Sold To The Alphas

Chapter 4: Ghost From The Past

Roman's POV

Both men moved fast, visibly relieved to have something useful to do besides sweat through their shirts.

They led us out through a side door into a narrow service corridor, the so-called exit hallway. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The air smelled like antiseptic and something older underneath it. Rust, maybe. Or fear.

"How did she escape?" the heavyset man demanded, his composure fully dissolved now. "She was drugged."

"She was," the other man said, his jaw tight. "But she fought through it somehow. Injected the nurse with the same sedative and walked out."

Damien was already through the corridor door before the sentence finished.

We followed to find a woman, the nurse, crumpled on the floor, a syringe lying beside her. Damien crouched, picked it up, and brought it slowly to his nose.

A long inhale.

Then that slow, dangerous smile.

Damien and chemistry had a relationship I'd never fully understood and never wanted to examine too closely. He didn't just use compounds, he created them. Could identify most substances by smell alone, the way a sommelier identifies wine. His knowledge of what chemicals could do to the human body was the kind of thing that kept people up at night.

"Well." He twirled the syringe between two fingers. "Our little fox has claws. I can't wait to see how she handles my newest formula."

Cole took it next, sniffed, and let out a low whistle. "That's a heavy dose. And she still walked out."

I exhaled slowly through my nose.

Here we go.

I glanced toward Caden, but Caden was already gone. I found him outside, standing at the perimeter fence, studying it with that unreadable expression he wore for everything.

"She's too heavily sedated to shift," he said, without turning around. "She can't have gone far."

The fence told its own story.

Blood. Not a little of it, smeared across the razor wire in dark, rusty streaks, caught on the steel barbs like something torn rather than something that passed through cleanly. She hadn't found a gap or a weak point.

She had gone through it.

Bleeding herself raw. On purpose. Just to get to the other side.

That kind of desperation doesn't come from nowhere.

Eli, who had said nothing since we left the auction hall, moved to the fence and touched one of the bloodstained barbs with a single finger. He brought it to his face.

Slowly.

And then his eyes changed.

The faint red ring that always lived at the edge of his irises, that permanent reminder of what he was, deepened. Darkened. Snapped into full, burning crimson.

The shift in his energy was immediate and physical, like a pressure change before a storm. Every one of us felt it.

He wanted that blood. Every part of him was leaning toward it.

"Caden" I started.

But Caden had already placed one hand on Eli's shoulder. Firm. Grounding. No words, just the weight of it.

Eli stood very still for a moment.

Then he wiped his finger deliberately across the front of Caden's black shirt.

I'll hold. For now.

That was the signal. We all knew it.

We cleared the fence in seconds. On the other side, the blood trail picked up immediately, dark spots against dead leaves, a path a child could have followed. She was bleeding steadily. Moving fast enough to keep the trail fresh.

She wouldn't last long.

"This reminds me of the old hunting traditions," Damien said, falling into step beside me, that gleam of dark amusement back in his eyes. "When Alphas used to chase she-wolves through the woods and claim whatever they caught."

"And that," I said evenly, "is exactly why pureblood she-wolves are nearly extinct."

I let that sit for a moment, then turned to look at both Damien and Cole directly.

"Neither of you touches her. Not tonight. Not until she's given us what we need. Am I clear?"

Both of them glanced past me to Caden.

Caden, who was moving silently through the trees ahead, didn't look back.

His silence was answer enough.

"She's close," Eli said quietly. His vampire senses cut through the dark like a blade, blood called to him the way a compass needle finds north. "The scent is stronger."

"We won't hurt her," Cole said, which from Cole was approximately the same as a promise. "We'll just catch her."

We pushed deeper.

The Illinois woods closed around us, dense, dark, the kind of quiet that swallows sound. Dead leaves under our boots. Bare branches overhead cutting the sky into pieces. Then

"There." Eli's voice. Flat. Certain.

Ahead through the trees, a figure.

A woman in a shredded off-white gown, staggering forward through the undergrowth. Her hair hung in dark, matted ropes down her back. Her arms were cut, her feet bare against the frozen ground. Every step looked like a negotiation between her body and her will, and her body was losing.

But she didn't stop.

Even now, she didn't stop.

We closed the distance fast.

Too fast for her.

She caught her foot on a buried root and went down hard, face-first into the dirt, arms barely getting up in time to break the fall. The impact was brutal. She lay still for one breathless moment.

"Did you really think you could run?" Damien called out, stepping forward, his voice carrying that particular edge of someone who's enjoying himself. "After everything we paid?"

Cole moved past him and crouched beside her. "Let's see what twenty billion dollars looks like up close."

He gripped her shoulder and turned her over.

She was a wreck. Dirt-streaked face, hair plastered across her cheeks, a cut along her jaw still bleeding. Her gown was in pieces.

Cole brushed the hair from her face with one rough hand.

And then nobody moved.

Nobody spoke.

The woods went absolutely silent.

Her eyes opened slowly, dazed, exhausted, but focused. And they moved across our faces one by one, with a recognition that hit me like a fist to the sternum.

She knew us.

And we knew her.

Every nerve in my body locked up.

No.

It wasn't possible. It couldn't be possible. We had buried this. Moved past it. Built entire walls around it and never looked back.

But there she was.

The girl from six years ago.

Not a memory. Not a ghost.

Flesh and blood and eyes that had every reason in the world to hate us. Lying at our feet.