be useful for once."
Chapter Twenty
Faust
It was several hours of cleaning and repairing the worst of the damage later before Knox decided to turn his attention to the hostage. If he'd known who the man was, he would've demanded to see him immediately, but I'd told him the hostage was unconscious, and we needed to remove the bodies from the woods—there had been many more soldiers than we'd suspected. Unknown to any of us, a second unit had been creeping through the forest toward the hotel, but Storri's beasts had taken care of them. Every person that had made it over the boundary was dead. Besides burning the bodies, making sure nothing in the hotel had been critically damaged was top priority.
And I'd needed more than a few moments to reconcile what I'd witnessed after jumping from the helicopter. I'd grabbed Dog, the twins had grabbed Pierce, and we'd launched out in opposite directions as a rocket zoomed toward us. I'd had enough time to roll to a crouch, confirm neither Dog nor myself were dead, and lift my head before the forest exploded with sound and movement. At the center of it all had been Storri as I'd never seen him. Throbbing with pain, it hurt to look at him. It was a feeling I'd only ever witnessed once before, when it was clear that Quinlan was dead and Diesel had lost his mate.
Storri smelled like himself now, and I'd left him in our bed, resting with Dog. He'd better stay there too. He needed sleep, and Hallie had agreed to sit in the nursery for the next few hours.
When Knox was ready, I had him and Diesel meet me in the hallway on the unused side of the hotel.
"The twins are still in there?" Knox asked with his eyes on the closed door behind me. "You must not trust the man if we're here."
With as big as the hotel was, there were still large portions we'd done no more than make structurally sound before concentrating on the more used areas. These rooms were farthest from where the others. "It's complicated."
"I hate complicated," Knox growled.
There wasn't a great way to drop this bombshell, so I decided to give it to them straight, like they would me. "It's Pierce. He's alive. Portal had him underground in their Seattle compound. The twins said it looked like they'd been experimenting. He's in bad shape."
"Seattle?" Knox croaked, and I knew exactly why his face had gone white.
Pierce had been so close, for so long, being tortured, and we'd had no idea.
Knox pushed open the door, and the twins moved to the side, clearing the path to the bed. I'd asked Dr. Tiff to join the twins a while ago, and she backed away when she saw us.
"He's going to live," she announced quickly. "He's been beaten, several times and recently. Many of these cuts and bruises look new. Some are…older. His left femur is broken. I won't be able to tell more without an X-ray, but for the bone to still be broken must mean the injury happened in the jump from the helicopter…"
"Or?" Knox's voice was hard.
"Or it was broken and left to heal so many times his body is having trouble keeping up."
Pierce may have looked unrecognizable as the powerful alpha we remembered him as, but he was one of us, an alpha, our leader. And he'd been tortured for years.
Knox stopped at the side of the bed, leaving Diesel standing in the middle of the room. "When will he wake up?"
Dr. Tiff shook her head. "Hours? Days? Weeks? He's pretty banged up, Knox. The longer we let his body rest and heal, the better it will be for him. I'll need some different equipment and supplies, but I'll be able to monitor his healing here. Unless you want him taken to a shifter hospital."
"No, he stays here, on pack lands." His deep scowl remained on his face as he stared down at the battered remnants of our packmate. "Cuff him to the bed—"
"Knox—" Huntley disagreed.
Knox spoke louder to be heard over him. "We don't know what Portal has done to him. Five years is a long time. When he wakes up, if it's clear there's nothing scrambling his brains, then we'll uncuff him, but I'm not taking that chance."
This was still a happy moment, even if no one looked all that happy. We were relieved to have a packmate return, but until he was awake and talking, none of us would