Dark Wolf Returning. Rhyannon Byrd

be someone you want to hurt.”

      “Carla, I—”

      “Stop!” she pleaded, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her free hand. “Please, just...stop. I don’t want to hear another lie from you. I just want you to leave me alone.”

      Shit! This is so screwed up.

      Moving to his feet, Eli stared down at the top of her golden head, and wanted to roar with frustration. “I wish I could make you understand, but everything I’ve done...the reasons...it’s complicated, Rey.”

      She didn’t say anything. She just turned and crawled up over the bed, then curled into a ball on her side, telling him without words that she was done listening to his bullshit.

      “Sleep fast,” he muttered, moving to sit on the foot of the other bed. Elbows on his parted knees, he dropped his head into his hands, squeezing his skull, and kept talking. “We’re getting an early start tomorrow. And I still have questions, so be ready to start answering them.”

      There was no response, but he hadn’t expected one. He listened until her breathing evened out, then moved back to his feet and stripped down to his fitted boxers. He pulled the covers over her small, curled up form, forcing himself not to look at her too closely because he knew he’d never be able to stop once he did. Then he turned out the light.

      Lying down on his bed, Eli put his hands behind his head and stared up at the watermarked ceiling, wondering what in God’s name he’d been thinking. He’d actually thought he could get his head together before he and the guys reached Maryland and he had to face her again. What a jackass idea. Even if it’d taken months to get back, it still wouldn’t have been enough time to sort out this messed-up situation.

      And he could no longer say for certain if he was still trying to protect her...or if it was his own miserable hide he was worried about. Especially seeing as how she wanted rid of him. Wanted to break the tenuous bond that tied them together, severing that final connection.

      Turning on his side, he stared at her delicate shape beneath the soft streams of moonlight filtering in through the blinds, and pulled in a deep breath of her warm, intoxicating scent. This woman had been under his skin for years, and he wasn’t sure if staying away from her anymore was the right answer...or the wrong one.

      All Eli knew was that it was killing him, not being in that bed with her, holding her against his body, where he wanted her.

      And where she’d always belonged.

       Chapter 3

      After a horrible night’s sleep, and a scalding shower that’d barely made her feel alive again, Carla had changed into one of her last clean pairs of jeans and a T-shirt. There was only so much cash she’d been willing to spend on clothes from the money she’d stolen off the Whiteclaw, and so her wardrobe was limited at best. Life would have been a lot easier if she’d had her stupid wallet on her when she’d been kidnapped, but hey, at least she’d had her cell phone. And she’d thankfully had another bra and pair of panties in her pack for this morning, as well as a hairbrush. So while she wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests at the moment, it was nice not to have bed head.

      Eli had woken her up with a touch on her shoulder about thirty minutes ago, just after six a.m., and told her he would be waiting outside the room while she got ready. He didn’t mention anything about their argument from the night before, and neither did she. In fact, she didn’t even look at him. She could forgive herself for her momentary lapse last night, but that was her only pass. From now on she needed to stay sharply focused. She had her eye on the prize—being free of him once and for all—and she wasn’t going to let her stupid hormones ruin it for her.

      No matter how crazy desperate for him those little suckers turned out to be.

      And I doubt going without will kill me, she thought dryly, running her brush through her hair. If that were the case, I’d have dried up and died a long time ago.

      A glance in the mirror over the dresser showed that she was still sporting a few yellowish bruises, had dark circles under her eyes, and the tight pinch of fatigue in her facial muscles. She might be only twenty-eight, but she felt eighty. Damn near looked like it, too. But what the hell? It’s not like she wanted him to be attracted to her. Zipping up her pack, she tossed it on her bed and joined him outside.

      As they walked to the crowded diner next door, where they were meeting the others, he asked, “You ever hear from your mom?”

      Nicole had finally given up on the pack a year before Eli’s banishment and left Shadow Peak, claiming she needed to find a place where she could make a new life for herself. “No,” Carla replied in a flat tone, wondering if her mother had ever managed to succeed with her dream. If so, she was obviously too content there to worry about contacting the daughter she’d left behind.

      He didn’t say anything more, and the guys kept the conversation light when they joined them for a quick breakfast. Afterward, they all headed back to the room she and Eli had shared to discuss the situation in private. Once everyone was settled, Eli explained to her what the men already knew: that his father had had a maniacal plan to take over the Silvercrest. A bloodthirsty plan that had resulted in a significant loss of life, had shattered the pack’s sense of safety, and left an entire group of teens—as well as most of the residents in Shadow Peak—emotionally traumatized. As a result, the town had been left without its leaders, and the Bloodrunners were now handling all elements of security for the pack.

      Since it was up to Carla to bring them up to speed on the rest, she explained everything that had happened with the Whiteclaw pack over the past weeks, starting with how Eli’s brother, Eric Drake, had met Chelsea, the human he’d recently married, while she was searching for her younger sister, Perry. Making a bad choice, Perry had gone chasing after the wrong guy and ended up falling in with the Whiteclaw pack who lived to the south of the Silvercrest, and who were now controlled by a man named Roy Claymore. With the Runners’ help, Eric had been able to prove that the Whiteclaw had partnered up with the Donovans, a corrupt local Lycan family, on a number of illegal activities, the most horrific being one that involved human girls. With the Donovans’ support, the Whiteclaw had been drugging the girls and pimping them out for Lycan gang rapes. The drugs not only acted as an aphrodisiac on the girls, but also impaired their memories of the attacks. And Claymore was using tapes of the assaults to later blackmail the participants into aiding the Whiteclaw.

      She then told them that the Runners had managed to close down a strip club in Wesley, a human town not far from the Silvercrest’s territory. The Whiteclaw had been using the club to find the girls, and closing it down had only increased Roy Claymore’s power hungry desire to destroy the Silvercrest and take their land. Something Claymore felt would be easy to accomplish, given the state the pack had been left in after Stefan Drake’s failed bid for power.

      Later, after an attack that some of the Whiteclaw and Donovan wolves had made on the Runners in the Alley, they learned that the Whiteclaw had also developed a “super soldier” drug that not only made them violently strong, but also camouflaged their scent. Which meant they were damn difficult to defeat.

      The atmosphere in the room had been grim during her telling, but the group’s tension only increased when she explained about the plans she’d overheard before making her escape after her and Elise’s kidnapping.

      “The Whiteclaw were hoping to blackmail the other packs in our region into helping them by providing foot soldiers. But they haven’t secured the kind of numbers they were hoping for, so they came up with a new plan. They’ve used a sizable portion of the money they’ve made from the gang rapes to purchase help from someone in your line of work. A man named Jack Bartley.”

      “Son of a freaking bitch,” Kyle muttered.

      “You know him?” she asked.

      “We’ve gone up against him before,” the merc explained. “He’s human, but he’s a maniac. Has a small army under his command, and they’ll do anything