Broken Bond: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (Claimed by Wolves Book 2) Read online

  Broken Bond

  Claimed by Wolves #2

  Callie Rose

  Copyright © 2020 by Callie Rose

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  1. Sable

  2. Ridge

  3. Sable

  4. Sable

  5. Trystan

  6. Sable

  7. Sable

  8. Archer

  9. Sable

  10. Sable

  11. Ridge

  12. Sable

  13. Sable

  14. Sable

  15. Sable

  16. Dare

  17. Sable

  18. Sable

  19. Trystan

  20. Sable

  21. Sable

  22. Dare

  23. Sable

  24. Sable

  25. Sable

  26. Archer

  27. Sable

  28. Sable

  Books by Callie Rose

  1

  Sable

  I limp down a hallway dark with shadows, trying to see beyond the empty black.

  God, I hate this all-encompassing darkness. It cradles me like a cold embrace and presses in on me from every side as if it’s a real, living entity. I can feel the panic inside myself. It churns restlessly beneath my skin, ready to surge out of me.

  I’m trying desperately to find the light. It’s there, I know it is, just beyond my fingertips. Somewhere safe and warm, where the horrors of my past can’t touch me. I just have to find the light and step into it where the living darkness—and the panic—can’t follow me.

  Almost as soon as I have that thought, the shadows begin to dissipate. I grip the solid wall beside me, my knees going even weaker with thankfulness. Inch by inch, light pierces through the darkness, opening up a window of illumination ahead of me. Thank God, I think, letting out a long-held breath in a sigh of relief. Safety is there in front of me, just like I thought. No panic attack this time. No shallow breathing, no mindless fear. No curling into a ball of anxiety and losing all sense of myself. I pick up the pace, running for that mirage of comfort.

  Except… there’s no comfort on the other side of that light.

  Only Uncle Clint’s basement.

  My heart stutters in my chest. I slow, then come to a stop just outside the golden glow. If I go any farther, he’ll see me, and I know deep in my soul that he’ll kill me this time.

  I got lucky last time.

  I won’t get lucky again.

  How did I end up back here? I shouldn’t be here. My shifters saved me from this basement just a few hours ago. Did I dream that? Am I still at Clint’s mercy, about to be slashed to a hundred ribbons with his knife?

  My stomach churns. I can almost smell the blood on the air. All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  Go back, I tell myself. Turn around. Run.

  As terrifying as the darkness is, it’s safer than Clint. I’ll just close my eyes and go.

  But before I can move, before I can rouse myself from my frozen stupor, my uncle appears before me.

  He looms in the circle of light, casting his shadow over me like a stain. He sneers at me, his thin lips curling and his gaze caustic. He’s so big he almost completely eclipses the light, and somehow the darkness that falls over me feels even more absolute than before. Like a snake, he lunges, one hand reaching for my throat.

  I try to scream but nothing comes out. His hand is already wrapped around my neck, squeezing my throat closed.

  Then the scene changes.

  I’m racing up the stairs that lead to the second floor in Clint’s house, where my bedroom is. My uncle’s boots pound heavily on the stairs behind me as he chases me. I forgot to wash his favorite pillow after he drank too much and vomited on it the night before. He reminded me this morning, and I still forgot, and now he’s going to kill me for my insolence.

  You useless waste of space.

  Such a fuck up.

  I gave you one job.

  One fucking job.

  Such a little bitch.

  I should have put you down the day your parents dropped you on my doorstep.

  His panted insults stick in my soul like burrs. I press my hands tightly to my ears, trying to drown out his curses and slurs. I almost make it to the top, my heart pounding and my blood pumping, but before I can launch over the landing and make a break for my room and the small hidey-hole in my closet where he can’t reach me, Clint’s meaty hand wraps around my shoulder-length blonde hair. So many times, I’ve thought about cutting it all off so that he has less to grab, but I never have.

  What a stupid, vain mistake.

  With a vicious yank, Clint pulls me backward, and I pitch down the stairs. I feel weightless for a brief moment before gravity takes over. He watches as my body soars past him, a satisfied smile on his face.

  I black out before the pain begins.

  More memories of my past come to haunt me. It’s like I’m watching a highlight reel of the worst injuries he’s ever given me, of the worst injustices he’s ever done to me. Each scene flashes past, and I watch it play out with a kind of numb disbelief.. How did I survive this horrific life? How did I come out of this with any sense of self left? I’d rather be back in that endless dark hallway, walking blindly forever, instead of reliving these horrific memories.

  Now I’m in the kitchen cooking eggs. I can almost smell the butter sizzling in the cast iron skillet and the heady scent of coffee permeating the room. Even the calm, early morning hours aren’t safe from his punishments though. If anything, he’s crueler before coffee. I make him breakfast every morning, his little servant girl, his little punching bag, and I hope against hope that this morning, I’ll come away clean.

  Instead, Uncle Clint roars with laughter. He’s still half-drunk from his bender the night before. Drunk on whiskey and on power. He grabs my hand and shoves it onto the red-hot skillet. The scent of my burning flesh mingles with the smell of toast.

  I go backward in time. I’m nine years old, tied to a chair with a bandanna shoved in my mouth because I laughed at a television show we were watching together. Any trace of happiness in his presence has to be stamped out, as if he has some kind of compulsion to make me hurt, both physically and emotionally. The cool snick of his blade opening makes my heart jump with terror.

  Not again. Please, not again.

  With a jolt, I surface from the dreams.

  Heat and pain sear through me until my entire body is in agony, but I try to open my eyes anyway. Nothing happens. I can feel a mattress beneath me, blankets bunched in my aching fingers, but I can’t get my eyelids to respond to any commands at all. I can’t open my hands, either—my fingers are paralyzed into claws, and the muscles in my forearms ache.

  I want to let go and wake up so I can escape the nightmares. Escape my uncle.

  Despite my insubordinate limbs and eyelids, I get the feeling I’m not alone in the room. There’s a presence beside my bed. Sturdy, strong, with a scent like pine that soot
hes my soul.

  Before I can even fully come awake, I submerge once more.

  I’m battered by more horrible memories of Clint’s abuse. My mind moves quickly, switching from scene to scene almost too fast for me to keep up. Somewhere in the deluge, I’m awarded a break from Clint’s snarling face and instead, I get a glimpse of two faces that seem familiar, though even in my fever dreams, I’m sure I’ve never seen them before. A man and a woman, both with fair hair and blue eyes. They’re both smiling, the kind of bright, pure smile I’ve only seen in the past few weeks while living with the shifters. Kindness is like a cloak around them, and when they hug me, all my broken pieces fit back together.

  This is such a stark contrast to the other memories I’ve coasted through that it stands out and gives me pause.

  My parents?

  I barely remember them. It’s more like I have a vague, shadowy notion that they did, at one time, exist. And that’s mostly because I know I didn’t just pop into existence one night without parents on the other side. So even in the midst of these wild dreams, I’m not sure if I imagine those faces or recall them from some deep, dark part of me.

  I can’t analyze the two faces for very long though. My mind is already on the move again, back in the hellhole that is my uncle’s house. The nightmares rewind and begin again.

  And again.

  And again.

  For a long time, I drift in and out of consciousness. When I’m awake, I catch dim glimpses of a familiar room—the cabin where I’ve been staying with the shifter men. My vision is never fully right. Blackness spreads across my plane of sight until I’m not sure if my surroundings are real or just another construct from my dreams.

  At one point, I come out of a particularly horrifying encounter with Clint, unable to see anything at all but with my hearing turned up high. Voices are arguing nearby, slightly muffled as if they’re outside a closed door. Familiar voices. But I can tell they’re angry and… frightened?

  That thought sends a wake-up call to the rest of my senses, and I push past the heavy weight on my eyelids to open my eyes. Everything around me is dark and cold, though the blanket stifles me, trapping the heat that radiates from my body. My skin is raw, and every bone in my body aches terribly. And I still can’t move or speak. I’m frozen in place, listening to my four shifter companions arguing well outside my reach.

  Even as I strain to listen, I can’t make out any of their words. Just a low, terrified urgency.

  My heart aches. I want to soothe them. I wish I could sit up right now, shove back the covers, and go to them. Promise them that everything is going to be all right. They’re safe. I’m safe. Anything else that remains is just something we’ll have to get through. Together.

  But as my vision turns blacker around the edges, and I feel my awareness leaving my body, I vaguely recall that I’m the thing they fear. I’m the reason they’re arguing.

  Once I remember that, I stop fighting for consciousness and let myself slip back into dreams.

  It’s easier that way.

  Time passes. I wake a few more times, but never fully—only enough to realize I’m still alive, that my burning skin has not melted me into a Sable-sized puddle, nor have my bones crumbled to dust under the pressure and pain. Sometimes there are voices, and sometimes there’s only silence. But every time I come back to that state of semi-consciousness, I sense something gathering in the room around me. It’s so faint at first that I don’t realize it’s happening, until the third or fourth time I open my eyes and catch sight of a huge, dark cloud hovering over me.

  The cloud is more than smoke or condensation. It’s a heavy, terrifying presence that strengthens every time I drift out of dreams. It seems almost… intelligent. Sentient. It weighs on me, whispering insidious things, and I don’t know if it’s real or something horrific following me from the madness inside my mind.

  In one of my more lucid moments, I blink away dark spots in my vision as raised voices filter into my ears.

  Don’t fight, I think weakly and try to raise a hand. I’m alone in the room though, with only this vicious cloud for company. At least I think I am, because honestly, I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep.

  Yes. Fight. Kill them all.

  The whisper hisses through the room. At first, I can’t tell if it’s coming from inside my own mind or from somewhere else. Then I realize with a dawning sense of horror that the sentiment came from the presence above me.

  Panic and fear surge through me. The cloud reacts, undulating as if it’s laughing at my discomfort. God, am I dreaming again? Please let this be a dream.

  Kill them, it whispers again. Destroy them. Destroy the abominations.

  Abominations. The dark cloud thinks that the shifters are abominations.

  Like the witches do.

  I shove at the cloud, my leaden hands waving uselessly in the air overhead. I can’t speak—I can’t even open my mouth—but I shriek at it in my head. Get the hell away from me!

  This thing, whatever it is, is no less dangerous than the witches who want all shifters dead, or even my Uncle Clint who wanted me to hurt because it gave him power.

  The presence laughs in my head, a dissonant, terrifying sound like a million voices raised in jarring disharmony. It presses me into the blankets and lords its power over me, like my uncle used to do when he yanked my hair or held me down to nick my skin with the tip of his knife. Both of them looking for any chance to prove just how weak I am in comparison to them.

  But I’m not weak. I promised myself when I ran from Clint that I would never allow myself to be weak again. I’d never give up without a fight.

  I resist the darkness, pushing harder, trying to force it away.

  Kill them! The cloud roars in my ears, a voice that seems to be both inside my head and outside of it at the same time.

  No! I buck wildly, my heels digging into the mattress as my body strains. But still, the cloud is untouchable. Immovable.

  With a wild hiss, the blackness surges down toward me. It slams into me with devastating force, and I think this is it. This is the moment I die.

  Then I jolt awake.

  2

  Ridge

  I’ve counted every single imperfection marring the wood floor in this bedroom over the past three days.

  I did it methodically. Picked a section of floor and scoured it, counting each knot, scratch, and burn before moving on to the next. There’s a fucking lot of imperfections too. Whoever built this cabin back in the early days of the North Pack, they found a whole copse of knotted, mottled trees to use. And to be honest, it does give the place more character. Kinda like how Sable’s scars tell her story too.

  On the other hand, there are so many imperfections in the floor that I only make it through three sections before I lose count. My mind’s too overloaded to hang on to more information than necessary, especially with numbers involved. No big deal—I just start all over again. I have time to pass, and I need other things to occupy my mind.

  It’s a lot fucking easier to count knots in the wood than to watch Sable go through her transformation.

  She’s been barely conscious. Sometimes, she’s so deathly calm and still that I slide my fingers beneath her small nose just to make sure she’s breathing. At other times, she’s so agitated she thrashes like a drowning woman, clutching the blankets as if they’re the only thing keeping her afloat.

  I hate those moments, because there’s nothing I can do for her. She doesn’t respond to my voice or my touch. She’s lost completely to the transition.

  And the black marks on her pale, satin skin? Fucking hell. They’re terrifying.

  Magic has pulsed through the room this entire time, waxing and waning with the black marks on her body. The marks themselves appear to show up anywhere she has a scar, as if the skin there is thinner and better suited for glimpses of the magic beneath. Tendrils of black power rise off her like steam. Not even the sunshine coming through the window during the day can penetrate th
at darkness.

  Trystan, Archer, and I are all well aware how dangerous it is for us to be in the room with her right now. There’s no way to know what she’s capable of with that magic flying around, and she could likely hurt us without even meaning to. But it hasn’t stopped us from keeping watch over the bed in shifts. Sable doesn’t need to be alone through this. We promised to take care of her and protect her, so we are.

  Even with this new—and fucking devastating—development.

  Since she first went under, we’ve taken turns cleaning her, changing her blankets, or trying to get any kind of food or water down her throat in the few moments she’s been coherent enough to swallow.

  I’m counting the section of floor beneath my feet when she wakes. She jerks up in bed with a painful-sounding gasp, her beautiful blue eyes flying wide open. The covers fall away from her as she struggles to get air into her lungs. She gasps, dragging in raw, shattered breaths that seem like they’re reaching deep inside her soul.

  Shock courses through me, rooting me to the chair for a split second. Her condition hasn’t really changed for three whole days, so I didn’t expect her to wake so soon.

  Honestly, I wasn’t sure she’d ever wake up.

  But I get a grip on my emotions as quick as I can and leap to my feet, ready to cross the small space between the bed and my chair. I want to tug her into my arms and soothe her pain away. Make sure she knows she’s not alone.