6
Craven Doyle paced the floor in the pack’s common room. The pack had left straight from the bar and traveled north to their place in the woods. To heal properly the pack knew he needed to shift, and shifting in the city was too dangerous. Even after healing, his voice sounded like gravel, which wasn’t present before the bitch tried to kill him. She ruptured his trachea with one of her nails and if they hadn’t brought him to the compound in time the injury might have become permanent. Thankfully not all of them had ridden their bikes to the bar.
Craven waited for his Beta to arrive. This bitch was going down and he wanted to be the one to kill her, but he needed to find her first. He put in a call to a west coast pack, which boasted one of the best trackers in the country. His job would be to find her, notify him, and leave. Craven would take over from there, along with plans to take out the owner of the bar. The pack spent a lot of money in his bar since it opened. No one takes his money and kicks him out… no one .
The tracker was committed to someone in Canada for the next three weeks so he deployed some of his pack to dig up some dirt on the woman. His Beta, Trey, was one of those. Craven couldn’t remember much after the fight, or even during it for that matter, but he couldn’t recall hearing her name during the games. They had next to nothing to go on, other than a description. Trey was checking out known biker bars and pool halls in the area, to see if anyone knew who she was.
Craven needed to get this situation under control soon. If he didn’t, he would have other problems on his hands. The first and foremost was his pack. They saw their Alpha get taken down twice by a fucking human girl. They would see this as weak, and in a pack full of former rogues, he could count on a challenge from one or several in his pack. He personally selected all of his pack by hand from the worst of the worst. That meant he was precariously hanging on to his Alpha status daily.
Craven heard Trey coming before he saw him. The Beta walked with a distinctive limp, stemming from a fight with a leopard shifter back in the late 1980’s. He never went into much detail on it, but the man lived to even the score. Trey was tall and gaunt, haunted by the man who permanently maimed him. He was a man of few words, but the toughest of his pack. If a challenge came from anywhere, he knew Trey would be first in line.
Craven stopped his pacing long enough to bark, “Did you get anything on the bitch?”
“Nothing. Her trail begins and ends at the bar so far. No scent of her anywhere else.”
“You heard from any of the others yet?”
“No, too early,” Trey said with a frown.
“What is it, Trey?” Craven growled when he saw the change in Trey’s posture. “I’m too pissed for games right now. Until that tracker can get here, we have to do everything possible to find her. Move the pack out to a bigger search area. She is mine and she will pay!”
“If I’d been there I could have done something. It got too far out of control, Craven. I should have been there.”
Craven smirked at his comment. Trey was loyal to a fault, but not to him. The pack held his loyalty. He cared about them far too much. He just wondered when the breaking point towards him would come. “Too late for that now. You were on patrol duty. I need to get this bitch, and show her what pain really is. I’m gonna do her slow, real slow. There is something else I want you to take care of, Trey. I want you to work on plans to set the owner of the bar up. I want him and his place to burn, and I want it done after the tracker gets here. No need to bring any more attention to the pack right now. I know I can count on you to do it right.”
* * * *
“No problem boss, consider it done,” Trey replied through his teeth while watching Craven pace. He was beginning to think this latest fight had loosened