POV: Alois
"Get her out," Marcus breathed, his voice barely audible. "Before I remember my duty."
He stepped back and hit the release button for the gate.
"Thank you," I choked out.
I didn't wait. I slammed the gas pedal. The SUV shot forward, leaving the pack lands behind.
"Alois..." A weak voice came from the back.
"I'm here, Luna. Hang on."
I drove like a madman, weaving through the city traffic. I wasn't taking her to a hospital. Kaeden owned the hospitals. I was taking her to the Black Market.
Dr. Gates ran a clinic in the basement of a laundromat in the slums. He was a human who knew about our world and didn't care about pack laws, only money.
I carried Daria down the narrow stairs. She was limp now. Her breathing was shallow, rapid gasps.
"Gates!" I roared, kicking the door open.
The doctor, a thin man with greasy glasses, looked up from a microscope. He saw the blood and sighed. "I charge double for Alpha messes."
"Just save her," I said, laying Daria on the surgical table.
Gates cut away her dress. He paused when he saw the silver burns. Then he took a blood sample. He ran it through a centrifuge on his desk.
A moment later, the machine beeped. Gates looked at the screen, and his eyes went wide.
"Holy mother of..." he whispered. "Do you know what she is?"
"She is a patient," I barked. "Fix her!"
"Look at the energy reading!" Gates turned the screen to me. The graph was spiking off the charts. "This isn't normal werewolf blood. This is... ancient. White Wolf markers."
He looked at Daria with greedy eyes. "Her organs alone would be worth millions on the black market. Her heart could cure any disease. Her bone marrow could create super-soldiers."
I grabbed Gates by the collar and slammed him against the wall. My canines extended, sharpening into points.
"You want money?" I snarled. "I'll give you something better. I'll give you the patent rights to the synthetic version of her blood. You can be the richest man in the human world. But if she dies, you get nothing but a severed throat."
Gates swallowed hard, his eyes darting between me and the readout. Greed won.
"Okay. Okay! But she needs surgery now. The uterus is ruptured. I... I can't save the pup."
I looked at Daria. A tear slid from her closed eye. She heard him.
"Save the mother," I said, my voice breaking.
Gates got to work. "I have a drug. 'Wolf's Sleep.' It stops the heart for three minutes. Flatlines the monitor. It mimics death perfectly. We can use the tissue from the... from the procedure... to fake a corpse."
"Do it," I said.
Gates injected a clear liquid into Daria's IV.
"I'm sorry, Daria," I whispered, holding her cold hand.
On the monitor, the green line of her heartbeat slowed.
Beep... beep... beep...
Then, a long, high-pitched tone filled the room.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
The line went flat.
"She's under," Gates said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "We have to move fast. If I don't revive her in exactly 180 seconds, she stays dead."
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a notification from the pack network.
Alpha Kaeden has initiated a track on your vehicle.
He knew.
