Feral Wolves (Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 1) Read online

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  Feral Wolves

  Feral Wolves of the Arctic

  By: J.L. Wilder

  Click to Receive a Free Copy of Brother’s Wolf (Full length)

  Table of Contents

  Feral Wolves

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

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  About The Author

  Feral Wolves

  Chapter One

  SOPHIE

  “All right,” a voice called. “Bring her out.”

  Annie nudged Sophie with her hip. “That’s you,” she said.

  Sophie nodded. She was really, sincerely, trying very hard not to hate Annie and the other beta girls in her wolf pack these days. She knew this wasn’t their fault.

  But it was so hard not to be angry with them. How was she supposed to be okay with this? They could see what was being done to her, what she was being forced to do, and they had clearly decided not to do anything about it.

  They’re traitors.

  No. They weren’t traitors. They were loyal. That was the whole problem. They were loyal to their pack. They were loyal to their alpha.

  It was just that the pack had never cared about Sophie, and she hadn’t realized it until now.

  “Look at her,” Betsy said, giggling. “She’s nervous!” She said this as if Sophie’s nervousness was adorable, something the girls were all enjoying together. A joke Sophie was in on, instead of one being made at her expense.

  “There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Annie said. She reached up and adjusted a lock of Sophie’s hair, which had been straightened and then curled and sprayed for the occasion. The girls had spent two and a half hours meticulously crafting soft, beachy waves that looked completely natural.

  And that was just the hair. Her makeup was immaculate. Every time someone’s hand had slipped ever so slightly, it had all been wiped away and they had started over with a fresh face.

  And this dress! It was beautiful, of course—pale peach with a flowing skirt and an off the shoulder neckline—but it was also, Sophie knew, a feat of engineering. It was specifically designed to make her accessible. To make her fuckable.

  But no, there was nothing to be nervous about.

  “We’re not going to wait all day!” the voice called again. The tone was jocular, but there was a hint of warning now. A note of you’d better get out here or there are going to be consequences.

  The smiles fell off the faces of the girls standing around Sophie. Now they looked as anxious as she felt.

  They all knew too much about consequences.

  “We’d better get out there,” Betsy said.

  Sophie wanted nothing more than to run and hide, but there was nowhere to go. And if the men had to come looking for her...well, that wouldn’t end very well. Not for anybody.

  She allowed Betsy and Annie to lead her out of the big estate house the Vancouver Wolf Pack called home and into the backyard. There, scattered among the trees, the men were waiting.

  The jolt of panic that shot through Sophie at the sight of them felt like a knife.

  The betas stood in a circle around the yard. The circle was ceremonial, allegedly, but it wasn’t really. Only a fool would have thought so.

  It’s to keep me from running, she thought wildly. It’s to keep me from escaping.

  She would have run if she could. Right then and there, she would have taken off. She would have sunk happily into her wolf form, which was so much more powerful, so much safer, and run until this place was far behind her.

  But even if they’d have let her go—and they never would have—there was nowhere else. She couldn’t just try to start over with another pack. It would end up like this again.

  In the center of the circle sat Josh, who was the alpha of the Vancouver Wolf Pack. He was the sort of man who could easily have been attractive if he had wanted to—he was tall, and Sophie could always sort of see the muscle trying to form on his body—but he drank too much beer, chain-smoked so that he always smelled bad, and washed his hair with a bar of soap. He was greasy and disgusting, and the way he looked at her as she stepped down off the porch was even worse.

  She hated him.

  He was seated on a chair from the kitchen that had been brought out to the yard for the occasion. He slouched, one leg extended, beer in his hand. As Sophie approached, he looked her up and down appraisingly, as if he hadn’t seen her every single day for the past twenty years.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  He hadn’t needed to make that an order. She would have done it. But with Josh, everything was an order. He had grown accustomed, apparently, to speaking only in demands, as if forcing people to do his bidding was the only language he knew anymore.

  As always, his command pulled at her like a magnet. As always, she tried—for a moment—to resist. And as always, she failed.

  Her head spun. She felt dizzy and nauseous, as if gravity had been reversed, as if she was falling, as if she was deep underwater and didn’t know whether she was swimming up or down. And before she knew it, her body was complying with Josh’s order, turning for him.

  “You look good enough to eat,” he said.

  She wanted to claw his eyes out.

  She had seen the way he looked at the other girls in their pack. She had seen the way he touched them when he passed by them in the kitchen, the way he slapped them on the ass when they brought him his beer and his cigarettes in the evening. She had seen him walk up behind them and cup their breasts, squeezing proprietarily and laughing before walking away.

  Every woman in the Vancouver Wolf Pack belonged to Josh. That was what he thought.

  For the others, it was bad enough. They had to put up with his constant harassment. But it had always been different for Sophie because she had always known that one day he would claim her as his own. She was the pack’s only omega, and she belonged to him in a way the others didn’t.

  Now it was her twenty-first birthday, and the day of her claiming had arrived.

  Happy birthday to me.

  Eddie, the pack’s second-in-command, a runty looking beta with heavy eyebrows and a mean stare, spoke up. “Omega, come forward.”

  Omega. As if she wasn’t even a person. As if she wasn’t a person he had been living with since they were children.

  She stepped forward. What else could she do? At least when Eddie said it, it was just a beta acting bossy. If she didn’t do what he wanted, Josh would give another order, and she would do anything to avoid that.

  “Today we celebrate a long-anticipated event,” Eddie said. “Our alpha claims his omega. And in keeping with the traditions of the Vancou
ver Wolf Pack, the claiming will be honored with a public mating ceremony.”

  She had known this was coming. She had known for years that this lay ahead. And yet, hearing Eddie say it, the horror felt as fresh as if she were learning about it for the first time.

  Josh got to his feet and crossed the lawn to stand before her. He was close enough to touch now, and just having him this near made Sophie feel uncomfortable. She started to shiver and couldn’t stop.

  Josh grinned, showing his teeth. “Excited?” he asked her.

  She couldn’t answer.

  “Say yes,” he prompted.

  Another command. “Yes,” she said, feeling like she was vomiting up the word.

  The beta women of the pack had taken up positions around the perimeter, together with the beta men. Sophie wondered if any of them felt sorry for her.

  They’re probably just glad it’s not them, she thought. God knew she couldn’t count on them to step up and help her.

  Josh reached out and caressed her arm slowly. She felt goosebumps spring up on her skin beneath his fingertips. She forced her eyes to unfocus. She forced herself to stand still. If she screamed or started to cry, this would all be so much worse.

  He gave a tug on the hem of her skirt, and she knew he was testing how light it was, how easily it would be pushed up and held out of the way. Right now, she wished it was made of heavy velvet, instead of the floaty chiffon that he would easily be able to hold up with one hand.

  She wished there were fishing sinkers sewn into her hems.

  He gathered a handful of her skirt and pulled it up slowly, revealing her legs up to mid-thigh. “They did a great job on you,” he murmured.

  Her shivering intensified. How was she going to get through this? In front of the whole pack?

  She couldn’t do it.

  He released his grip on the skirt. “Turn around,” he said. “I want you from behind.” His eyes went to her breasts, which were bursting obscenely from the tight top of the dress. “Easier to hold on that way.”

  She couldn’t move.

  Josh gave the order again. His voice was louder now, harsher. “Turn around, I said. Did you not hear me?”

  He was going to grab her. He was going to take hold of her arm and force her around. And before she could even think about what she was doing, Sophie stepped back, away from Josh, putting several feet of distance between them.

  He narrowed his eyes. His face blazed with anger. But she saw something new there as well—fear. He had never been openly defied like this. He had never had an order disobeyed.

  She had scared him.

  Suddenly, she felt a rush of power.

  He closed the distance between them again. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he said through gritted teeth, “but you’d better cut it the fuck out, or you’re going to pay for it later, and I know you don’t want that. This doesn’t have to be an ordeal. We can do it the easy way. I’ll make it nice for you. Or you can put up a fight, and—well, then it might not be so nice.”

  He reached out to grab her, to pull her to him.

  She slapped him across the face, nails raking along the skin of his cheek.

  He howled and jumped back from her. Around them, the betas gasped. No one had ever seen an omega wolf attack her alpha like this. It was unheard of.

  Sophie was in shock herself. How had she been able to do it? It shouldn’t have been possible—and yet, it had happened.

  “She’s a demon,” someone said. “She’s possessed.”

  “No,” Josh said, his fingers pressed to his cheek. “She isn’t a demon. She’s just a failure of an omega. A failure as a packmate. She’s feral, is what she is.”

  Silence.

  The word feral echoed in Sophie’s mind. It was practically an obscenity. It was something they didn’t say to one another, something they didn’t talk about. When they were children, testing the limits of appropriate behavior, Sophie had called Annie feral once. She had meant no serious insult—it was just a word she’d heard adults using—but she had been taken aside for a long talk about the meaning of the word and why it was inappropriate to use with a friend.

  The feral shifters were practically a different species. They were closer to being wild wolves than to being humans. Sophie had never met a feral shifter, of course, but she knew enough about them from stories and legends to understand what they were.

  Josh had never respected her. He had never seen her as anything more than a body to fuck and carry children. But he had never spoken to her like that before. He had never called her feral.

  She waited for someone to speak up, to tell Josh that he was going too far, to question whether he’d really meant what he’d said. She waited for the awful word to be taken back.

  No one spoke.

  No one was going to question their alpha. No one was going to stand up to Josh.

  In an astonishing twist of fate, the only one who had had the strength to do that was Sophie herself. The omega. She should have been the weakest member of the pack. She should have been the last one to refuse a direct order.

  Maybe I am feral. If his orders aren’t working on me, that must mean there’s something wrong with me. What kind of omega doesn’t submit to her alpha?

  The flawed kind. That was the answer to that question.

  He was glaring at her as if she were a weed spoiling an otherwise perfect garden. “We can’t have a feral shifter in our midst,” he announced, his voice loud and carrying. “It’s too dangerous. It’s a danger to all of us, and I’m not going to allow it.”

  She didn’t understand what he was saying. Was he going to force her to submit to him? Was that the plan? Did he have some idea for how to bring her back under his control?

  He looked at her. “You’re going to have to leave,” he said.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Leave,” he repeated. “This pack is no place for feral shifters. This is a pack for loyal followers of pack order, for people who know how to submit to their alpha. You don’t belong here. You’re clearly broken beyond repair, unworthy of trust. We don’t want you. Go and find a new place to live. You’re no longer a part of this pack.”

  Her heart pounded. Just minutes ago, she’d thought that she would give anything to escape this pack, that she would run away without a moment’s hesitation if she could.

  But that was before. That was when it hadn’t been real.

  Now, for some reason, all she could think about was the inside of the house. Her little bedroom—she’d had her very own, as the pack’s omega. It was smaller than all the other bedrooms in the house. There was hardly space for her bed, and she could only stand on one side of it. Still, she had been able to close the door and get some privacy.

  Everything she owned in the world was in that room. The healing crystals she had collected. All her clothes. The painting her mother had made of her as a baby before she had died.

  But Josh had positioned himself between her and the house. He stood with his feet wide apart, arms crossed over his chest, chin jutted out, and she could see that he did not mean to let her back into the house.

  Everything was lost.

  “I don’t have anywhere to go,” she pointed out.

  “Not my problem,” Josh said. “Nothing about you is my problem. Not anymore.”

  “Josh, please—”

  He shook his head. “Go,” he said, “or I’ll have the rest of the guys run you off our land.”

  There was no choice. She turned, feeling numb, and walked away.

  Chapter Two

  RYKER

  On days like this, Ryker felt as if the whole forest belonged to him.

  He hadn’t seen another shifter in days, although he had crossed paths with a small pack of wild wolves yesterday. They had been smart enough and wary enough to leave him alone, and he was glad. He had no fear of wild wolves, but that didn’t mean he wanted to tangle with them.

  He had fought a pure wolf only once before,
and the animal had lain dead at the end of their struggle. That was something that would always haunt Ryker. It may have been self-defense, but that wolf had been his brother, as surely as any human he met would have been his brother. It had felt like murder to him.

  But he’d had no choice. Out here in the wild, self-preservation was the most important thing. Nobody else was going to take care of Ryker, so he had learned early how to take care of himself.

  He had been on his own since the age of twelve, when he had run away from his pack, the call of the wild beckoning to him. Ryker knew that the circumstances that led different feral wolves out into the wild varied, and someday, perhaps, he would meet another wolf and learn his story. But making friends was hard out here.

  He was running south right now. He wouldn’t go too much farther in this direction. He definitely didn’t want to dip below the 66th parallel. The farther south you got, the higher the risk of running into human settlements and organized shifter packs. As long as he was farther north, he knew he was in feral territory.

  It had risks, running feral like this. But they did tend to leave one another alone, and that was good.

  He was glad not to have seen anyone else. When he encountered a wolf, there was always a weird, tense moment during which he and the wolf seemed to be sizing each other up, deciding whether they would fight or pass each other by. Most of the time, nothing came of it, but Ryker did not enjoy those interactions. He would fight when he needed to, but it was not in his disposition to seek fights out.

  And then there were the bears.

  There were bear shifters in this territory too. Ryker knew it, though he had never seen one of them face to face. He had spied them through the trees. He had seen them in both human form and bear. He had seen them shift. He had seen them hunt.

  The bear was the natural enemy of the wolf. He didn’t like to think about what would happen if he was ever forced to come face to face with a bear. There would be no mutual agreement to stand down as there so often was with a fellow wolf. He knew that much. If he met a bear, there would be a fight.