Read Online Past My Defenses (Taming the Pack series) (Entangled Ignite) by Wendy Sparrow - Free Book Online

killed her. Her conscience kicked her. Okay, fine, she’d tell him.
    Now they were meeting at the office. Cheri seemed to have disappeared. No record of her on flights. Her family and friends in her former pack hadn’t heard from her. She’d just vanished. Vanessa was the last to arrive, and Jordan shot her a look over the others’ heads. It was an uneasy truce between them, but she’d staked her claim to Dane.
    “I figured we’d track her from her place and from where the car was found,” Jordan was saying now to those members of the pack assembled in the meeting room.
    The other males in the pack had moved away from her. She doubted Jordan had explained about Dane—he wouldn’t have had time, and more Lycans would have been smirking at her. She was scent-matched to a human, after all. They must assume she was being considered for alpha female with Cheri being…wherever she was.
    Travis made eye contact briefly with Jordan before bowing his head.
    “Yes?”
    “I had Tom check out the car.” Tom was standing beside him with his head bowed. He’d arrived the same time she had. “The damage done by the ditch didn’t seem to explain everything. He said there were nicks on the brake lines and power steering line so that they bled out as she drove. She probably panicked when the power steering dropped to manual and tried to brake and then lost control.”
    If this was a game, Cheri wasn’t the only player. There was no way she’d crawl under her car to cut the lines and put herself in danger.
    Travis cleared his throat. “Which puts a different spin on the bottle of bleach on the floor.”
    Everyone turned to stare at him, though they all kept their heads slightly bowed out of deference to Jordan.
    “The bleach was to mask the scent…of the car tampering…of whatever happened,” said Travis.
    A wave of apprehension passed through them. There was no reason to destroy the scent if only humans might be tracking her abductor.
    “This is how poachers destroyed the Coquihalla pack,” Carrie said. Her family had been pack members for generations and thus she felt allowed to speak out of turn. She was also a friend of Cheri’s—though the alpha female didn’t seem to take to any of them. “Friend” was more of a relative term. She disliked Carrie the least anyway, and seemed to confide in her occasionally. “First one and then another…and they masked trails with gasoline and bleach, and by the time they thought they were going to catch the poachers, seven dead or missing, and the poachers moved on.”
    Unfortunately, those Lycans from British Columbia only had twelve in the pack to start with. The remaining five had left to join another pack and taken with them the inability to live without feeling hunted. She’d heard of the carnage left behind when the poachers harvested a Lycan’s organs for wealthy benefactors on organ transplant waiting lists. Lycan organs wouldn’t give them the power to shift, but they were still the new hot item on the black market. The wealthy and entitled had been fed crap about their magical qualities. Their organs were stronger and came with a primitive rush…one long-stop high with a potent walk on the wild side.
    If there wasn’t a donor match or the harvest was poorly handled, the organs were sold for blacker, darker reasons than a kidney transplant. Lycans were currently being hunted as an ingredient—part of remedies for everything from sterility to hair growth.
    The fact that the organs had to be harvested when the Lycan was in human form meant that all of the human bodies recovered had shown signs of torture. There had been wolf mutilations occurring more regularly in the last couple years—which were either wolves mistaken for Lycans or Lycans that’d held strong and not shifted. It was a horror story that seemed too surreal not to be fiction.
    It couldn’t have happened to Cheri. These were things that happened so far away you didn’t believe them. At the