Page 43 of Rabid
It’s a challenge, but there’s something underlying there, something that makes me fidget on my high horse.
“What...what’s your full name?” I ask lamely.
“Tyran Bauer. Age thirty-two. I’m a fucking Leo. No siblings, I’ve been alpha for ten years, and no, I won’t apologize for taking this pack from my old alpha and killing the bastard,” he says without hesitation. “You?”
God, we’ve already fucked and knotted, argued at every turn, and now we’re doing this weirdget to know youtalk? Everything is so ass backwards.
“Uhhh, Seneca Rain...and I’m a Pisces?”
He repeats my full name so quietly that I can’t even hear it, but my eyes drop to watch his lips as they form the words, and my stomach tightens at just how sensual it seems.
“Tell me who you are, Seneca Rain. Tell me why you’re so fucking angry.”
My eyes flash with heat for a half-second at his question, but I manage to hold back my wolf. “My pack dumped me here, isn’t that enough?”
Tyran tilts his head. “Maybe.”
“What about you? Why areyouangry?” I ask, turning it back around on him.
“Who said I was?” he retorts with a taunt. “Do monsters even feel anything?”
A sigh escapes me, and I run a hand down my face. These boiling emotions keep spitting over the edge, scalding me with every back and forth we hiss at one another. “Fine. No more gossip, no more assumptions. Tell it to me straight. Does Ruin Falls really kidnap shifters and kill their families?”
With twisted nerves, I wait for him to answer, hoping—
“Yes.” He answers in an instant, without shame.
My grain of hope is crushed.
“Why? How could you do something so horrible?”
The psychopath rolls his eyes, as if I’m overreacting. I take a step back, forgetting for a second that the cliff is behind me, but Tyran lurches forward and grasps my arm, yanking me forward against his chest. “Let go!” I squirm, heart racing from my almost-plummet, while also dealing with the need to get away from him.
“Relax,” he snaps, pulling me further away from the cliff before he lets me go. “We kidnap shifters who are being abused.”
My body instantly stops fighting him, and I look up at his face. “What?”
He nods. “We keep eyes out on the local shifter packs. If there’s an issue and their own packs won’t deal with it, we go in. Get them out, bring them here, and then we kill the bastards responsible without mercy.”
All I can do is stare at him as this information settles.Would’ve been nice if someone had rescued me.
“What about your pack members? Is it true they mostly live as wolves?”
“You want to judge them for embracing their shifter natures?” he asks with disdain dripping off his tone. “You, Miss Rabid Wolf, think you can look down on them for that?”
Shame and anger claw inside of me. “I’m trying to understand,” I snap.
“You have any kin left, Seneca Rain?” he asks instead.
My eyes shutter. “No.”
“Me either. My father died when I was young, and I barely remember him. My mother couldn’t cope without him and lived the rest of her life as a wolf, because the connection with her animal’s spirit was the only thing that kept her going,” he says, and my stomach drops at the deadpan way he says it—as if he’s learned to be numb to it. “Some pack members stay wolves because they’ve found peace in that side of their dual spirits. Some do it because they’re too afraid, feel too weak in their human bodies. You going to judge them for that? Judge my mother?”
I shake my head. “No, I—”
“You want to stand there like you’re so much better than Ruin Falls, even though you don’t know shit? You want to walk around like the world should be apologizing to you?” He makes a face of disgust. “Maybe you should take a good look at yourself and stop behaving like you’re ashamed of your shifter nature.”
“I’m not ashamed!”
