Kidnapped by the Werewolf Mafioso

Chapter Two

AKIKO

The synthetic heat burns through my veins like acid mixed with lightning. Every nerve ending screams awake, hypersensitive to platform lights that cut through fog rolling off dark water. My bare feet stick to metal grating slick with old blood—I can taste the ghosts of girls who stood here before me, sold and shipped and slaughtered.

They've pumped me full of enough drugs to drop a dragon. Suppressants fighting tranquilizers fighting synthetic omega heat that makes my body betray everything the convent beat into my bones. Seventeen years of wolfsbane scarring, of virgin prayers, of Sister Evangeline's whispered warnings about what males do to girls like us. All of it dissolves under this chemical cocktail designed to make me perform.

The handlers' hands burn where they touch me. One has fingers wrapped around my bicep, nails digging crescents that well with blood. I catalogue his weaknesses through the drug haze—favors left leg, old injury. Rotator cuff damage in right shoulder. Carotid artery pulsing two inches from my teeth.

If I could just f*****g move properly.

"Lot thirty-seven. Akiko Carver. Age twenty-three. Virgin omega of exceptional pedigree."

The auctioneer's voice oils through speakers, each word another violation. The arena erupts but sounds filter strange through the drugs. Voices blend into white noise punctuated by numbers that climb like screams. Ten million. Twenty. Thirty.

My mother's blood recognizes the monsters bidding on her daughter's flesh, even if I can't see past the lights. Sulfur and sake—yakuza. Cold that burns through the heat drugs—vampires. Something in the VIP box that radiates nuclear winter, making my suppressed wolf whimper.

I try to shift, to fight, but my body won't obey. Caught between forms—not fully human, not fully wolf, not fully kitsune. Fox-fire crackles along my spine, the only rebellion I can manage. The handlers jump back when sparks singe their skin.

Good. Burn, you f***s.

"Fifty million."

"Sixty."

"Seventy-five."

The numbers mean nothing. Everything means nothing except the rage building behind my sternum, held back by pharmaceutical dams that won't last forever. My mother died for less than what they're bidding. Tortured for months while my father watched, claiming love while he counted profit margins.

"Eighty-seven million to Mr. Liu's representative."

Gold teeth flash victory in the lights. The winner moves forward—dragon stink rolling off him in waves. They'll breed me until I break, harvest kitsune magic through rape and forced pregnancy. Use me up like they used my mother, like the convent used my faith.

The thought should terrify me. Instead, it feeds the rage, makes something deep in my chest pull tight like fishing line through sternum. A sensation I've never felt before—not quite pain, not quite pressure. The suppressants have kept me numb for so long I don't recognize my own body's signals.

Then the first smoke canister detonates.

Jasmine and funeral rites flood my enhanced senses. The arena explodes into chaos—gunfire from six positions, professional crossfire patterns that turn the crowd into meat. Bodies fall like dropped dolls, million-dollar suits shredded by bullets that don't care about bank accounts. The handlers release me to draw weapons, leaving me swaying on the platform.

Through the smoke, I see him coming.

White-blond hair like arctic fox fur. Eyes that burn ice-blue through the chaos. He moves wrong—too fast, too precise, like violence given form and purpose. His knife opens the Liu enforcer's throat in one motion so beautiful it makes my drugged brain sing. Arterial spray paints patterns across the platform.

My knees hit wet metal. Not from weakness—from something else. That pulling sensation in my chest intensifies, yanks me toward him like invisible chains. I don't understand it, don't trust it. Seventeen years of training scream danger, predator, run.

But I can't run. Can barely crawl.

He cuts through the defenders like they're made of paper. One tries to block his path—the stranger grabs his wrist, redirects his blade into his partner's kidney, then snaps his elbow backwards. The sound carries over gunfire. While the man screams, the stranger drives the blade up through his soft palate.

Two more converge. He lets them think they have him flanked before dropping low, sweeping legs, driving an elbow through a knee. Violence so efficient it looks choreographed. Bodies pile up between us while that pull in my chest becomes unbearable.

When he finally reaches me, he's covered in blood. Not his—theirs. He smells like winter and warfare, like every nightmare the nuns warned us about. But underneath, something else. Something that makes my suppressed wolf claw at her pharmaceutical cage.

"There you are," he says, like we know each other. Like I haven't spent seventeen years behind convent walls.

The restraints fall away but I still can't run. The platform tilts and spins while bodies continue falling around us. Someone screams about neutral ground, about rules. A wet sound suggests they've been corrected.

He kneels beside me, one hand tangling in my hair. Not gentle—possessive. Claiming. The gesture sends wrong signals through my drugged nervous system. No one's touched me like this. Like I'm his.

"This will hurt," he says.

I bare teeth that aren't quite human. "Good."

His laugh sounds like danger. Then his teeth find the junction between neck and shoulder, bite deep enough to scrape bone.

Pain explodes through my system like nothing the convent ever taught me to endure. Not clean pain like Sister Evangeline's discipline. This burns through the drugs, through the suppressants, through seventeen years of carefully maintained control. My wolf detonates awake—not gradually, not gently. She tears through my consciousness like she's been drowning and finally found air.

But worse than the pain is what comes after. Something snaps into place between us—barbed wire through my chest, electric current between nervous systems. I can feel him. Not thoughts but impressions bleeding through whatever this is. Mine, finally, mate, protect, kill for her.

I don't understand. Can't process what's happening while my body betrays me in new ways. The drugs mix with whatever this bond is, making me hyperaware of him. His heartbeat syncing with mine. His satisfaction flowing through shared channels I didn't know existed.

No. This is wrong. Another cage, another claim on flesh that should be mine alone.

I bite him back out of pure instinct. Hard enough to mark, to make him understand I'm not prey. His blood tastes like winter moonlight, floods my mouth with sensations the suppressants never quite killed. He doesn't pull away. If anything, his approval pulses through this unwanted connection.

"That's my girl," he growls against my throat.

Girl. His girl. Like I'm property already, like the auction just changed owners instead of ending.

More gunfire. Closer now. Someone tries to reach us—yakuza soldier thinking to claim the prize while the stranger's distracted. I move without thinking, muscle memory from Sister Evangeline's secret lessons mixing with new instincts. My hand finds his throat. Squeezes until cartilage collapses.

The stranger—no, through this thing between us I suddenly know his name. Giancarlo. Morelli. Chicago's Dark Angel, though I don't know what that means. Only that he's dangerous and he's claimed me and I can feel his pride when I drop the yakuza's corpse.

"Can you run?" His voice rumbles through the bond, internal and external.

"I can kill." My voice sounds wrong, rougher from his bite.

"Good enough."

He lifts me when my legs fail, carries me through the m******e like I weigh nothing. My body betrays me further, curling into his warmth while my mind screams warnings. This is what the nuns warned about—alphas who take, who claim, who own. But the bond pulses contentment I don't feel, broadcasts his protective rage to anyone who comes too close.

Someone appears beside us—androgynous face shifting between features I don't recognize. They clear our path by wearing dead men's faces, confusing the remaining fighters. Magic or mutation, I can't tell through the pharmaceutical haze.

We reach a speedboat that screams money. He sets me down, hands steady on my waist when I sway. The bond pulses between us—raw nerve I don't know how to shield against.

"Drive," he tells the shapeshifter, already turning back to the platform.

Something massive rises from the lake—dragon, the real kind. Not mythology but ancient predator, water cascading off scales older than Chicago. The platform shudders under impossible weight while helicopters circle like fireflies. My drugged senses can't process the scale of it.

"Dramatic lizards," Giancarlo mutters.

The dragon speaks, voice like earthquakes. "Giancarlo Morelli. You killed my blood."

"Your blood tried to buy what's mine." He pulls something from his jacket—a grenade that smells like nothing, like void. "Consider the debt paid in full."

He pulls the pin with casual violence, tosses it like skipping stones. The dragon laughs—right until detonation. Not fire, not force. Something worse. A hole in reality that starts eating, consuming dragon flesh like acid through tissue. The sound it makes will haunt my dreams.

We're already moving when the dragon starts dying. The boat cuts through dark water while I struggle to process what's happening. The bond broadcasts his satisfaction, his pride in the kills, his pleasure at having me close. I hate it. Hate him. Hate how my body responds to his proximity like he's safety instead of just another cage with teeth.

"Your father will come." He says it like weather, inevitable but manageable.

"Let him." The words surprise me, rough from his bite. "I owe him seventeen years of interest."

His approval flows through the bond like warm honey. I try to block it out, to rebuild the walls the suppressants maintained. But my wolf won't go back to sleep. She paces under my skin, confused but curious about this male who killed for us.

No. Not for us. For ownership. For the right to use what he paid for in blood instead of money.

Chicago's lights blaze ahead like a funeral pyre for the girl I was before the platform. The bond pulses with each heartbeat, tying me to a stranger who speaks violence like a mother tongue. Behind us, the dragon sinks screaming into lake water that will never give up its dead.

"You don't know what you've claimed," I tell him, testing words that taste like blood.

His hand finds mine, squeeze that promises violence and protection in equal measure. "Neither do you."

The shapeshifter pilots while Giancarlo keeps me upright. I catalog exits, weapons, escape routes through vision that stutters between clear and chemical. But the bond makes leaving feel like tearing off my own skin. Another trap. Another clever cage.

My mother's magic stirs under my skin, recognizes kindred violence. The ninth tail she died hiding pulses between heartbeats, waiting for something I don't understand yet. Power that seventeen years of suppressants couldn't quite kill, couldn't quite tame.

The speedboat docks at a private pier. More soldiers wait—his people, the bond tells me. They smell like pack but I don't know what that means. Don't know anything except that I've traded one prison for another, and this one comes with teeth in my neck and alien sensations in my chest.

He carries me off the boat when my legs give out completely. The drugs are wearing off but leaving wreckage behind—neurotransmitters fried, synapses misfiring, a body that doesn't quite remember how to be human anymore.

"Welcome home," he says when elevator doors close around us.

Home. The word tastes like lies and ash. The convent was never home. This won't be either. Just another place to survive until I'm strong enough to run. Until I figure out how to break whatever he's done to me with his teeth and his blood and his mate bond I don't understand.

My wolf curls up under my skin, patient now that she's tasted freedom. She doesn't share my fear, my rage, my need to escape. She's content to wait, to learn, to study this male who painted an auction platform red for the right to claim us.

Traitor, I think at her.

She just huffs, reminding me that we bit him back. That his blood tasted like possibility. That for the first time in seventeen years, we're not alone in our own skin.

I hate that she might be right.

The elevator rises through floors that shouldn't exist, carrying us toward whatever comes next. His hand stays steady on my spine, possessive and protective in ways I don't know how to fight yet. The bond hums between us, raw and new and inescapable.

Not love. Not trust. Not anything I understand.

But mine, something whispers. Whether I want it or not.

The elevator opens on a penthouse that smells like money and blood and him. My new cage, gilded and gorgeous and guarded by a white wolf who thinks he owns me.

He'll learn otherwise.

Eventually.

When the drugs clear and the bond settles and I remember how to be the weapon Sister Evangeline trained instead of the virgin they tried to sell.

For now, I let him carry me inside, already memorizing the layout for when I'm strong enough to run.