Chasing Tail: A reader x shifters romance

Part 25

Cody POV

I stand in the courtyard of the pack compound. It's been only months since I last called this place home, and yet it feels like a lifetime ago.

I'm a new man now, stronger than I've ever been. Braden may have managed to drive me out before, but he won't oust me now. Not when I've got everything to fight for, my whole life on the line.

"Braden!" I roar his name, a challenge that echoes between the buildings surrounding the courtyard.

Wolf shifters begin to emerge from the headquarters, studying me with eyes that glow, reflecting the fading sunlight of the evening. I recognize them all—people I used to call friends and family. They mean nothing to me now. Whether or not they approve of Braden's tyrannical rule as alpha, I consider them all complicit in my mate's capture.

I scan the gathering shifters, but their alpha is not among them. Nor is my mate. I can smell Y/N's sweet scent, tinged with fear and the salty, metallic scent of blood. It drives me wild with fear for her.

I have clung to our connection in my mind. I heard her cry out for her mates, felt her pain. It made me sprint like the wind until I made it to her side. But now that I'm here, I don't see her. The mingling scents of all the pack members clogs my nose and makes it impossible to determine where my mate's scent is coming from.

Y/N. Where are you?

"BRADEN! Face me, COWARD!" I roar a second time, daring him to face me. His whole pack is now gathered around me. If he doesn't respond to this challenge, he will look weak in front of them and lose legitimacy.

The circle of shifters parts to make way for a tall, broad figure. Braden approaches me, a triumphant smile playing across his lips. His hands and clothes are stained with scarlett—Y/N's blood.

Fury seeps into my bones, suffusing me, a feeling so strong it's almost foreign. My entire being narrows to only one goal: to shred the man who's hurt my mate.

"Well, what do you know? The bait worked. I'm glad you could make it, Cody." He says my name, the one Y/N bestowed on me, with a sneer.

I don't even feel the jab, which I'm sure is intended to make me feel ashamed over my human mate. Nothing could make me ashamed of her. I'm the luckiest shifter in the world to have found her. And when I rescue her, I'll spend the rest of my life making sure she knows that, too.

All I feel now is rage.

"I'll kill you," I tell Braden. It's a quiet, deceptively calm threat, but with our enhanced hearing, every shifter in the courtyard hears my words.

"You can try," he replies.

Beneath his skin, the bones begin to move and crack. His limbs extend as he hunches forward and lands on all fours. His body expands, shredding his clothes and revealing the fur sprouting from his skin. In no more than a few seconds, he changes forms until a massive direwolf stands before me.

As alpha, he can take on the direwolf form at times when ordinary shifters can't. His dominance over the pack acts like a bond, lending him extraordinary strength and confidence. He's counting on being able to defeat me easily with this added power.

But what he's not considering is that I'm mated now. A mate bond gives a shifter greater power, too.

And there is nothing more powerful, more uninhibited, than a shifter whose mate has been threatened.

Braden crouches, digging his claws into the cobblestone ground. He bares his teeth in a mocking, wolfish leer. His muscles bunch up as he prepares to launch himself at me and kill me in a single strike.