Alpha Betrayed: A Dark Shifter

Ford

For a second, right after she wakes up, I think Juliet is going to elbow me in the gut or slam her fist into my face as punishment for trying to wake her from her nightmare.

But no sooner has she stiffened in my arms than she goes limp again. Her eyes die inside, going blank and empty as her breath slows.

After a moment, I’m not sure she’s breathing.

“Juliet?” I shift on the bed until I’m cradling her in my lap, but she doesn’t move. She’s as boneless as a kid lifted from a car seat after falling asleep on the drive home. I give her a little shake with one arm and wave my hand in front of her face with the other, but she doesn’t so much as flinch. “Juliet? Can you hear me? Juliet!”

I press my hand to her chest, fear lifting the hairs at the back of my neck as I pray to feel it rising and falling. If she isn’t breathing, I can perform CPR, but if that doesn’t work, I have no idea how far it is to the closest hospital or how I’ll get her there on a bike.

I’m cursing myself for getting the chopper without the side car—it would have slowed me down, but at least I’d have somewhere to put an unconscious woman—when she grasps my wrist and sucks in a breath.

My entire body goes limp with relief. “You’re breathing.”

She inhales, holding it for a second before she exhales and nods.

“F**k, you scared me.”

“What happened?” she asks, her fingers digging deeper into my skin.

“You were having a bad dream. I tried to wake you up, but when I did you just…vacated. Your eyes were still open, but you weren’t here. At all. For a second I didn’t think you were breathing.”

Her next breath shudders out, making her ribs vibrate beneath my hand. She’s so thin, I can feel her bones through the thin covering of skin and fabric on top. “You’re the same size,” she whispers. “As the men who hunted me. They were the winners of the fights earlier in the night.”

I try to pull my hand away, but she holds tight.

“Did you have to do anything like that?” she asks. “Did they make you hunt people who couldn’t fight back, too?”

I shake my head. “No. Sometimes they’d send me out against two, weaker men but never a woman. And never someone they’d starved half to death.”

“But what if they had?” she asks, still clinging to me. “Would you have done it?”

I want to say no. I want to say I would have died first, but I don’t want there to be any lies between us. If we’re going to be allies, we have to be honest with each other. So, I sigh and say, “I don’t know. I hope not. But if they’d tortured me enough before and threatened to do it again…”

She swallows. “Those were the worst. It didn’t happen very often, but every once and a while, there would be a guy who I could tell didn’t want to do it. That he was being forced to, even though it was f*****g him up inside. One even cried after, while the audience booed him for being a wimp. I was in pieces, though, so I couldn’t offer much comfort.”

My chest tightens until it feels like my ribs are going to squeeze my heart in two. “We can heal from all this. I know it doesn’t feel that way now, but we can. We have to, or Hammer wins, even if we take his pack and his life and everything else that matters to him.”

She holds my gaze, but doesn’t respond, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. But she’s still on my lap and seems to want me close.

Seems like as good a time as any to share my plan.

“But we’re going to need help,” I add. “We need people on our side who have experience with shifters who have been through hell, and who are ready and willing to keep us safe until we’re strong enough to face your dad.”

Her brows pinch together. “You aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”

My lips hook up on one side. “I’m not a mind reader, so I’m not sure, but Lost Moon University—”

“Is a cult,” she cuts in flatly, finally releasing my wrist.

I move my hand from her chest, uncomfortably aware of how close I was to brushing against her breasts. “It’s not a cult. It’s an alternative learning community.”

“Aka, a cult.” She sits up, shifting off my lap to sit cross-legged on the mattress. “I’ve heard they make you donate b***d during orientation and use it to work punishment spells against you if you break the rules. And that in order to graduate, you have to promise to come back and teach for at least five years before you die. And that if you won’t do it, they resurrect you as a zombie and make you serve guard duty in the woods until you’re too rotted to walk your beat.”

“I think those are just rumors,” I say, hoping I’m right.

If Lost Moon proves to be a dangerous dead end, I’m going to be scrambling for a backup plan.

“Maybe, but who knows,” she says. “They don’t let anyone talk about their time there. Why the secrecy if there’s nothing weird going on?”

I shrug. “Yeah, they have secrets, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad secrets. The university was founded to give outcast shifters a place to go and learn a trade so they could survive without a pack. The packs didn’t like that in the 1800s and they don’t care for it much now, either. Could be the people at Lost Moon are secretive to protect their students. If no one knows what’s going on behind the walls, it’s a lot harder to shut the place down.”

She chews on the inside of her l*p. “So, you’ve already talked to them? They know we’re coming?”

I clear my throat. “Not exactly.”

Juliet’s brows shoot up. “Not exactly? You know they kill people who try to walk in there without an acceptance letter, right?”

“Another rumor.”

“You think. What if you’re wrong?”

“The university was built for people like us,” I say. “Outcast shifters who are in danger from the people who exiled them. If we can’t get accepted, who can? Once we explain what Hammer did, what we’ve been through the past two years, they’ll find a space for us. I’d bet my hands on it.”

“You’re betting your life on it,” she counters. “And mine.” She drags a hand slowly through her long, dark hair.

It’s only now, that I’m this close, that I can see the hint of blond coming in at the root. It feels like a sign that the people we were before aren’t gone, just hiding beneath the surface.

“But it’s worth a shot, I guess,” she continues. “It’s not like we have a lot of other options. I have family in France on my mother’s side, and my grandmother said I could come live with her whenever I wanted. I’m sure they would take you in, too, if I vouched for you, but…”

“You don’t feel like vouching for me?” I ask, only half teasing.

She grunts. “I don’t feel like giving up. France is a place to run and hide, not a place to regroup while we figure out how to take my father down. And I don’t speak French.”

“Yet,” I say. “Lost Moon is in French Canada. I’m sure you’ll have the chance to learn if you want. And they have a college of Education and Social Work within the university, so you can work on finishing your degree.”

“My degree.” Her shoulders slump. “That feels like a lifetime ago. I’m not sure I remember how to do normal things like study and write papers.”

“You’ll remember. Or fake it until you make it. We’ll have to at least pretend we want to study something, or they won’t let us in.”

She c***s her head. “What about you? What are you going to pretend to study? I thought you hated school.”

“I don’t hate anything except your dad and everyone who helped him flush our lives down the toilet. I’ll find something. They have a trade school, too. Originally, that’s all it was. They only started adding academic colleges in the early 1900s.”

“But what if—” She breaks off, sitting up straighter as she adds in a softer voice, “Did you hear that?”

I listen harder and catch the slight scuffing sound she must have heard outside the door. I grab my gun from the bedside table, motioning her behind me as I ease off the bed and head for the door. I peek through the peephole but can’t see anything outside except the empty parking lot baking in the sun and a young mother pushing a baby stroller outside on the sidewalk in front of the motel.

One of the stroller straps hangs down, dragging along the concrete, making the scraping sound. I’m about to turn back to Juliet when my stomach flips and something instinctive tells me to look closer at the stroller.

I hone in on the tiny feet poking out from beneath a faded yellow blanket, noting how stiff they look. The legs are stiff, too, sticking straight out at a ninety-degree angle. I spent enough time helping out at the pack daycare as a kid for extra cash to know babies don’t sit like that.

I glance back at the woman pushing the stroller. She’s thin but strong looking, with toned leg muscles visible beneath her tight gray leggings and broad shoulders for a woman. She’s wearing a black hoodie, even though it’s still warm outside, and there’s a suspicious looking lump under her left armpit.

Maybe it’s the strap of a purse I can’t see from this angle, but it could just as easily be a gun.

Which means Juliet and I should head out the back way. Now.

I turn back to see Juliet with her new flip-flops and my extra hoodie already on, stuffing the rest of the snacks I grabbed from the gas station into my bag.

“How many?” she asks, stuffing the pad and pen from the bedside table into her pocket, clearly not intending to leave anything of value behind.

“One. A woman pushing what looks like a fake baby in a stroller,” I say as I cross to grab our toothbrushes and toiletries from beside the sink. “Could be nothing, but best to head out the back, anyway. We don’t want to get shot at and attract the wrong kind of attention from the local cops.”

“Or get killed,” Juliet adds wryly. “That would be bad, too.”

“Not my favorite way to start the evening,” I agree, shoving the smaller toiletry bag into the duffel and crossing back to the door. “Leave the key on the table by the window. I’ll leave the door unlocked. They’ll realize we left, sooner or later. We shouldn’t risk stopping by the lobby.”

She tosses the key and follows me through the room to the small bathroom. There’s a narrow window above the toilet. When I shove the frosted glass up, I can see the dumpster and my bike parked beside it to my right, but nothing else. If the woman out front is after us, she must be working alone.

But to be safe, I stick my head out far enough to make sure there’s no one pressed against the side of the building.

“All clear?” Juliet asks.

“Yeah, but head straight to the dumpster and get behind it, just in case,” I say, pulling my gun from the back of my waistband. “I’ll cover you then be right behind you.”

Without a word, Juliet climbs up on the back of the toilet and sticks her legs out through the window. She hesitates, turning back at me. “Are you going to fit? It’s tight on my h**s.”

“I’ll manage,” I say, hoping I’m right. “I’m flexible.”

“Okay.” Holding onto the bottom of the pane, she slips out and drops onto the dry grass with a soft crunching sound. I glance out, gun in hand, to see her take off her flip-flops, holding them looped around two fingers as she dashes silently across the gravel to the bike.

I scan the area, following my gaze with my weapon until she’s safely hidden behind the dumpster. Only then do I click the safety back on, tuck it into the front of my pants and toss the duffel out the window. I start through next.

It’s tight on my h**s, too—and my a*s as I shift sideways—but I get eighty percent clear before my shoulders present a more serious problem. I tuck my head to one side and reach forward with my left arm, then spiral out in a half circle. I scrape my elbow and pull a muscle in my neck, but finally manage to drop down beside the bag.

I grab the duffel and turn just in time to hear the bike rumble to life.

A beat later Juliet zooms around the dumpster and out toward the front of the motel, leaving me standing there gaping like a f*****g idiot.