Read Online Claiming His Fate by Ellis Leigh - Free Book Online Page A

last dancer.” I glared at Scab, daring him to say a word about what he smelled. He smirked and crossed his arms over his chest. “I say we circle the building and move inside until we converge on the room where he's holed up. Then we extricate the last human and start a search for Pup. If he’s not inside, we can hunt through the woods in wolf form.”
    Each man yipped in agreement. It’d been a while since our last team hunt, even longer since we’d hunted something as challenging as one of our own. We all loved to run as wolves. Hunting as them was a fucking gift.
    “No brother left behind,” Gates growled as we broke into two groups—him leading Shadow and me leading Scab. 
    Closing in on the basement room where I’d stashed Charlotte took longer than I would have expected as the club contained multiple secret rooms and connecting passageways. Every door led to more hallways, more doors. It was a veritable maze of come-scented carpet and furniture. The place might as well have been a whorehouse for all the sex happening in it.
    Scab and I were clearing the kitchen while Gates and Shadow guarded the basement stairs. I made a turn behind the line-prep area into a short hall that led to a walk-in freezer. Immediately my hair stood on end and my shoulders tensed at something in the air.
    “Scab.” I paused and sniffed deeper, trying to uncover the disturbing odor under the overwhelming scent of bleach lingering in the hall.
    “What’s up, bro—what the fuck is that?” Scab took a step back, his lip curling over his teeth instinctually.
    I shook my head. “No fucking clue. I can’t get past the bleach enough to get a handle on it.”
    Scab whistled long and loud, alerting Gates and Shadow we’d found something. Within seconds, the two rushed into the kitchen. 
    “Fuck, what is that?” Gates stopped just behind me. Shadow and Scab moved in as well, the four of us creating a wall of shifter. 
    “I don’t know,” I said as I took a step toward the freezer. “But I have a feeling it’s behind that door.”
    We moved as one, closing in on the large metal door. I growled with every step, letting my wolf crawl to the surface to better track the scent. I was sure my face was shifting, becoming more wolflike and less human, but I didn't care. I needed to know what it was about the space that had set my instincts on fire.
    When we reached the freezer, I yanked on the handle and swung the steel door toward me. My knees nearly buckled as the scent of blood swamped us, making each man whimper. But the sight inside the freezer immobilized all of us. 
    Pup hung by his ankles in the center of the freezer. He'd been sliced open from neck to pelvis, his blood drained and spreading into a sticky red lake on the floor. Numbers was wrapped around him, holding his weight, staunching the blood flow with his own body.
    “Holy fuck.” 
    I wasn't sure which man said it, but I knew we all thought the same thing. There weren't many ways to kill a shifter like us. Sure, you could shoot us in the head and we'd probably die just as a human would. Otherwise, we healed fast enough to avoid most forms of death our human counterparts fell prey to. But bloodletting…that was one scenario we couldn't escape from. Without our blood, we couldn't regenerate. And without regeneration, we died. Plain and simple. Whoever did this to Pup knew exactly what our weak point was. 
    “He’s still alive,” Numbers said, his voice weak. “Fucking barkeeper hung him here in his wolf form and left him for dead, but I got him.”
    “Cut him down.” The voice coming out of my mouth didn’t even register as my own. My body smoldered from deep within, my wolf in sync with my human mind on our next course of action. Find who did this and kill them. Preferably in a slow and painful manner.
    Shadow, the only one of us with any medical training, approached first. He stepped carefully into the puddle of thick blood on the floor until he could reach