She looked over her shoulder every few minutes, keeping an eye out for other hunters while trying not to run headlong into a tree or snap her ankle on the uneven ground.
She’d hunted in the forest for as long as she’d been a prisoner in the bunker, which was the last twenty years. The kitchen women helped the young children when they were first captured and brought to live in the bunker, but that luxury faded quickly.
No matter their age, males in the bunker had to hunt, or they would starve to death. Ryder had been dressed as a boy when she was captured, and she had no choice but to hunt if she wanted to survive.
Before that, she had lived a normal life with her family in a lush, green settlement, secluded from the rest of the world. Everything had changed when Afana’s men had come to their enclave and raided it for slaves. Her people had tried to fight back, but they were no match for the brutality of Afana’s thugs.
As Afana’s men ravaged their village, Ryder’s mother had given her the order that saved Ryder’s life.
“Pretend to be a boy,” she had urged, her terrified eyes spurring Ryder to action.
Ryder did as he was told, putting on her dead brother’s clothes just before Afana’s men burst in and dragged her and her mother away.
If she hadn’t been sharp enough to obey her mother, Ryder would have been locked up in the bunker’s cells with the other women. Their very existence depended on them providing the men with sex. Ryder had no intention of doing that. She’d promised herself that if she escaped the bunker, she would free the women.
No matter what the cost.
She was looking forward to ripping the guts out of every asshole who had wronged those women, and there were a lot of them. Ryder would need to find an army to bring those men to justice, and that was just what she planned on doing.
Those fuckers wouldn’t know what hit them.
The air rippled through Leandro’s thick, white fur as he ran. He loved changing into his wolf form. He felt free.
Leandro tracked the wolves but by the time he arrived, as always, they were gone. He could still smell their trail, but that wasn’t the only thing he could smell.
There was a human nearby.
The human scent came from a female. It got stronger as he closed in on her, and he slowed his sprint so as not to scare her.
When he caught up to the human Leandro peered through the leaves, confused by the dichotomy between what his eyes and nose told him. He thought his sense of smell was messing with him. They didn’t look like a female at all.
Although if that was a male, it was the best-looking male he’d ever seen. Leandro might have to rethink some fundamental truths about himself.
He shook his head at the thought. He was all about women, and he puffed his chest out to prove it. If he were a gorilla, he’d have thumped it with his fist.
Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off the human’s delicate features.
He took another sniff to make sure his nose hadn’t lied. He sighed with relief. Yup, that’s a girl pretending to be a boy, Leandro thought to himself. Feeling reassured, he allowed himself to look at her and drink in her beauty.
Her lips were full and red as a crisp apple. Her eyes were the cold blue of a Siberian tiger’s. She was breathtakingly beautiful, even with a buzz cut. Leandro wondered what she would look like with hair. It was hard to tell what color it would be since it was cropped to her skull, but he was sure she would look stunning.
He checked out the rest of the stranger’s body, and it still looked like a boy’s. Something strange was going on here, and Leandro was determined to find out what.
Ryder skidded to an abrupt halt. Something or someone else was out here with her, and she felt as if she were being hunted. She spun on her heel, taking in her surroundings. She didn’t see anything out of place, but she heard the crack of branches from behind her. Not the heavy boots of a person.
It was an animal.
She whirled around. Piercing blue eyes stared at her through the undergrowth. She instantly knew that it was a white Siberian tiger, one of the meanest bastards in the forest.
Ryder reached for an arrow and slowly nocked it as the tiger crept forward. They were both getting ready to attack.
Ryder’s arrow struck the tiger’s neck, which pissed him off royally but did little else. He growled, revealing sharp white teeth, and leapt at her, colliding with her shoulders and knocking her to the ground with a thud. She refused to be easy prey.
This fucker would have to earn his dinner.
You’re not eating me! Ugh, your breath smells like a bag of wrinkled old-man ball–sacks! She punched the tiger in the throat, trying to get it off her.
Ryder thrashed, pinned against the ground as the tiger lunged again in an attempt to sink its teeth into her neck. Saliva dripped onto her face, and she gagged on the stench of rotting flesh as the tiger’s breath assaulted her senses.
A blur of white fur streaked into the corner of her vision. The new arrival slammed into the tiger, knocking it away from Ryder. She blinked in surprise, seeing a huge white wolf attack the tiger. She rolled away from the snarling beasts, unable to bring herself to flee as they went head-to-head.
The wolf attacked over and over, the white of the tiger’s fur turning pink from the blood seeping from his wounds.
The wolf is protecting me?
The tiger arched his neck, snapping its jaws and kicking wildly with its back legs, trying to fight back. The wolf had the tiger pinned but it was forced to leap back
