the air.
We hadn’t gone far.
Keeping my body still, I tracked a pair of feet as they moved around me. Dusty brown men’s work boots with scuffed toes. Whoever this was wore paint-stained jeans and smelled male.
I wanted to remember his scent so I’d be able to hunt him down later, but once the aroma of magnolias was gone, it was replaced with the pungent reek of men’s body spray. So much of it, I couldn’t make out his natural body odor.
These guys were smart.
They smelled like sexual predators looking for easy prey on Bourbon Street, but they planned ahead. After he showered I wouldn’t be able to find his real smell again.
The man crouched in front of me, his face hidden behind a black ski mask. Brown eyes that might have been warm in other circumstances met my angry glare without blinking.
He wouldn’t have been cocky if I wasn’t tied up.
“You’re awake. Good. It took a lot of effort to bring you down. I was worried they might have really hurt you.” He brushed my bangs away from my face. I flinched but couldn’t recoil. “You don’t look like much, but you’re a scrapper.”
“You don’t look like much either.” I growled after saying it, in spite of the way my throat protested.
The area around his eyes bunched, and I realized he was smiling.
The urge to smash him in the face was so intense my body vibrated from trying to hold still.
“Still got some fight in you. Isn’t that sweet?”
Condescending prick was going to find out exactly how much fight I had in me as soon as I was free. I’d like to see if he was smiling after I turned his large intestines into an infinity scarf.
“If you let me go, nothing will happen to you,” I lied. “I just want to go back to my people.”
“You don’t have people.” His tone was suddenly cold and scary, and I didn’t like the way he said people, like he was mocking me. At first I was terrified he was suggesting Wilder was gone or something had happened to Cash. Then his meaning sank in, and it was much more obvious.
I didn’t have people because I wasn’t human.
Lowering my eyes to the floor beneath me, I focused on the black bloodstain. How many other non-humans had hung here before me? How many lives had these people decided weren’t important because we were different? I thought I might cry again, but this time the tingling had moved from behind my eyes and into my hands.
Not the tingling of feeling returning to my extremities, either.
If this guy didn’t want to deal with me as a werewolf, fine. But I had other ways to make him suffer.
“You’re going to want to let me go,” I said quietly. “And my friend too.”
“Oh? And why would I do something like that when I went to all the trouble of tying you up so nicely?” He ran his finger over the rope at my throat. Our eyes locked, and he seemed to be challenging me to stop him because he knew I couldn’t.
Takes a really tough man to challenge a lady when she resembles a Thanksgiving turkey.
“If you let me go, I won’t hurt you. I won’t make you suffer. I’ll walk away with my people, and I will pretend this town never existed. That you never existed.” I almost believed it myself. It might work. If I was released, I could leave. Take Cash and the Shaws and go.
Somehow, given my current circumstances, I didn’t think walk away was in the cards.
His loss.
The tingling in my fingers got worse. If not for the other sensations in my arms and legs, it might have even hurt. Instead it just woke me up, made me feel alive. It gave me something to focus on other than what he’d done to me.
“You’re not going to let me go, are you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not a chance in hell.”
I smiled at him, and he must not have expected it because the uneasiness in his eyes was obvious. “Good. I might have felt bad otherwise.”
He stood up, moving out of my sight, and when he came back, he was holding a huge hunting knife. My limbs twitched in response, but I couldn’t do anything to get away or move my body out of his range. If he wanted to cut me wide open, there was nothing I could do to stop him.
“Now, I want you to tell me where your