” She was almost angry in her despair.

Aleksei gentled his tone. If Taryn had been captured by this new faction that wanted to take down Niko as the Wolf Tzar and had kept her here, making her think she was no longer a wolf, they'd done a lot of damage to a woman who was once a savvy and powerful wolftress. “Of course we are. We were born shifters. No one but the Goddess can take that away.”

“Try to shift, try to even feel your wolf, then tell me you're still a child of the Moon Goddess.” Taryn spat out the words.

He closed his eyes to focus, and called on his wolf. All he found deep in his soul where the wolf lived was more darkness, total emptiness. He shuddered.

“It's not there, is it?”

What had they done to him, to her? “Who? How? Why?”

Aleksei could hardly get those questions out. All he could think about was this hollow place inside.

“The demon wolf.”

Umm. No. That wasn't a thing, and her saying something so crazy made his instincts flare back to life. No way he'd lost his own wolf, it was perhaps suppressed but he'd never believe it wasn't there at all. So, think. What was really going on here?

Niko had defeated an incubus who'd allied itself with some kind of demon dragon. They'd used the wolves as pawns in their own war. But when Niko became the Wolf Tzar, he'd extricated all of wolfkind from that game. That was the only demon Aleksei had ever heard of interfering with other supernaturals. Those kinds of creatures usually kept to themselves.

Except Taryn had grown up in Crescent Bay, or Cape Cod as it was known in the human world. It was well known that the King of the Incubus, Leon, had a home there with his demon family. The wolves had never had any trouble with any Incubus or Succubus. Why would they want to get involved in the aftermath of the pack war? That couldn't be it. Yet she'd called him a demon wolf.

“He's our master now.” Taryn sounded a bit maniacal now, and Aleksei was worried about how long she'd been here in the dark and if she'd developed some kind of Stockholm syndrome for this so-called demon wolf. “He's taken the power of your wolf and mine, and he wants more.”

Aleksei let the splices of information roll around in his mind. The Incubus demon Niko had defeated posed as a Volkov. Every wolf on the planet bowed to the Volkovs’ ancient power. The oldest among them, Rasputin, struck a deal with the devil to be practically immortal. Yes, this demon wolf had Rasputin written all over him.

There were not enough swear words in English or Russian to express the severity of their situation if Rasputin was behind the new faction of wolves and their imprisonment. He'd already brought down one Wolf Tzar for shits and giggles. He'd be much more dangerous if he was actually trying.

But Aleksei was making a lot of assumptions here, with only a wolftress under extreme duress for information. The only solution he could see to this problem was to figure out how to get the fuck out of this cage of darkness. So far that had proven impossible to even comprehend, much less strategize.

He sure as shit could use a good dose of Helena's kickass, take-no-prisoners sassy attitude right now. Since he didn't have her in person, he imagined the sweet scent and taste of her, pictured the way she grinned at him like they had a secret no one else knew, and clung to the soul-deep sense that the two of them belonged together.

What would Helena do?

She was all about the girl power. Possibly for the first time ever, Aleksei wished he had a vagina. Since it was unlikely he was going to grow one in the next few minutes, he had to go with what he did have. At the moment that was a pile of broken bones, a gaping chasm of darkness, a semi-carazy wolftress, and a whole lot of guesses as to who his enemy was and why he'd been captured instead of killed.

In other words, diddly squat.

He was fucked.

Aleksei wanted very much to live so that he could spend the rest