Page 17 of Rabid
Burke’s angry steps sound like cannon fire as he leers over me, more gauze pressed to his neck. Once again he bends down, but I’m too battered to take advantage of his closeness this time.
“You will fucking submit!” he yells into my face, but this time it’s not power he’s radiating as he bellows the command. It’sfear. I can smell it leaching out of him, and it’s cloying. So potent I can taste it.
And that taste, that response from this joke of an alpha, it sinks into me, charging me with a burst of power. I spit the blood in my mouth at his feet and lock eyes with him.
“No.”
My response is more growl than word, more wolf than woman. A flip has switched, pure animal instinct overtaking my humanity, fed by the weakness of his fear.
My vision breaks, sways, fractures. Fur begins to sprout over my body, and my mouth begins to froth. Eyes burn with a glow that blazes hotter than that violet flame during the Flux, so searing that it feels like I’m seeing through the heated fires of hell. My chest pants, my throat roars, all consideration of pain and injury shoved aside as the need for blood, the need tokill, is suddenly the only coherent thought I have.
Burke backs up so fast it’s like he’s a car hydroplaning over a wet road. Wide black eyes stare at me. “Impossible…” he whispers, but I barely hear him over the snarls in my burning throat. I feel wild, untethered, like something in me is spinning out of control, and yet, I’m so damnstrong.
It’s almost laughable that this stupid shit, Burke, thinks he has any power over us.Try again, little alpha wolf.
“Y-your eyes…” he stutters, shaking his head like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“Alpha?” Conrad calls, standing just outside the open door leading into this bare, frigid cell.
“Look at her eyes,” Burke hisses, expression turning to one of such disdain, if only to hide his panic. “Her transformation fucked up. She’s gone rabid.”
The male at the door blanches, eyes swinging to me.
The word bounces in my skull too loudly for me to grasp. But in this moment, Ifeelrabid. I feel irrational. Extreme.Savage.
“Hold your form!” Burke cries as more fur begins to erupt from my skin. He still doesn’t get that my shift wasmychoice, not his, so when nothing happens, understanding dawns in his heartless black eyes.
I’m stronger than him.
I leap to my feet, watching in satisfaction as my fingers curl into razor-sharp claws. He must anticipate I’m going to lunge for him, because he and Conrad are out the door and it’s slammed shut against me by the time my body hits it, teeth snapping at the place he just was.
There’s a small square of reinforced glass cut into the steel door, just big enough for Burke’s face to fill, to have me clawing at it as if I can drag my nails down his face instead.
“What are you going to do with her?” Conrad asks, his voice muffled behind the thick door, but not enough with my new wolf’s superior hearing. “Are you still going to claim her?”
“Claimthat?” Burke snaps, like the very idea is appalling. “Fuck no. She’s not worthy of me and my wolf. Not like this. She’s useless now.”
My nails dig into the glass with even more force, etching divots into it with every screeching scrape as I imagine gutting the male deigning to look at me like that whenhe’sthe one that forced me to snap.
“Should we put her down?”
That question sends me into a rage. I start snarling and clawing at the door harder. There’s no handle to grapple with on this side of the cell, so I start punching it instead. My half-shifted fists slam against the steel so hard that the metal starts to bend and dent.
“No,” Burke says, and I snap my teeth so close to the glass near his face that he flinches back. I give him a cruel, fanged sneer. Fury flashes through his eyes, and he glares me down. “No, I’m going to make sure she suffers.”
I hear him, but Idon’thear him at the same time. I’m too busy tossing my shoulder into the door, trying to break it down, too busy being completely overcome with this all-consuming animal hostility. I want to get lost in it, fall deeper, because there is power in this unhinged ferociousness.
Glittering, vindictive eyes hold mine, making me pause, and I watch the wheels turning in his mind. The smile that curves his lips is so cold that the temperature around me seems to drop. “I knowexactlywhat to do with a rabid bitch.”
He’s gone before I can snarl again, and someone flips off the light, trapping me in the concrete cage as the darkness swallows me whole. The lack of light is so encompassing that even my heightened sight can’t pick up anything.
And that vicious, burning part of me explodes with a terrifying howl that rattles the window and cracks the air. My savage fury is so loud that there’s no way the members of the Twin Rivers pack can run from it.
* * *
Isleep.
I wake.
