He couldn’t let that happen, so he had to fake it. All they knew was that he’d escaped from the city. They had no way to know how long he’d been in there. They couldn’t know that all he knew about how packs worked and how life worked was from fragmented childhood memories, instinct, and the tiny bits of conversation he’d picked up over the years in the yard from his runs.
Many of his fellow prisoners had been taken as adults. They had entire histories to reference back to. He’d listened to them talk and had practiced sounding like them because if he didn’t, he’d known when he broke out of there, he’d sound like some stiff robot and would never be able to successfully blend into life anywhere.
Noah thought back to the escape. In so many ways they’d been lucky. He’d been terrified they wouldn’t make it past the service elevator. And then what would happen to Sydney? He’d long ago stopped caring what happened to him. If his escape wasn’t successful, he’d be happiest dead, but Sydney had given him the will to believe failure wasn’t an option. Failing himself was nothing, but if he failed her…
He’d never killed anyone before. When the guard had grabbed Sydney and took advantage of Noah’s distraction to jerk her free of him, he’d reacted on instinct. And in the lobby, he’d known it was them or Sydney. As he’d scooped her out of the laundry bin and run for the door, he’d glanced back at the macabre tableau he’d created with fangs and clawed hands. Why didn’t he feel anything?
Shouldn’t he have felt guilt, remorse, horror? Something? But he was blank. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to feel about it. But if he could just flip like that, fly into a rage and take dozens of people out, was Sydney safe with him?
He’d become too anti-social locked away from the world, isolated even from his fellow prisoners. It was too many years without any socialization. The orders and routines had substituted for pack hierarchy, and for a while it had fooled some part of his brain into going along with it.
He’d spent years repressing everything inside him that screamed to fight, because he’d known it was the wrong time to fight. He would only lose, and he shouldn’t start a fight he couldn’t win. But tonight, all the pent up aggression and rebellion rose up out of him with the power of the moon, and he’d reacted. It was as if an invisible trigger had been pulled. He’d gone from mild-mannered, quiet Noah, to crazy-killing-machine Noah in an eye-blink.
He looked up to find the alpha striding toward him. For whatever reason, she was running this pack alone, and he smelled the fear on her. If he could smell it, just having met her, he knew her pack could smell it. He knew she feared losing her wolves to him, but at this point, she may as well fear losing it to any one of the werewolves in the bar. If there was one thing he remembered from his dad, it was that the alpha couldn’t show fear to anyone.
Even if no one was waiting in the wings to take over, it de-stabilized the pack and introduced petty squabbling among the other wolves, testing boundaries, trying to find a barrier they would bounce off of so they could feel safe and cohesive again.
Shira scanned the room. Noah felt a wall go up around her as she pushed the fear down and tried to cover it. But she wasn’t nearly the expert at covering emotion that Noah had become, and everyone had already seen it.
They watched curiously as she sat in the chair across from him. A small table separated them. He didn’t say anything. He knew everyone in that bar watched him with as much scrutiny as they watched her. He wouldn’t speak first no matter how much he wanted to start figuring out how he’d get back home. Let her set the parameters of their engagement.
“I’m Shira,” she said for the second time that night. “This is my pack. Since you’re my guest, don’t you think you owe me a name?”
Noah considered giving her the number tattooed on his arm. But baiting her would be stupid right now if he still wanted her help. He needed transportation and a plan. If her pack had been holed up here a while—and it looked as if they had—they’d know where he could get the things he needed for the trip.
He watched her discomfort grow as he stared at her. Finally he said, “Noah.”
She still wore the black leather pants her pack had tossed her. But she’d changed into a more revealing top and had added boots and some gold jewelry to the mix. And make-up. Her smokey eyes and bright red lips were an orchestrated seduction, meant to draw him in. She formed her words slowly, and leaned in toward him.
“So, how did you meet the girl?”
Noah stared at Shira, his expression closed. He wasn’t going to play this game. Sydney wasn’t her business, and he wouldn’t give the alpha even the smallest tidbit of information that she could use in whatever her plan was. But he thought he knew. Though he’d been blocked off from the world, there were some things you just knew without knowing how you knew them.
When she saw she wasn’t getting anywhere via that route, she unbuttoned another button on her top. “Wow, it’s hot in here. The desert. You never get used to this heat.”
If that was the case, she shouldn’t be wearing leather pants and boots. Werewolves ran hotter, anyway.
She scooted her chair closer and ran a long red fingernail down the side of Noah’s throat.
He growled. “I told you, Sydney is mine.”
“You haven’t marked her,” Shira said.
“Not yet.”
“And even so, it doesn’t mean you can only have one. You can have whatever you want. Why don’t we move this conversation somewhere more private?”
Someone casually observing might guess that her desire for privacy was rooted in seduction, but Noah sensed it was because she feared he’d shoot her down in front of her pack. After all, he’d already given her a warning growl.
“I’m fine right here,” he said.
She leaned in even closer, her breasts brushing his arm as she whispered, “She’s too weak for you. You and I could run this pack.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid I’ll try to take it from you otherwise? Don’t worry, I have no designs on your pack.”
“A bit presumptuous don’t you think? I run a big pack with several decent fighters. You think they’d submit to my leadership if I weren’t strong enough to lead? This isn’t the human world. I couldn’t have slept my way to the top even if I’d wanted to. You saw me reclaim my human form out there when no one else could.”
Noah turned fully toward her, pinning her to her seat with a glare. “I know we both sized each other up out there under the moon. I was born in my fur. Tonight is my twenty-eighth birth moon. And it’s a blood moon. I escaped a heavily guarded facility, leaving dozens of bodies in my wake. You might be strong enough to lead, but we both know you’re just trying to seduce me because you think I’m going to take your pack from you. Between us, you know I would win in a challenge fight. And I think you’re smart enough to know I wouldn’t pull my punches. After all, it would be disrespect to hold back just because you’re a woman when you’ve proven you can hold a pack on your own.”
Her manipulative pout morphed into a snarl. “I shouldn’t have extended hospitality to you. I should have just let you and your girl die out in the desert. Between the vampires and the human magic users coming from the city, they would have ripped you apart.”