“Katya.” Anya reached for her friend’s hands.
Katya wasn’t much older than Anya; she was barely thirty. Her clear, unlined expression was tight with worry though, as her too perceptive topaz eyes went over Anya’s face.
“Anya, I agree with your papa, you are not well,” she said haltingly, a frown marring her brow.
“I’ll be fine soon,” Anya promised her. “Alpha Gunnar is on his way to this meeting. Asylum is being granted to you and your uncle but under very strict rules. You’ll have little freedom.”
Alexi shook his head. His brown hair was longer than it had been in the lab facilities, his green eyes worried. “We have no freedom now, Anya. We run in fear of our lives. The Coyote Breeds were our lives, not just our research. To work with them again . . .” He shrugged philosophically. “From what your papa says, we will have more freedoms than we did with the Council, yes?”
“Well, you won’t die for stepping outside for that cigar you like so much,” Anya promised him. “Though you might have company.”
Alexi’s eyes crinkled in humor. With his and Katya’s arrival in the facilities and their eventual control of it, conditions had changed drastically. They had made Anya’s job of aiding the rescue much easier.
“Sit, Anya,” her father encouraged her. “Your cousins, they are waiting for your Alpha Gunnar. Why are you ill, child? You are never ill.”
“The inoculations we gave her as a child should have made her immune to nearly every virus known to humans,” Katya stated, watching her carefully.
“I was inoculated?” Anya blinked back at her. “With what?”
“We all were,” Katya confirmed. “Alexi and I developed the immunizations before coming to the labs. We finished them there. The Breeds are immune to all viruses known. We used that inoculation on ourselves as well as you, your family and Sofia. There was no danger involved. We’d been lab testing on certain animals for years. But it has allowed us never to grow ill. Even your papa has not known illness. You should be well.”
Anya shook her head. She would get to that later. She turned to Ashley. “Has Emma made that call?” God, she needed Del-Rey.
“We dropped her off before coming here, Coya, remember?” Ashley reminded her gently.
She remembered. She swallowed tightly and focused on her father and her friends again. “You’ll be taken out under armed escort.”
“You will go with us,” Katya said with an edge of fear. “Won’t you?”
Anya shook her head and turned to her father. “You and the cousins must leave now, Papa, before Del-Rey arrives.”
“Why, will he shoot my leg again?” Petrov Kobrin asked with a snort. “I will not leave you while you are ill, Anya. I will return with you or these Breeds you protect will learn a father’s anger. I will stay until you are well.”
“We have a Feline Breed arriving, advance scout,” Sharone told them. “He’s coming armed.”
Anya nodded and forced back a cry. Del-Rey had allowed an advance scout rather than coming himself.
“Coya.” Fear laced Ashley’s voice a second before there was a rustle of greenery, a scuffle, and suddenly, they were surrounded.
She stared at the weapons trained on her father’s head, and Ashley’s. The Feline Breed stepped into the grotto.
“Douglas,” Anya whispered.
The junior-grade soldier that hadn’t yet made enforcer. He was young, younger than Anya. Close-cropped dark hair, brown eyes. He was dressed in an enforcer uniform though. A Wolf Breed Enforcer uniform.
He smiled, displaying his canines as he lifted the butt of his weapon and brought it down hard on the back of Ashley’s head.
“Ashley,” Anya cried out as she moved to kneel beside the girl.
“Come here, bitch.” Hard fingers wrapped round her wrist and through the blinding pain she saw the blow delivered to her father next.
Where was Sharone? Anya looked around desperately, feeling dazed, confused. Sharone should be here. Instead, she saw only city council members and the Feline.
Seven humans and one Breed and leading the pack was the mayor, Timothy Raines.
“I hear you’re breeding,” he sneered as two others tied the doctors’ hands and placed gags over their mouths. “I was just going to kill you. I think I’ll give you to those nasty Coyotes that have offered us a damned fortune a piece for a Breed mate. Only mates can breed, right?”
Breed? He thought she was pregnant?
She shook her head. “Someone lied to you.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think so. But we’ll get what we wanted anyway. Your f**king kind out of our county. We break the Coyotes’ backs, then Haven will fall. That’s the only thing saving them right now. Bastards. The alliance will never stand when a Wolf Breed is seen escorting the Coyote’s mate out of this spa just before she disappears forever. We’ll win. You’ll lose.”
Sharone and Emma. Where were they? Where was Del-Rey? A sense of vertigo gripped Anya as she swayed.
“The bitch is sick,” one of them cursed. “She could be contagious.”
“Get her, Douglas. Let’s find your damned Coyotes and get our payment.”
The fingers that wrapped around her arm were like a manacle of agony, needles driving into her flesh. She went to her knees with a scream, and she swore hell opened up and loosed demons that howled in fury.
“Coya, come with me. Now.”
Jax. She lifted her head to stare at the Coyote dragging her across the ground, his expression tormented as he lifted her, carried her as fire flashed around her.
“Coya, you’re safe,” he growled.
“Papa ...”
“Cavalier has your father and the doctors. Move. We have to move.” He pushed her through the snow-shrouded evergreens that surrounded the next grotto, dragging her through them, pulling her from the sound of gunfire.
“Ashley ...”
“Taken care of dammit,” he growled. “Hurry, Coya. If you get so much as a scratch, the alpha is taking my throat out. Do you want that?”
He steadied her as she tried to crawl, handicapped by the broken wrist and her own weakness.
“Clear,” he snapped, his arm wrapping around her waist. “Let’s go. We have enforcers just ahead waiting on you.”