Hunt Me! I Crave the Chase (Spooky Boys #3)

Those nights were pack-family-solace.

Safe-safe-safe.

But apparently that was over.

I’d felt no comfort then, as I’d laid in my bed and the sun began to shrink.

Because I could feel the moon before I even saw her—and I burned.

I burned.

I burned.

And as I burned and itched and itched, alone, sick, scared-scared-scared, I knew nothing would ever be the same again. Because I may be a wolf, but I was also an alpha, and like all young alphas, my timer had begun to tick. Before the sun had even sunk below the mountaintops I knew my second mother had forsaken me.

I shifted before the moon ever rose.

And it was fire.

And pain.

And black.

Black.

Black.

When I came back to myself I was in the basement of the main lodge at the compound. My mouth was dry, my paws ached, and I’d been lying on the cold concrete for so long I felt bruised. Or maybe that was the shift? Because this was my first alphashift—and I knew, before I’d heard my father enter the basement that something had gone wrong.

His eyes glinted in the dark as he stood at the top of the stairs.

When he descended, careful as ever, his scent was sorrow-loss-worry.

He loosened the manacles on my ankles and wrists, silent.

Dad was hardly ever silent.

But he wasn’t my dad right then.

No.

He was my Pack Alpha.

And he knew…as well as I did, that my clock had just started ticking. And one day—in the near future—I was going to lose myself, unless I found a mate.

PRESENT DAY

“I need your pants.”

“You need my?—”

“I need your pants,” I repeated, staring at my brother, Butters, with what I hoped was a convincing expression. To his credit, he didn’t question me a second time. Didn’t even blink, despite the fact I’d yanked him off the street into an alley and I was currently standing naked in front of him, smelling like distress-need-help.

“Sure,” Butters shrugged, his big shoulders going up and down as he began tugging his clothes off as directed. God, could he be any slower? I asked for your pants, not your whole wardrobe. My hands shook, clenching into fists as my heart thumped unsteadily.

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

Butters shucked off his pants last, and I snatched them up, yanking them on—and then his shirt, because he had been kind enough to give me both. I hadn’t been thinking properly, but he had. Humans were weird about nudity. He stared at me all the while, as his phone and the keys to our shared home rattled in his—now my—pocket.