Deadlier than the Males Read online

  Deadlier than the Males

  By Teresa Hann

  To someone who reminded me to write my thing (although this probably isn’t quite what you meant!)

  Content Notes

  This is a dark book meant for mature readers. Please be aware that the story contains the following:

  Explicit language, sex, and violence

  Light m/m

  Discussion of past sexual violence, including domestic abuse and sexual abuse of minors (not of the heroine)

  Attempted sexual violence

  Brief mentions of suicidal thoughts

  Alpha/omega mating urges

  Chapter 1

  Rye

  The smell of the city assails Rye when he opens the car door. Smoke and exhaust, rot and trash, all overlaid by the distant wash of dirty river water. His inner wolf withdraws disdainfully, until he can only feel the faintest whisper of its presence.

  The kid in the driver’s seat wrinkles his nose. “You sure you got the right place? How’s a wolf supposed to live here? Any wolf, let alone an alpha like Miss Briar.”

  Rye laughs at that. “Never been here before? I can tell you from experience, you get used to it if you have to.”

  The crinkles in the kid’s nose only deepen, as if to say, of course Rye would be familiar with city squalor.

  Poor kid, stuck chauffeuring him. None of his elders would have touched the job; probably his mother had ordered him. To the pack, Rye is as hated as he is necessary.

  Rye pats his shoulder, just to watch him stiffen. “You wait here. I’ll be in and out.”

  “If it’s such a simple job, why’d you have to bring a second person?” the kid challenges.

  “Oh, that.” Rye smiles. “There’s good odds I’ll be fucking the alpha in the backseat. Saves time, to have someone else drive while I’m busy.”

  He leaves the car at the curb.

  Discarded wrappers skitter across the sidewalk at his passing. The brick of the apartment building is blackened with age, the carpet in the hallway more grime than fiber. The dingy fluorescent illumination flutters unsteadily. And yet, inside him, his wolf rouses with every step. Of course it’s rousing. Through the must and mildew and cigarette smoke and cooking grease, he smells her.

  The door to Apartment 112 is locked. Rye slips two slender bits of metal from his jacket and works them into the mechanism. He’s years out of practice, but also the lock is shit. A bit of jiggling around, and it clicks open.

  Rye steps into the dimness—

  The cold edge of a knife kisses his throat.

  He freezes, muscles tightening. At the edge of his vision, he registers a chilly green gaze.

  “It’s been a while, Princess,” says Rye.

  “You,” says Briar Faelan, in the way someone else might say whore.

  What kind of alpha greets an intruder in human form, wielding a knife instead of claws and fangs? The same kind of alpha who chooses a city as her place of exile, Rye supposes. Briar had plenty of options after Conall kicked her out. Most other packs would have taken in a fifteen-year-old, even a fifteen-year-old alpha. Instead she had gone where wolves don’t go.

  Even in human form, Rye’s vision adjusts quickly to darkness. Impressive, for an apartment to be so tiny and so barren at the same time. A sheet-draped mattress lying on the floorboards. A battered metal folding chair that looks like it came from beside a dumpster. A mop tottering against the windowsill—

  The knife presses harder, forcing Rye to retrieve his gaze. “Did Conall send you?” Briar demands.

  “No,” Rye says. He feels a sting of broken skin as his throat moves. “Do you mind setting that knife down? You’ve made your point.”

  Briar doesn’t budge. “Have I? I think I like you where you are.”

  He lets his eyes go heavy-lidded. “I’m sure you do,” he purrs.

  She jerks away as if burned.

  Rye massages his throat, pleased. Six years ago, the last time he’d seen her, Briar had still exuded the faint, subdued scent of an immature youth. Now, at twenty-one, she’s in full bloom, blackberry and red rose and the wild green lushness of summer. His cock thickens just from her proximity.

  If her scent can do that to him, what’s his scent doing to her?

  With the knife out of the way, he finally gets a proper look at her. “You haven’t grown an inch,” he remarks.

  “Shut up,” she says.

  She’s wearing men’s jeans with the cuffs heavily folded up, and a baggy sweatshirt, the logo chipped into illegibility. Her auburn hair threatens to straggle into her eyes. The wounds she’d received in wolf form wouldn’t show as scars in her human form, but her left eye is a visibly duller green than her right. Six years ago, her older brother Conall had made sure to claw it out thoroughly. Even an alpha’s healing factor can be overloaded with enough damage.

  Her pupils are blown. She’s breathing hard. “Did Conall kick you out, then? Is that why you’re here? Panting for a new alpha to take you in?”

  “No. But also, yes.”

  “Quit your bullshit.”

  “Conall’s dead.”

  She reels. “What? How?” she demands.

  “A accident. Very nasty car crash—you remember he wasn’t a fan of seat belts. The damage went beyond his ability to heal.” Rye shrugs. “Sad business.”

  Her eyes are narrowing. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe whatever you want. Either way, he’s dead. That makes you the new head of the pack. I’m here to take you home.”

  “Home.” She spits the word out, sharp and bitter. “What if I don’t want to come with you? Did you think of that? Why should I throw away the life I have now?”

  “For us?” he suggests.

  “The pack? The pack can go fuck itself. I remember how you all stood by and watched that night.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean the pack,” Rye laughs. “I mean, with Conall’s death, his omegas are yours for the claiming. That includes your beloved Torin. And, of course, that includes me.”

  Chapter 2

  Briar

  In the bathroom, teeth clenched, Briar presses a panty liner to the inside of her soaked briefs. She washes her hands in cold water, then her face. She packs her toothbrush.

  She doesn’t touch herself, because if she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Even here, she can smell him, autumn fields, autumn nights, underlaid by something intensely, indescribably omega. Rye is well-named: his scent pours heat through her veins like whiskey.

  Long ago, when she’d been a child and he’d been her mother’s teenaged charity case, she’d admired him in an innocent way. The older boy had seemed like a storybook prince, with his haze-blue eyes and hair the gold of pirate’s plunder, the most handsome, charming boy she knew.

  Rye had fueled countless daydreams. She’d made him a fucking valentine, which he’d gently declined. When her mother had exiled him, she’d locked herself in her room and cried her eyes out. For the better part of a year, she’d asked her mother when she would let him come back, while Justine Faelan’s responses had grown more terse and strained each time.

  Years later, he’d come back at Conall’s side, splattered in blood, and Briar had learned to hate him.

  Her inner wolf, starved for so long, is stirring at his presence. The beast demands his flesh inside her. She’ll pin him beneath her claws and taste him with her teeth. She’ll drink his sweat, his blood, his tears, his saliva, his semen—

  Briar punches the wall so hard she cracks the tile.

  She shakes out her hand grimly. She licks her split knuckles, closing the wounds.

  Rye definitely heard that, from the other side of the flimsy door. But she’s dragged her wolf
to heel. For now.

  Rye Kouris is an animal, just like her brother. Like an animal, he has no conscience, no concept of love.

  She will never stoop to his level.

  She sees him kneeling beside her bed when she comes out. He’s straightening her sheets.

  “Get your hands off my things,” she snaps.

  “Sorry,” he says innocently, letting go of the sheet. He’ll have gotten his scent all over it. She’ll need to wash it when she comes back. With bleach.

  “Traveling light,” he remarks, nodding at the backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “I don’t expect to stay long.” She wants to see for herself that Conall’s really, truly dead. She wants to see Torin again, if he’ll let her. That’s all.

  The town where she grew up has nothing else to offer her.

  With reluctance, she shuts and latches the windows. She’d rather keep them open, to air out every trace of Rye’s scent by the time she returns, but leaving a first floor window open in this part of town is asking to be burgled. She’s not afraid of any human, and she has nothing to steal, but no wolf takes intruders on their territory well.

  They walk out to the waiting car. “Miss Briar!” says the guy in the driver’s seat. “It’s been years!”

  “Vinny,” she greets, and runs out of anything else polite to say. She thumps into the front passenger seat, backpack in lap, putting space between her and Rye. The car pulls out onto the road.

  Vinny was two grades below her in school, Briar recalls, staring ahead. He has a brother. He’s a beta, like the brother, and therefore oblivious to the haze of pheromones rapidly filling the enclosed interior of the car.

  An omega. She takes shallow breaths. An aroused omega.

  “I imagine I’m the first omega you’ve been around since you were old enough to care.” Rye’s voice comes from the backseat, raspy with lust.

  She’s not going to look at him, she tells herself. She’s not going to dignify him with a response.

  He gives a low chuckle that goes straight to her core. “Thought so.”

  Briar clenches her thighs together. It’s not like she’s some starry-eyed virgin. For a while she’d grimly sought out casual, anonymous encounters with humans, where no one talked about themselves and her wolf stayed silent, trying to prove to herself that it was enough. She was more than capable of teaching a lesson to any creep that tried her.

  But for the past six years, she’d made a point of avoiding other shifters, and now she’s paying for it. She has no acquired immunity to someone like—him.

  “We should make up for lost time,” Rye says, and moans.

  Conall left her blind on her left side, so she can’t even look at him discreetly. Instead, she has to give up all dignity and visibly, obviously jerk her head toward the rear view mirror.

  He’s touching himself, idly running his fingertips along the hard ridge in his jeans. His head is thrown back, curls of dark blonde hair framing the exposed column of his throat, the faded mating bite scars of dead alphas, the new thin line of red from her knife.

  His eyes meet hers in the mirror. He smiles, and palms himself more firmly through the denim. “Help a man out?”

  Briar drags her gaze away from his crotch. “How long has it been since my brother died, again?”

  “A day and a half.” Rye raises an eyebrow. “Do you mourn him?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t see the problem here.”

  The problem is that you’re fucking terrible, Briar thinks, as she finally acquires enough resolve to roll down the window.

  Air whooshes past. The stink of the city rapidly snatches away their scents. Briar inhales pointedly, even as her inner wolf whines at the loss.

  Rye gives one last lazy stroke before giving up. He turns to gaze out the window; his smile doesn’t waver. Until next time, it says.

  Belatedly, too loudly, Vinny says, “So how about that weather?”

  The city gives way to fields, then forest, pressing dark against the sky. Briar closes her eyes, feeling the wind of the highway whip through her hair. It’s beginning to smell like home.

  Home. What a thought. After her exile, she’d tried to cast off Fell River as ruthlessly as it had cast her off. She vividly remembers how she’d left the first town she’d come to—walking to work, she’d spotted a car bearing the Fell River High School bumper sticker. She’d turned around on the spot, grabbed everything that would fit in a backpack, and gone hitchhiking a second time.

  But wolves have an innate sense of place. Territory. Home, even when it shouldn’t be home. Though she resents it, something’s loosening inside her chest with every breath.

  Vinny has given up on awkward small talk; the only sound is the rush of the highway. With her eyes closed, it’s so easy to turn back time. No one’s dead. No one’s lost. The terrible events of six years ago never happened. It’s her mom in the driver’s seat, and they’re running errands like they have a hundred times before, and maybe they’ll get to eat out at that one diner before they go home…

  Briar blinks awake in darkness.

  The sun’s set. The car’s stopped.

  Through the open window, she sees Rye walking toward her. The diner’s neon sign silhouettes his lean figure, his unruly golden waves. In the dimness, to her sleep-blurred eye, he almost looks like a storybook prince again.

  She closes her eyes forcefully, then reopens them. “This isn’t Fell River,” she says.

  “No,” he agrees. “I thought I’d get you something to eat first.” He takes something wrapped and rectangular from the plastic bag he’s carrying. “Catfish grilled cheese. You used to yell for it every time we passed by East Bend.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she lies. Then she catches a whiff. Her stomach immediately growls.

  Smiling, Rye continues to hold out the sandwich.

  She snatches it from him.

  They eat there in the parking lot, all three of them. She hasn’t had that catfish grilled cheese in years. It’s as delicious as nostalgia, hot and crisp and salty.

  He’d remembered to get hers with ketchup.

  It’s such a small thing, but she’s been alone for so long. It’s enough to make her commit the mistake of looking in the rearview mirror.

  Her gaze collides with Rye’s. Still looking at her, he smirks and swipes his tongue along the crevice of his sandwich.

  A wave of simultaneous lust and loathing turns her stomach. She grips the seat. For a moment, she thinks she’ll throw up.

  Under Rye Kouris’s pretty face is a dog in heat. He’d begged her mother to fuck him. He’d gotten her brother to fuck him. Now that they’re both dead, he wants her to fuck him. In the twelve years since she’d met him, he’s taken more from her than he can ever make up for.

  His consideration means nothing. He’ll hump whichever alpha he can get. He’s less capable of real emotion than a family dog.

  And she’d be a fool to forget it for an instant.

  Chapter 3

  Briar

  The swelling moon hangs high overhead by the time the Welcome to Fell River sign greets them out of the dark.

  Briar has forgotten how quiet a small town gets at night. Houses and shops stand with darkened windows. Theirs is the only car on the road.

  And then they’re pulling up in front of the house where she grew up.

  Briar steps out slowly, her gaze scything over the lot. “It’s a mess,” she says, her voice harsh.

  Beside her, Rye shrugs. “Conall did as he liked.”

  Weeds bristle from the cracks in the driveway. Broken things litter the overgrown lawn: rusting chunks of machinery, half a lawn chair. Briar recognizes that chair. She’d learned to read on it, sitting in her mother’s lap on long summer afternoons.

  Absurdly, she feels a sting in her eyes. What did she think would happen in her absence? Conall had only ever left ruin and pain in his wake. This is just one final little fuck-you to her from beyond the grave.

&n
bsp; Rye takes the opportunity to rest his hand on her shoulder. She shrugs it off violently. “You lived here too.”

  “Conall didn’t like having his property disturbed.” Creeping vines have half-swallowed the house, hanging in a snarled curtain over the porch. Rye pushes them aside for her and reaches for his keys. “Lisa made an effort, at first. I tried to warn her, but…”

  “Who’s Lisa?”

  “Conall’s third mate. You’ve never met. She came here not long after you left, from the South Junction pack.” The door swings open, revealing a dim, cluttered entryway. “There she is now.”

  The lights of the kitchen burn from the other end of the entryway. A woman is asleep at the kitchen table, blond head pillowed in her pale, soft arms.

  “Lisa,” Rye calls out softly.

  She jerks awake. Blinking rapidly, fearfully, she stumbles to her feet and comes to them. She smells of pear blossoms—but her scent doesn’t have an omega’s effect on Briar, because she’s pregnant. Her belly’s visibly swollen under her baby blue sweater.

  With Briar’s nephew. The thought is disquieting.

  Lisa twists her hands. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, I’m an idiot, I’ve made such a terrible first impression, I just wanted to talk to you when you arrived, I know it’s rude of me to ask for a favor like this, you must think I’m awful—”

  Uncomfortable, Briar says, “What did you want?”

  Lisa cringes. “I-I wanted to ask if I could go back to my home pack. This way, my child won’t be considered part of your pack. He won’t be a threat to you if he turns out to be an alpha. S-so it’s the best way forward for both of us, I thought, and I hope that you’ll agree with me, if it’s all right, I hope you don’t think I’m asking for too much—”

  “Go ahead,” Briar interrupts. “Let me know if you need anything before you go. Leave whenever you want.”

  She stalks out of the kitchen, feeling sick. Lisa had been afraid that Briar would take her as a mate—with or without eliminating a potential rival first, killing her predecessor’s unborn child. That’s the kind of world Lisa is used to. That’s the kind of world Briar has returned to.