THE BROKEN WOLVES

Saige’s [POV]

“Witnesses reported seeing the red Porsche before. She was always in his lap on that bridge, having sex, most likely because what else would she be doing there?”

My eyelids flicker.

“You’d think the guy would at least remember to turn on cruise control or, you know, wait until he had her in a bed.”

A male snort is the only response.

I sense movement drift toward me, bringing with it a hotdog and onions scent strong enough for the person to have eaten minutes before. “Guess he just couldn’t wait.” A gaze sweeps my face. It’s so intensely penetrating that I want to lean away. “Not that I can blame him. If I had a girl who looked like that, I’d fuck her six ways from Sunday.”

“That’s hardly the professionalism I’d expect from a cop,” an amused voice says.

“She’s out cold, and as if I didn’t catch you staring at her tits. Just what the hell did they teach you at the Academy?”

“Fuck off, Bradley.”

Whoever tucked me in this bed did it so tightly I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. And I want to.

Bitter antiseptic, harsh soap, and that unidentifiable scent that tells me I’m in a hospital aren’t nearly enough to calm the sickness churning in my belly.

From further away, unhurried and deliberate footsteps approach my room. A door creaks open, letting in a cool wind. “Officers? Is there anything I can help you with? I’m Dr. Simon Trevor, the attending physician today.”

When the cooked meat and onion scent move away from me, I relax for the first time. “Just stopped by to question her.”

“Well,” the new voice says, “there’s been no change since the last time. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

This doctor doesn’t like these men. Maybe he heard what they said, or maybe he just doesn’t like cops in general. After what I just overheard, and from how little the cops I’ve known before have given a shit about people, I don’t like them either.

“Any idea when that might happen?” the one who smells of onions asks. Or is it the one who was staring at my tits?

“It could be tomorrow, it could be a week,” the doctor responds in that same cool tone.

“We need a name. A man is dead, and we need to know how that came to be.”

Felix.

My heart spikes and a sharp beeping machine silences all voices. Footsteps approach my right side and stop. Someone leans over me. It isn’t either of the cops because food smells or male sweat aren’t threatening to choke me. Just a woodsy cologne too faint to identify. Not overpowering. Nice.

“Is she waking up?” one cop asks, sounding like he’s moving closer.

“There’s no sign that she is,” the doctor murmurs as if distracted.

What is he doing? Reading the machine? What?

“But the machine. It—”

“Can often be triggered by unexplained brain activity. We see the same thing in our long-term coma patients. The machine sounds an alarm, but the patient sleeps on.”

A cool finger peels back the lid of my right eye and I stare up at a man in a white coat, a black stethoscope draped around his neck. Dark red hair, small brown eyes, and a pale face. Younger than I was expecting. He must be in his late twenties or early thirties. That’s all I see before the same finger drags my eyelid closed again.

“As I thought, she’s not ready to wake.”

He’s lying.

I feel lucid—aware enough—that one glimpse in my eye should have made that clear. And he didn’t shine the light that doctors like to blind you with. He didn’t check my pulse or do anything that I would expect a doctor to do.

He doesn’t want the cops to know I’m awake.

But why?

“Now, I have my rounds to make. Did you need me to show you the way out?” The doctor's voice is pleasant, friendly even, but I know he doesn’t mean it.

“No need.” The officer's voice is less pleasant because he knows he’s not wanted either. “We can find it. We’ll be back.”

Three sets of footsteps move toward the door and out of it. A soft click announces their departure and alone, at least for the time being, I let myself think about something I couldn’t before.

I’m still alive.

Felix is dead, but somehow, I’m still alive.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

A flare of hot pain stabs my right side. Gasping, my eyes fly open. White walls, white sheets, and a hard bed. Those are the things I noticed first.

Bent over me is the same brown-eyed, red-haired doctor from before.

For several seconds he gazes down at me without expression before he lifts his hand from my ribs and takes a step back. “Still tender?”

I don’t say a word.

“I’m Dr. Trevor.”

My eyes dart to the door and find it closed. The sheet pinning me to the bed has been peeled back, so that’s one less thing trapping me. It’s just the needle in the back of my hand that I’d need to deal with and I can make my escape.

“They’ve gone. You don’t have to worry about seeing any cops until you’re well.”

From the dim light which cast deep shadows around him, it’s later than it was before. It must have been the morning, or maybe lunchtime if the cop smelled like hotdogs and onions. Which means I must have fallen asleep or passed out.

I lick my dry, cracked lips. “What time is it?”

“Six. Dinner time.” He nods at the table beside my bed. I glance at it. Something rich and savory drifts from a white plastic-covered dome on a tray.

“Can I have a name?” He plucks a silver clipboard from lower down on my bed and waves it at me. “I won’t use it if you don’t want to, but we’ve got three Jane Does at the hospital this weekend and it can get a little confusing,” he says, a playful smile curving his lips.

His joke barely registers in my mind.

My stomach rumbles as if it’s only now waking up, but I don’t have time to eat. Even if I was starving, it still wouldn’t be my priority.

I’m alive when I should be dead, which means I’m going to have to move fast if I want to stay that way. And if Rylan isn’t here already, he soon will be.

The doctor clears his throat. “You’re a miracle.”

I dart a glance at him before shifting my attention to the white ceiling.

In a blue hospital gown, I’ll attract attention as I make my escape, but maybe I can sneak into the staff changing room, or steal another patient’s clothes since I doubt my dress and heels survived the crash. If I have to, I won’t bother with the change of clothes at all.

“Few people would survive a car crash like the one you did with so few injuries.” After a brief pause as if waiting for a response, he continues. “The fire department pulled you from the water. Between the shattered window and you floating free, it looks like you might’ve been flung from the car before it hit the river.”

Every part of my body aches, but it doesn’t hurt the way I’d expect a car crashing into a river with me inside or out of it should hurt. My gaze darts to the tube in the back of my hand that leads to a bag half-filled with a clear liquid. Morphine. Or some other drug.

As much as I want to stay silent until the doctor goes away, I need to know the extent of my injuries and I need to know how long I’ve been here.

“What other injuries?” I ask, my voice husky.

“You had a pretty nasty laceration on your head.” I glance over at him.

He lifts a hand to touch his right temple. “Required stitches. Eight in total. Several smaller cuts on your face and body, but those weren’t serious enough to require stitches. From the shattered glass, most likely.” His hand moves to his right shoulder. “Dislocated shoulder. Bruised ribs. Fractured wrist. The left one. But that’s healing up nicely. Bruises which have mostly faded.”

That doesn’t sound bad. “And my legs?”

He shakes his head. “No injuries there.”

Good. Means there’s nothing to stop me from running.

“And a concussion. How is your vision?” he asks.

I glance at a little torch tucked in the front of his white coat, and his stethoscope hanging from around his neck. Surely, he’s supposed to check those things for himself instead of just asking me. Isn’t he?

“It’s okay.”

“No double vision, blurriness, or—”

“No. Nothing.”

“Then you’re even luckier than I thought before. Not everyone recovers from that severe of a concussion. Especially in a week.”

Everything in me stills. “A week?”

My heart pounds so hard that I wince when it triggers a new sharp pain in my ribs.

He nods. “A week. That’s how long you’ve been unconscious.”

I return my gaze to the ceiling as panic surges. This isn’t good. At all. That Rylan hasn’t found me and dragged me back yet is in itself a miracle. A week is more than enough time for a wolf to hunt prey, as he was so fond of telling me back when I thought I could escape.

And the cab driver. He’d barely driven me two miles before Rylan was stepping in front of the car, forcing him to halt.

Blood and piss.

I swallow hard.

If I hadn’t run, maybe he wouldn’t have decided on the chain and the handcuffs beside his bed so he could always keep a close watch on me. Maybe he still would have done it anyway.

“Your friend wasn’t as lucky,” the doctor continues, “he—”

“He wasn’t my friend,” I interrupt, my voice cold.

Silence.

“Well, whoever he was, he didn’t make it. The car pinned him to the riverbed, and he drowned before anyone could get him out.”

Shifters can drown. Who knew?

From all the things I’ve seen Rylan and the others do, I’d have thought they were so invincible that they could live through a stabbing, drowning, a clubbing over the head, and get up with little more than a headache. Until one of his pack would do something that made Rylan rip out their throats. No one ever got up from that.

I’d get papercuts from flicking through the Sunday papers in bed, and my lips would crack in winter from the cold. When I’d stub my toe on the coffee table, sometimes I’d have a bruise for the rest of the day, but never Rylan. His skin was perfect, unmarked, and unscarred. Always. Being born a shifter had its benefits, he would tell me with a smile, and after he turned me, I’d know those benefits too.

Well, that never happened.

Would Rylan have lived because he was born a shifter instead of being turned like Felix? I don’t know.

But they’re still men, if only sometimes, Saige. And all men die.

I don’t respond to the doctor’s revelation. What else is there to say?

“Is there anyone you want me to call? We didn’t have a name, so—”

“No.” My eyes close. “There’s no one.” Well, there’s Dad, but since I have no cash to give him for booze, he won’t care.

Felix is dead.

The only thing Felix liked more than his pleasure was my pain. It wouldn’t matter how much I screamed or begged him to stop as my blood soaked through his white sheets. As long as he was having fun, the pain just went on and on.

Or until I passed out, which didn’t happen as often as I hoped it would.

Felix wasn’t the best of Rylan’s pack because there weren’t any, but he wasn’t the worst either. He was the only one who fed me. It didn’t happen all the times that I went with him, but sometimes he would untie me from the bed, sit me up, and feed me cut-up steak, eggs, and fries.

Once he even left a steak knife beside my hand. Just once. After that, he never fed me steak or anything ever again.

I shouldn’t care that he’s dead—that I killed him—after everything he did to me. Things I learned the hard way would only hurt worse if I didn’t do what I was supposed to with a smile and a moan.

I hated every last one of them. But you wouldn’t have known it to look in my eyes. My smiles were flawless, my moans so convincing no one could’ve guessed I was counting down the seconds till I could wash the stink of sex and stale sweat off my body in the shower.

Tears prickle my eyes and I will them not to fall because no shifter deserves my tears. Not a single fucking one of them.

I’m glad Felix is dead. I’m only sorry I wasn’t conscious to see it happen.

“I’ll be back to check on you later,” the doctor says, “so try to rest.”

His footsteps move away from me, and I hear him open the door and close it firmly behind him.

The second he’s gone, my eyes snap open and I force myself into a seated position. My world goes hazy with pain and I swallow my scream at the stabbing pain in my chest before it can emerge.

For several seconds I don’t move, just concentrate on breathing around the pain as I wait for it to fade. When it has, I turn my head to the side and spot a slim white remote that must control the small black screen on the wall opposite. I grabbed it because a remote means TV and a TV means news about what could be happening in the city.

I can’t imagine a Porsche being driven off a bridge and into a river wouldn’t have made the news.

The first channel is an old black-and-white movie. The second is a sports game. Baseball. But the third… the third I strike gold. The evening news.

Perfect.

I hold my breath as I wait, my hand clenched tight around the remote, for an image of my face to flash on TV with my name and the hospital the paramedics brought me to.

“In other news. The police are no closer to identifying the cause of the fatal car crash on the Lancaster Bridge north of the city last Friday night. Now, back to…”

I tune out the rest of the female reporter's words.

That’s it? That’s all you have to say?

I stop clutching the remote so tight as I wait for more news about the crash. But there’s nothing. Just muggings, burglaries, the usual bad things that happen in every major city, then the weather, and it’s over. So I clicked to the next channel, and then the next in case I missed a more detailed report while I was out cold.

An hour passes this way, and on no channel, and in no news report, is there any report other than a tragic fatal car crash on the bridge. There’s no mention even of how many people died.

Is that why Rylan hasn’t found me yet? Does he think I’m dead?

When the door swings open, I drop the remote in a panic. It bounces off my bed and clatters to the floor. A round-faced nurse in her forties, with her dark hair pulled tight back from her face, and exhaustion creasing her eyes, steps in. “Awake now?”

I nod.

Her gaze dips to the tray beside my bed. “You haven’t touched your meal.”

“I’m not hungry.”

When her lips tighten, I lift a hand and gesture toward my ribs. “My ribs hurt, so…” I let my voice trail off so she can fill in the rest with whatever she wants to think.

The tightness around her eyes and mouth melts away, and sympathy fills her eyes. “Ah, broken ribs are no fun. Well, I’ll make a note on your file and we’ll see if the doctor can do something about upping your pain medication so you can eat. You’re all skin and bones as it is.”

A diet of two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a day will do that.

I nod. “I’d just like to sleep if that’s okay. Maybe tomorrow it won’t hurt so much that I can eat.”

Smiling now because I’m proving not to be a difficult patient when she’s likely coming to the end of her shift, she crosses over to me. After retrieving the remote from the floor, she flicks the TV off and returns it to the side table. With brutal efficiency, she tucks the sheets so firmly around me that I don’t have hope and a prayer of prying them loose without my bruised ribs screaming in agony.

Once she’s done that, she collects the tray and makes her way to the door.

It’s only when she’s gone that I let myself relax as I stare up at the ceiling.

They think I’m dead.

I let out a slow breath of relief.

Rylan once told me that a shifter has one mate. Just one.Ever. There’s no rejecting the bond, no walking away. No shifter will ever let what’s his go. And especially not an alpha so controlling that he would chain me to his bedroom wall to stop me from running.

Death is the only way to break that bond. Will Rylan’s wolf know it? Or will he watch the news, think what I just thought, and let the possessive wolf side of him curl up and die?

I don’t know, but a girl can hope.