Chapter 4

ENZO

I was on my way home from work when my Bluetooth alerted me to an incoming call. Part of me wanted to ignore the call, but I hit the button to accept it instead.

Was it too much for me to wish that the outside world didn’t exist for the rest of tonight? All I wanted to do was grab a shower and drop onto my bed, finding sleep after another exhausting day. It was a little after 10 at night.

“You need to get your ass over here. I’m sending you my location,” my brother, Niccolò, said the moment that the call connected.

The urgency in his voice gave me pause because Niccolò was rarely like this unless something serious happened.

His location came through to me. I wasted no time in clicking it on the display so that it would pull up the map to get me there. It looked like I was fifteen miles away so not that far.

“Tell me everything,” I demanded.

I knew that he hated it when I demanded shit, but I didn’t care right now. This was the time for me to know what I would be walking into.

“I was following a gut feeling after witnessing an altercation earlier. I have no fucking idea where hunters fall into the equation, but I was alerted to one of their vehicles being in this area. Something’s going on, and we have to stop them.”

I cursed and tightened my grip on the steering wheel, realizing the seriousness of the situation.

Niccolò was what one classified as an intuitive. He was known for getting feelings, sometimes strong and sometimes subtle, that guided him. All seers were intuitive but not all intuitives were seers. He didn’t get visions but did get the next best thing. His feelings were not always easy to follow but always important.

The Goddess was selective when it came to bestowing gifts on her wolves. Niccolò’s gift had saved our pack’s ass time and again, something I knew that we were all thankful for. Therefore, I never questioned him when he got them.

I pushed the accelerator down, getting the car to go as fast as it would go. Thankfully, my Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ was fast as fuck because I needed that speed right now. It was also a damn good thing that cops didn’t frequent these suburban areas at this time of night.

“I’ll be there in eight minutes,” I told him before ending the call.

My wolf, Titan, was bloodthirsty for revenge against the hunters, and I was no better. They were responsible for the deaths of a handful of our pack members.

Hunters did exactly what their name suggested. They hunted but not wild animals like deer and woodland creatures. Nah, they hunted supernaturals. If that wasn’t bad enough, they often took those supernaturals to torture and experiment on. It was truly disgusting what they did.

There was a reason why we safeguarded the knowledge of our species. Nobody wanted to be captured and experimented on by the hunters or scientists. Too many of my kind had been killed after they were no longer deemed useful.

There was a time when one of our allied packs had been targeted and nearly wiped out by the hunters. Thirty of their pack members had been taken and used by the sick fuckers before they were disposed of. Their bodies had been found back on the decimated pack grounds after four months of them being tortured.

Some people were truly and utterly fucked up. It was positively disgusting the lengths that these people would go to. It was precisely why we did everything that we could to track the hunters and cockblock them whenever possible.

It was ironic that the hunters said we were the monsters in the equation. They should really be looking in the mirror.

I knew that I was at the right place when I saw my brother talking to a couple of our elite warriors who must’ve been with him earlier because we were nearly forty minutes away from the pack. I didn’t live there, opting to live closer to the company that I ran, but the others here did live in the Midnight pack.

I parked my car behind Niccolò’s and got out to join them. The guys lowered their heads in greeting. I was technically the Alpha heir, so pack members always treated me with respect due to my future post, even though I never wanted to take over when Dad finally decided to step down.

I didn’t want to be Alpha and would rather focus on the business side of things. I took over as CEO of Vittori Enterprises from my uncle four years ago. Dad didn’t agree with me that Niccolò should become the next Alpha. He was barely two years younger than me and had every quality that an Alpha needed. It was never something that I desired for myself, and it wasn’t something that Dad understood. He felt that everyone would jump at the chance to be an Alpha, but I wasn’t one of them.

“Their vehicle will be coming down this street soon. I figured the best course of action is to have Joshua throw out an illusion, making them think that something ran out in front of them. That way they aren’t alerted to our presence until it’s too late,” he explained.

It was a solid idea, so I nodded in agreement. Damn good thing that Joshua was here tonight. I had no idea if that was because of a stroke of luck, Niccolò’s gift giving him nudge, or divine intervention. It didn’t really matter though because it was our benefit either way.

My ears picked up the sound of a vehicle heading our way. We ducked down behind our vehicles so that we weren’t spotted. We needed the element of surprise for this to work out the way that we hoped for it to.

A black SUV looked unsuspecting, but we knew that those vehicles were equipped with plenty of weapons that could fatally wound or permanently injure us. None of us were keen about being on the receiving end of that.

“Now,” Niccolò prompted Joshua.

His illusions always looked real, which made his gift so powerful. I had never seen anyone who had his level of control over that type of gift.

I watched as a large wolf barreled in front of vehicle and smirked at the thought of what their faces looked like right now. Were they scared, intimidated, or eager to get their greedy little fingers on the prize of a lifetime like that wolf? It was bigger than typical Alphas were.

The driver slammed on his breaks, which caused the vehicle to fishtail. What kind of fucking idiot did that at the speed they were driving at? I was not surprised at all when it flipped the vehicle. There was no doubt that the fuckers definitely felt that. Hopefully they were still alive so that we could give them a dose of their own medicine while extracting as much information as we could about their operations.

I smirked when I heard groans of pain. Today might’ve sucked at work, but this brightened my mood right up.

Their hearts began racing as they heard the glass crunching underneath our feet. We needed to move this along quickly before anyone showed up.

Niccolò mindlinked that he already reached out to Diego. He was one of the state troopers that were a part of the pack. It was important for our pack to have people on the inside of law enforcement in our area for cases like this right now.

There appeared to be four males. They were outfitted in tactical gear, so they were out this way for a purpose. I was curious to know what that reason was.

“Take care of them,” I said.

Our warriors immediately complied, opening the doors and dragging them out. They started fighting our warriors, but they were no match.

“Shit,” Niccolò cursed, pulling my attention away from Titan’s newest chew toys.

I followed his line of sight and saw someone else in the backseat. ‘One of these things is not like the others,’ I mused to Titan.

This female would appear to be the answer as to why they were out here. Her hands were zip-tied behind her back.

I climbed into the backseat and used my claws to shred through the binding before carefully pulling her out of the car. I barely felt the glass that cut into my knees, being more focused on her.

A frown pulled at my lips when I surveyed the damage to her body. It caused anger to surge right through me.

Glass had cut into her when it exploded as the vehicle flipped. That wasn’t the worst though. A bruise in the shape of a handprint marred her cheek, clearly having been slapped. Then something had happened to her face as well.

Titan was growling dangerously in my head, seething with rage. I had only ever seen this kind of anger from him when it came to our pack members being harmed. He had never had this type of reaction on behalf of a stranger before.

“Violet?” Niccolò asked absentmindedly, staring at the unconscious woman in my arms.