Maddox
The Boundaryland Omegaverse
Callie Rhodes
Contents
Maddox
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Also by Callie Rhodes
About the Author
Maddox Book 4 in The Boundarylands Omegaverse Series
Hunted and broken, her only hope for survival lays in the arms of a feral Alpha that knows no mercy.
No woman willingly travels to the Boundarylands.
It’s where they are—the Alphas.
They keep to themselves in the wilderness, and beta civilization knows to keep its distance. Especially beta women…for fear they may not be a beta after all.
The only way to know your true nature is to feel the touch of an Alpha. Omegas may be rare, but every woman knows their fates are hellish—held captive, broken, mated, knotted, and bred.
After a hiking trip goes horribly wrong, Darcy is on the run, tracked by men who want to ensure she doesn’t live to tell her story. She doesn’t realize that she’s crossed over into the Boundarylands until she collapses before the one creature she fears more than the murderers on her tail.
Now her only hope for salvation lays with an Alpha so dangerous even other Alphas know to keep their distance.
Chapter One
Hope Johansen's lungs were burning.
She'd been running for hours, forcing her feet to keep moving, her arms to keep pumping. Even when gulping for breath became agony and her legs threatened to give out. She pushed past the pain and kept going.
She had to. What other choice was there? To lie down and die right here in the middle of the forest? Give herself up to the men who were chasing her?
"Hell, no."
Hope muttered the words out loud despite the breath they cost her. She might not make it out of this alive, but she would keep running—keep fighting—to the very end.
The brown and deep green of the forest blurred in her peripheral vision as she ran. Every tree, every hill and valley looked exactly the same as every other. Hope hadn't been able to make out a single distinct landmark for miles now. And with the thick forest canopy blocking the sun, she had no idea which direction she was headed.
For all she knew, she might have been running in circles this whole time. Might crest the next hill and run right into the men who were hunting her.
The men who had killed Sandra and Dave.
Hope's breath hitched at the memory, and she stumbled, costing herself priceless seconds. She did her best to force the horrible scene from her mind, but it replayed relentlessly—the shouts, the screams, the blood.
Dear God, all that blood.
But Hope couldn't focus on that now. She needed to direct all of her energy into putting as much distance as she could between herself and the killers.
It was what she had been doing for the last three days. Resting only for a few precious hours each night, ever since the gunshots had broken the stillness of the forest, and her friends had crumpled to the ground.
It seemed like a lifetime ago. But only seventy-two hours had passed since Hope, Sandra, and Dave had set up camp.
The spot had been beautiful, just steps from the rocky shore of a small, crystal blue lake tucked into the Klamath Mountains barely a quarter-mile off the Continental Trail. They couldn't believe their luck at finding such a perfect spot, with fresh water for drinking and a swim before dinner.
A swim they had never gotten to take.
Another hitch in her breath. Another overwhelming wave of guilt.
It had been Hope's idea to hike this section of the Continental Trail over Labor Day weekend when she and Dave had both managed to get the time off from the sporting goods store where they worked. Just as it had been her idea to try the faint path leading off the trail late in the afternoon of their first day out.
Hope dreamed of hiking the Continental Trail all the way from Mexico to Canada someday. But until she saved the money to take that much time off, she was content to hike sections of it every chance she got. It had been easy enough to talk Dave into coming with her, since he loved the outdoors almost as much as Hope. But his wife Sandra had been less enthusiastic.
Like most betas, Sandra was uncomfortable with the idea of spending time in the wilderness, especially when there were such good walking paths around the city of Sacramento.
And of course, Sandra was leery of hiking a trail so close to the Boundarylands.
But they wouldn't be that close, Hope had assured her over beers one recent Friday after work. The Continental Trail was nearly thirty miles away from the closest boundary line. The only things they'd have to worry about were mosquito bites and raccoons stealing their food while they slept.
And Hope had been right. On the first day out, they'd experienced perfect trail conditions, sunny, but cool weather, and wild blackberries to snack on. They hadn't even seen another beta on the trail. By the time they decided to make camp for the night, they'd built up a healthy appetite even for the freeze-dried beef stroganoff in their packs.
Hope was gathering firewood, and Sandra was filtering water from the lake when two men walked into their camp. One of tread his heavy boots over the fire Dave had just lit.
These weren't hikers. Hikers didn't wear heavy gold chains and knockoff designer jeans, or bandannas over their faces under their mirrored sunglasses.
Hikers didn't pull guns from the holsters on their belts.
Hope knew exactly who these men were—and how much trouble she and her friends were in—from reading first-person accounts by the few people who'd survived stumbling into an illegal grow.
But she could tell that Sandra and Dave didn't realize what they were dealing with. They didn't know that not far away, there would be hidden fields of marijuana or poppies that these men would harvest and sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fields whose locations were a
