Ellie's Wolf by Maddy Barone Read Free Book Online Page A

into his face. Ellie stared with a mix of horror and admiration and started toward them, but before she had gotten more than a step, the two referees and the mayor ran up and pried Sara off.
    “You stay put,” the mayor snapped at Sara.
    The glare she gave him should have curled his hair. “They’re going to hurt her!” she shouted.
    The crowd fell almost silent, straining to see and hear what was going on.
    The mayor swiped a hand over his shiny forehead. “That’s none of our business. They paid their entry fee and won the lady. Gentlemen, you can take your bride away now.”
    It took both the Fosse brothers, but Mel was carried, fighting and screaming, off the stage and into the cheering crowd. Ellie wanted scream too. Sara did scream, but the noise was loud enough to cover it.
    “Damn it,” Sara said, squeezing Ellie’s hand. “We should have run away! I knew we should have run away!”
    Ellie squeezed back. “No, everything’s going to be okay. Jelly is here.”
    “What good is one snot-nosed kid going to do us?”
    That was a good question. “I don’t know, but if Jelly is here, other members of the Pack might be too. They’ll take care of us. And I know they’ll help Mel too.”
    “Pack? Pack of what? Wild dogs?”
    Ellie hesitated. “Actually, they’re wolves.” Her father had called them devil-spawned demons who had stolen his sister, but Ellie knew they weren’t. Taye loved his mate tenderly. He might be fierce and even dangerous, but no one who showed women such gentle respect was evil. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Lakota Wolf Clan?”
    “Nope. Should I have?”
    “Well, where I’m from, everyone has heard of them.” The Clan’s women had been stolen and murdered over twenty years ago, and the vengeance the Clan had taken was a story men still told each other. “Everyone knows not to bother their women.”
    Sara flicked her hair off her cheek with an impatient finger. “What can they do when we’re won and raped by whatever guys win us?”
    Murder wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. “I just hope the Pack doesn’t make us widows.”
    Sara stopped in the middle of a laugh when she saw that Ellie was serious. “Your cousin’s friends would kill the men who win us?”
    A new, louder roar from the crowd brought Ellie’s attention back to the square. The blood and bits of flesh on the floor had been mopped up, and Group Two was fighting. The man who had stared at her was moving with the same grace Ellie had seen in her cousin Taye. Was he a wolf? He must be. Only the wolf men from the Lakota Wolf Clan moved like that. Not all of Taye’s Pack looked Native American since many of them had European ancestors. She still couldn’t place him, though, and she had spent enough time at Taye’s den to know all of Taye’s Pack at least by sight. Maybe he was one of Taye’s relatives who lived with the nomadic Lakota on the prairie. She held hard to that possibility, praying the hope she clung to was real, not just smoke that would leave her at the mercy of a man she didn’t know.
    He defeated three of the four men with what seemed to Ellie almost laughable ease. He was able to dodge most kicks and fists, and no knife came close to him. He tricked one of the fighters, luring him to crash into the ropes, disqualifying him. Two more were dispatched, leaving only one man to face him. That man had muscles on top of muscles, looked stunningly mean, and used every trick to defeat the wolf. The knife he swung was almost long enough to qualify as a sword, and he swung with vicious precision at his unarmed opponent. In spite of the mean man’s speed with his weapon, the blade never touched the wolf. He simply moved too fast to keep up with.
    The fight went on for what seemed like hours. Although the muscle-bound fighter wasn’t able to do much damage, the curly-haired man couldn’t seem to defeat him. Ellie did not want the mean looking one for her husband. She told herself looks