Chapter Seven

If was as if everything was happening all at once. I was in the house cooking for the alphas, the ones who treated me awfully. Then, poof, I was standing outside with all their bodies in various displays of carnage, and now I was directing a dragon, the one my wolf had been prancing and preening over, to a place I'd heard about but never been—the people in need of rescuing I'd overheard existed but had no proof of.

This dragon, this powerful dragon, listened to what I said and acted, trusting me completely. I suppose in a way I had done the same for him as I climbed on his back, but he wasn't doing this on his own. He'd called in his "team," whoever that all entailed. There was so much I wanted to ask him, but time wasn't on our side.

Chances were great that the bodies would be discovered soon, if they hadn't been already. Especially since the "guests" they had talked about coming hadn't arrived yet. Unless…maybe that was a ruse, one set up by the dragon and his team. Maybe Mav was the company they'd been waiting for, after all.

There were so many possibilities, but none of them ones we could explore now. We had omegas to save.

"I need you to stay in the SUV when we get there." He didn't even pretend to be asking me. Silly dragon. I didn't play that way.

"Yeah, that's not gonna happen." Could I explain further? Sure. But this was a complete sentence, and I didn't need to explain myself to him, not that I had the time.

I might be limping, but I knew how to connect to these people in a way he never could. I'd been one of them. I understood their trepidation when it came to strangers. And Mav was fierce looking, even in his human form.

Unlike me, they wouldn't see Mav and think, "Oh, what a teddy bear… Let me snuggle and sleep in your scent." Nope. They'd see him as the weapon he was.

But me? When they saw me, they'd see one of them. We could sense our own. It wouldn't buy me complete trust, but I had a shot of getting them to come with us.

The car fell silent and, with that, my resolve to not explain myself evaporated.

"If I don't go in, some of them will hide from you."

"You're right," he said, letting out a long sigh and surprising the heck out of me.

The backup he called for when we first left arrived at the same time we did. They must've been waiting on standby. They looked like something out of a movie as they drove up the dirt road—all these little nondescript SUVs, planning to surround the bad guys and save the good.

We stopped as soon as we were all off the road, and they talked about what was going to happen and how. I felt very much like I didn't belong, like I was a danger to their mission. I didn't need to defend myself; Mav did it for me. He didn't even have to say a word. Between his side-eye and grunts, they all got the picture and quickly. Not all of them came in with us. The plan was that some of them would stay outside the dwelling to assist the omegas we saved, while a few of us collected them. There was also the mention of killing alphas who got in the way, but I didn't let that get too embedded into me, for fear it might distract me from what was important…the omegas.

"We're gonna go in, get them, get out," Mav commanded.

He went on to clarify that any alpha who tried to stop us was to be dealt with according to protocol. Protocol I learned meant that our first attempt would be to capture them. Second? Death.

I was fine with either of those options. As long as they were stopped, I was there for it. Death was permanent, but alive meant the potential for information. Both outcomes were solid.

Unlike where I'd been kept, the alphas hadn't put the trailers together to make it sort of look like a house. These were fifty-year-old trailers. It might at one time have even been a trailer park. It was hard to tell with all the overgrowth and junk scattered everywhere.

Mav and I went into the first one we came to. There were no alphas to be scented as we walked in, which allowed us to focus on the omegas. One step in and it became instantly clear that my awful life was better than their hell.

We shuffled them out and brought them to the SUVs, promising to keep them safe. It took a bit of convincing to get the first one to agree, but once they did, everyone else followed.

Mav seemed unsure when he approached the omegas. Perhaps what I had seen him do earlier comprised his actual job on this team. The one who came in and exterminated the bad guys to allow the others to rescue the omegas? Was I okay with that? He wasn't arbitrarily killing people or anything. Those men were evil. They needed to go. So were the alphas who ran this place, wherever they were.

"This was supposed to be a safe house," one of the omegas sobbed, and I understood exactly where they were coming from. I'd been there too.

"I know." I hugged them tightly, unsure what else to do.

We worked as quickly as we could until we got everybody out and into the SUVs. They would need so much more than simply a way out of those trailers, but this was a start—a big one.

Mav drove us to what he called the warehouse. I soon discovered it was so much more than that. Not only was it my mate's home but the home of so many others, including, for the meantime, all of these omegas.