Quickdraw Slow Burn (Battle of the Bulls #3) - T. S. Joyce Page 0,48

lying in the dirt, with bright lights blinding her. There were men running around, but her vision was blurred.

Her head hurt so bad. So bad she closed her eyes and blinked hard a few times to clear the fog from her mind.

The buzzing got even louder, filling every corner of her head.

Take stock of your surroundings. She could hear Rork’s voice so clearly in her head, for a moment, she thought he was here with her. She blinked hard and scanned the arena, trying to shake off the fog in her head.

She focused on the men in front of her. Three were in the dirt, not moving. One was staring vacantly right at her, his face covered in red. They were dead. Several other men stood on the fence, looking in at them. Arrow was near them.

She was dreaming…right?

Four giant men were on the other side of the arena, and all were yelling as they held something down. No, not something. Someone.

They jerked Quickdraw out of the arena dirt and up on his knees. He was covered in blood, and the dirt stuck to the places on him that seeped red: a gash above his eye, deep slashes over his ribs. Red ran down his side, creating crimson mud on his body and beneath him. “Let her go!” he demanded, his face twisted with a wild fury she’d never witnessed before.

“You killed Jax!” one of the men yelled from where he was checking the pulse of the man staring at her with empty eyes.

“And two others,” Arrow said calmly from where he was filling a needle with a brown liquid from a vial. “Why the fuck would we let you go?”

“She’s waking up, boss,” a man said from too close to her.

Annabelle tried to get up, but she couldn’t because there was a boot pressed against her back.

No, no, no.

The boot eased off and the man beside her yanked her up, and she staggered to her feet, his hand too strong in her hair. He was definitely a shifter. A bear perhaps. He was too big and smelled too dominant to be a wolf. She sniffed again. There was another man behind her—the one who had held her down with his damn boot—and a human to her left.

“Let us go,” she murmured, but the words were hard to get out. When warmth trickled down the side of her face, she remembered the shovel.

Russ had betrayed them.

“Boss, what do you want me to do with her?” asked the behemoth holding her by the hair.

Annabelle’s eyes were watering from the pain as she held onto the man’s meaty wrist to try to take some pressure off. Her feet were barely on the ground.

It wasn’t Arrow who answered him, though. It was a man leaning against the back gate in the shadows. “She’s a werewolf. Give her Filsa.”

“You put that shit in her veins,” Quickdraw growled, “And I swear on my mother’s grave I’ll kill you all one at a time, and I’ll do it slow.” There was truth and promise in his voice.

“We ain’t dealing with some she-wolf changing in the truck,” Arrow sneered, tossing the empty vial to one of the other men along the fence. He squirted a few drops out of the sharp tip and then headed for Quickdraw.

Beside Annabelle, the human was rifling through a medicine bag.

Shit, shit, shit. “You can’t give me any drugs. Please!” It would hurt him. It would hurt her little boy.

“I’ll take hers,” Quickdraw bargained. “She won’t change. Annabelle,” he called, leveling her with a look. God, he was bleeding so much, and the right side of his face was swelling uncontrollably. He arched his eyebrows and begged her with his eyes. “Promise them you won’t change.”

“I can’t change if I tried,” she cried out, tears streaming down her face as she struggled away from the brute shifter holding her. He released her hair but gripped her arm so hard she knew he would snap it at any moment. When another pair of arms went around her from behind, she kicked and clawed at anything she could reach. “You don’t understand!” She looked in horror at the man who pulled a syringe out of the medical bag and jammed the needle into a vial. “You don’t understand!”

“I’ll take her Filsa!”

“Well now, that won’t work for us,” Arrow growled as he approached Quickdraw. “You’re not getting, Filsa. You’re getting something a little stronger.”

“Let her go right fuckin’ now!” Quickdraw struggled against the thick ropes