Taken by Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

have been so gentle. He shouldn’t have pretended to be a gentleman. He wasn’t.
    Hell, he wasn’t even human.
    She would have been just another bloody rut with another bloody animal.
    But now, with every beat of his heart, he wanted her. And yet, he couldn’t have her. She belonged to the pack, not him. He hadn’t been part of the pack since Ivan’s death and Vladimir assumed the alpha role. That had been more than seven years ago. Although, to be honest, Dimitri had never really fit in with the others. Ivan had tolerated Dimitri’s lone wolf tendencies. Vlad, on the other hand, saw them as a threat.
    It had been either leave or die. So Dimitri had fled. He’d thought he’d never see any of them again. He’d built a new life, a good life. He’d been content. Well, as content as a wolf could be living in the middle of a bustling city.
    Then a little more than a year ago, his sister, Misha, wrote a frantic letter to him about the hunters.
    It wasn’t news he hadn’t heard before. The hunters—humans who hated their kind—sought to cleanse the wolves from the earth. It was an old battle. The hunters targeted the alphas, the heart of the pack. In the recent past, the men had killed Sasha and Lev, the strongest alpha pair in the pack’s memory. After that, it had taken nearly a decade for the pack to regain a small measure of its past strength. In the interim, the hunters had shot Dimitri’s parents as the pair of wolves hunted small game in the forest. And then more recently, the hunters killed Ivan, strung him up from a tree, and skinned him alive.
    Losing Ivan had nearly torn the pack apart. But despite the hunters’ successes, the pack—those who survived the assaults—always regrouped. It always survived.
    This time, however, things had changed. The hunters had recently shifted tactics. Instead of targeting the alpha, the strongest, they now hunted the young, the old, the weak, picking off the pack one-by-one until only a dozen of the strongest, the wiliest, of them were left alive. And worse, the nearby villagers had begun to convert the forest—the only home the wolves had ever known—to farmland. Their home, their sole source of food, was slowly being eroded away. If something didn’t happen to change this, soon the pack would become a distant memory, a shadowy fable parents told to scare young children.
    His sister’s letter detailing the deaths and carnage had been graphic. Her jagged handwriting betrayed her growing alarm.
    Dimitri had replied, begging Misha to save herself and join him in England. She’d refused. The girl had always been stubborn to a fault, a family trait.
    The letter that followed, the one he carried in his breast pocket, had moved him to action. Misha, like all the women in his family, possessed the gift of what his kind called the Kiss of the Moon . She had visions of the future. Not often, but when a vision happened, the pack’s ears perked up, even a lone wolf’s like Dimitri’s.
    He loped up the back stairs to the first floor. His silent stride carried him to the parlor where the pack was holding a council of war. With arms crossed, he stood in the shadows of the doorway, listening. He’d hoped to slip into the room without anyone noticing, but Misha turned toward him almost immediately, her dark eyes wary.
    Her face used to be wreathed with laughter. The years of being chased by the hunters had changed her. He feared for her. He feared for all of them, though this wasn’t his battle. Vlad had made that much clear when they’d arrived in London a month ago.
    The pack had clearly suffered. Except for Vlad, they were all appallingly thin. And even Vlad looked more than a little haggard. The hunters must have resorted to starving them out of their hiding places. As long as they were under his roof—Carew’s roof—they would have access to all the food they’d need.
    Vlad gladly took Dimitri’s food, his hospitality, and expected Dimitri to dutifully obey his