Jacks, Marcy - Handcuffed to the Werewolf [DeWitt's Pack 3] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) (2 page)

He got kicked in the head once or twice for that,  so hard that his vision went foggy and his brain seemed to slow down.

He got back up to speed when he realized where the other side of the handcuff had gone.

The other ring had gone through a metal loop in one of the chains,

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which, as he looked, seemed to  be connected to the bear in the pit

with him.

What they had planned for him became apparent, and he flipped out. “Are you guys out of your fucking minds? He’s going to kill me!  Let me out of here!”

They pretended to be deaf once more as the grim-looking men above the pit helped their friends out of it using rope ladders.

“Help! Help!” Jason screamed, as though he expected someone to rush into his rescue.

A slight whining groan caught his attention from beside him.

The bear. It was definitely alive, and…not  a bear.

A long, heavy tail, shaggy and brown, started a lazy thump against the concrete flooring, the chest rising and falling in drugged breaths, and the body itself twitched.

Not a bear. A giant dog.

A huge wolf?

Not much better than a bear.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jason muttered.

His captors were going to feed him to this thing. Jason had to find

a way to get out.

After a minute of heavy breathing and sweating over just how in

the hell he planned to do that part, exactly, he finally got up the

courage and reached his hand out, ready to crawl forward and find out  exactly where he and the wolf were connected and if he could sever  that connection before it woke up.

He stopped when the ripple passed under the wolf’s skin. It almost  looked like something was moving underneath.

Bugs maybe?

Then the entire body of massive wolf shifted, and Jason’s heart  slammed to a complete stop in his chest.

It didn’t get up and rip his head off, though, no. It started to shed  its hair.

The coarse hairs fell away like leaves on a tree, only much faster,

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revealing smooth, pink skin beneath.

Then the body of the wolf began to shrink, as though someone had  popped it and it was deflating like a balloon, slowly losing its helium.

Jason wasn’t sure what he expected or even when  he expected this  sudden change to stop. But it certainly hadn’t been when the body of  a man replaced the wolf on the cold grey concrete.

A naked man, with the body of a
 
GQ
 
model.

Jason had watched enough horror flicks to know what that meant.

“Holy shit,”  he muttered, right before he started to scream again.

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Chapter Two

Mick Stewart came briefly awake, floating up through the cloud of drugs that were in his system. The reason for his fogginess couldn’t be anything else. He was sober enough to put that much together, but he couldn’t quite figure out where all that annoying racket was coming from.

Groggily, he decided it didn’t matter and fell back under the heavy haze that kept him calm and comfortable.

When he came to again, he was more aware this time, especially of the fact that the noise from before had stopped. He didn’t know why, but that actually scared him. No noise was a bad thing.  Something was wrong.

He was definitely not back with his pack, in his own bed where he should be. His bed wasn’t this gritty, hard, and goddamn

uncomfortable.

He was clear headed enough to know that opening his eyes, letting whoever had taken him know that he was awake and aware, was a bad

thing indeed, so he kept quiet and kept his eyes gently shut, allowing

his other senses to tell him what he needed to know.

He’d shifted back into his human form sometime during his ordeal, he could tell that much. The hard, dirty surface under his naked body felt like stone, but the scent and feel was different. This

was man-made. Cement. The place reeked of old blood, so these were  definitely not friendlies who had him, and then there was the sound of  breathing.

So someone
 
was
 
in here with him.

His first thought was that it was one of the unfriendlies. A hunter,

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or a werewolf from a rival pack. Deacon was certainly still pissed  about what had happened last month to his own pack, and he wouldn’t  be above trying some stupid shit like this.

No, not Deacon. The heartbeat was different, quick and  frightened, just like the breathing. Whoever this was, they were  having a mild panic attack.

Another prisoner, perhaps.

Mick took the risk and opened his eyes.

Though he did not recognize the guy, had never seen him before  in his entire life, the sight of him would have knocked Mick back a  step, had he not already been laying down on his side.

The point of no return. The one and only. The yin to his yang,
 
and  all that other weirdo shit wolves said when they finally made the  discovery.

Mate. This was Mick’s mate.

The man was small, not naked like Mick was, but not dressed for

the occasion either. Looked like he was wearing a pair of navy-andwhite striped pajama bottoms and nothing else.

His knees were up, arms hugging around them, struggling for  warmth. A human, then, otherwise the temperature wouldn’t bother  him so much. Mick definitely felt fine, but if this man was cold, Mick  wanted to warm him.

His eyes—they were such a deep shade of chocolate that, even with his excellent sight, Mick had some difficulty seeing the irises—were as round as golf balls, and Mick could most assuredly see the whites all the way around them.

He’d noticed that Mick had woken up, and from the looks of things, he might also assume that this man had watched him transform.

That usually was enough to freak out the locals.

Mick lifted himself not his knees, ignoring the man—his mate—hoping that if he didn’t show much interest in him, he wouldn’t be so afraid of him. He stretched out his back and neck, the little cracks and

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dull pops hurting, but he needed it so badly and felt a little more like

himself when he finished.

Finally, he looked at his cell mate. They appeared to be in a cement hole somewhere, and from the looks of the stains and deep claw marks that scarred the walls, he would not be the first werewolf

held prisoner here.

The poor guy still looked terrified, and Mick couldn’t blame him.  He wondered what the men who brought them here thought this man  had done to them in order to throw him into a pit with a werewolf,  probably in the hopes that Mick would eat him.

“Hey,”  he said.

The man jerked back, as though it shocked him that Mick would  know how to speak.

He needed to take this easy. The man was radiating fear, like a  deer that knew it could not outrun a predator and was about to be  devoured.

“I’m Mick Stewart. Did you see anything that could help us get

out of here?”

The man shook his head in the negative, still giving Mick that

shocked stare.

Any other time, he would have just ignored the guy and tried to find his own way out, or flat-out lost patience. Now, patience  was his middle name, despite how much he needed to figure out what was going on and fast.

Was this how James felt when he first scented Corey? Some wolves said it was the scent that led them to their mates, others swore

they knew on sight.

Mick officially  knew which camp he was in when it came down to

that.

God, he felt like shit. His regeneration abilities couldn’t kick in fast enough to get out whatever those assholes had pumped into him.  He still couldn’t remember what had brought him here. The last thing he could bring to mind was being called into James’s office. Then

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there was just a whole lot of nothing.

He tried getting to his feet. “Could you—”

The heavy clinking of chains stopped that sentence before it could  really begin, and he looked down, suddenly aware that the reason for  his heavy limbs had more to do with what was weighing them down,  rather than his own drugged up muscles.

A chain. A big-ass heavy chain with an actual shackle on,  something that looked like it might have seen more use five hundred  years ago, was around his left wrist.

He lifted his arm, letting the chain clink and rattle, and following  it with his eyes over to where the other end was connected.

To his mate.

“Oh, fuck.”

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Chapter Three

Jason only marginally began to calm down a few minutes after the man, werewolf, shape-shifting-whatever, woke up and started talking to him in a calm language he could understand. Not getting up and tearing his limbs off and drinking his blood or anything, the guy,  Mick, had seemed just as confused as Jason was.

Maybe it was that reason that his heart had started to slow down the crazy beat it had been drumming, or maybe it was the soothing sound of his voice, or even because Mick was the first person to actually speak to Jason instead of ignoring him altogether.

“Why are we here?” Jason asked, though he already knew Mick had no answer for him. It was just the first thing to pop out of his mouth, the question he wanted answered the most. “I mean, do you know those people out there? Why chain us  together?”

That was the most he’d spoken that wasn’t a yelling scream since he came here.

Mick was playing around with the chain that connected them. He grabbed a couple of the links between his hands and tugged, but nothing happened. “My guess is that they’re hunters. This is too elaborate for a rival pack.”

“Rival pack?” Jason said. There were more of these guys?

Mick nodded then dropped his chains with a heavy clang on the cement ground in disgust, which only made the cement chip. Then his eyes landed on Jason’s end of the chain. “You got a smaller one. I’m guessing you’re not a…you’re not like me?”

Jason shook his head.

“What’s your name?”

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“Jason Snowe.”

“Pretty,” Mick replied then turned away quickly.

Jason was glad he looked away, because his face heated up at the  compliment. No one had ever said anything about him was pretty  before, and though he’d always associated the word with what little  girls and women liked to be called, he found that he liked it, too.

Mick cleared his throat, then turned back to look at him. “Can I

come closer to you? The chains on my end are too thick, but I can try

and break those handcuffs.”

Every muscle in Jason’s body went tight. Should he or shouldn’t

he?

“I promise I won’t try and hurt you. I don’t know what they told

you  about me, but I would never want to hurt you.”

The absolute mind fuck was that Jason believed him, and why  shouldn’t he? Mick was chained up, the same as Jason. Maybe those  werewolf hunters up there thought Jason was a werewolf, too, and  that was why he was in here.

Though, how anyone could have ever mistaken him, grouped him  in the same camp as the perfect being standing before him, he would  never know.

Jason nodded. “Okay.”

Mick smiled a little, and then came forward, the chain dragging behind him as he neared his target and got down onto his knees.

If Jason had thought this man was big before, now, up close and personal, he was frickin’ huge! Jason could smell him, too, the scent of sweat and maybe even the faintest hint of wet dog.

“Sorry. I know I need  a bath,” Mick said, keeping his eyes firmly glued to Jason’s hand. They were the prettiest shade of amber Jason had ever seen.

Then his words registered in Jason’s brain. “Can you read my

mind?”

Mick halted right before he could reach Jason’s shackled wrist.

“No, I just thought it was obvious that I’m not in the best condition

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right now.”

“All things considered, I can’t blame you,” Jason replied, thinking  of his sweaty ride in that dirty van, bag over his head, and then being  dumped in here with all the dust, rocks, and mystery stains. “Bet I’m  not much better.”