Knox (The Boundarylands #12) - Callie Rhodes Page 0,4

away but coming in hot. It only took another minute for them to roar so loud that he had a feeling every brother clear down to the midlands was throwing back the covers, pulling on their boots, and readying themselves for a fight.

Make that a war.

The betas had finally come, and in true beta fashion, they were about as subtle as a hickey on a priest's neck.

Slamming the nearly empty bottle of rye down on the empty roadhouse bar, Knox grabbed his keys and headed for his truck. Within seconds, he was burning rubber down the Central Road while the rest of his brothers were still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

The night might have started out dead boring in an empty roadhouse, but it was promising to end strong. Especially if he could beat the rest of his alpha brothers to the betas.

A smile lifted Knox’s lips at the thought. He liked being first, even if it meant facing dozens of those beta bastards on his own.

Especially if it meant that.

Unfortunately, the helicopter didn't stick around very long. Only seconds after Knox heard the landing gear strike pavement a few miles away, it lifted off again.

Knox tried to temper his disappointment with the knowledge that they'd be back. Once those cowards got a bug up their asses, they were annoyingly dogged about seeing their plans through to the end, even though it often meant losing their lives in the process.

Unfortunately, those little toy soldiers could do a hell of a lot of damage first, something that had become clear over the last year.

And they'd also gotten sneakier, a thought that brought the smile back to Knox's face when it occurred to him that even though the pilot had headed back, others might well have stayed behind.

His suspicions were confirmed a couple miles down the road when he detected the first scent of a single beta, confirming that at least one of them had been left behind. That ridiculous blend of courage and fear that got them in so much trouble hung heavy in the air.

No matter how dominant betas pretended to be, biology always proved otherwise.

Knox pressed the pedal to the floor while inhaling deeply. Even as he approached the site of the landing, he could still only detect a single beta. Betas rarely worked alone—like an infestation of rats, where there was one, there were bound to be others hiding in the shadows.

But the lack of scent didn't mean much. Recently, beta scientists had perfected scent blocking technology, something the alphas had learned the hard way when a brother down in the midlands got ambushed.

As Knox drew closer, he detected something else in the beta’s scent: fresh blood. There wasn't much, certainly not enough to suggest that the beta was about to die from his injuries.

Knox rolled his eyes. Idiots. Leave it to a beta to injure himself within his first few moments in the Boundarylands.

He was prepared for a shit show when he came barreling around the last turn, but what he saw nearly knocked him off his feet. He slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop only a few feet from the pathetic figure in the middle of the road, who was illuminated in sharp relief by his headlights.

There was no battalion of soldiers waiting for him. No tactical agents in combat gear. No high tech communications devices and weapons.

Just one skinny-ass woman dressed in torn red flannel pajamas struggling to keep her footing on the icy road…something that would have been a lot easier if her hands weren't cuffed behind her back.

Those leg irons probably didn't help either.

Shit.

Knox sighed. He'd raced over here expecting to pound out several months' worth of pent-up aggression, only to find out that the betas were playing one of their stupid-ass games again.

When was he going to learn—those fuckers were nothing if not consistent. Consistently hypocritical, in this case. For months, the beta government had claimed that their reason for punishing the residents of the Boundarylands was to protect the safety of vulnerable beta women.

It would be a lot easier to believe if they didn't keep using those same vulnerable women as bait.

If Knox was the kind of guy who was known to do the smart thing, he'd shift the truck into reverse and head back home. He'd seen this kind of shit before, and he knew how it ended.

A few months back, some beta operatives had pulled this same crap, dangling a woman in front of his