Free The Beast Within by Jennifer Lyon, Bianca DArc Erin McCarthy

it. She reacted, pausing, her shoulders giving an involuntary jerk.
    “Oh, you bitch,” he breathed from right behind her, his voice shaking with fury.
    Liv walked faster. Scarborough grabbed her arm and drew her up short. Shocked at the rough grip of his hand on her arm as he forced her to turn and face him, Liv yelled, “Let go of me!”
    “Not until you give me a piece of the ass you keep letting my brother have so willingly.”
    Bile rose in her throat. “You can’t be serious.”
    “Oh, I’m very serious.” Scarborough yanked her purse out of her hand and tossed it fifteen feet back into the family room. “Were your keys in there? Why don’t you bend over and get them?”
    Disgust and fear swept over her, turning her skin clammy, and a hot anxiety rose in her mouth. She didn’t know what to do. If she went for her purse, she would be nowhere near a door, and he would have her on the ground in a minute. There was no way she could fend him off if he truly wanted to rape her.
    Her fear was amusing him. A sick smile was smeared across his face.
    “Not your first choice? You know, you’re right. I’d actually like to see your face when I’m fucking you. Back up against that wall.”
    Without further thought beyond the immediate desperate urge to get away from him, Liv backed up, then turned and ran, hurling the door to the garage open and darting through it. She tried to pull it closed behind her, but she just managed to hit him in the shoulder with it. Sprinting across the concrete, she expected to feel him grabbing on to her, but a glance back showed he was just standing in the door.
    Maybe he hadn’t been serious. Maybe it had just been a sick mind game.
    “Go ahead and run,” he told her, his voice hard and cold. “I like the chase. And you know I always get what I want.”
    She did know that about him.
    And she also saw that as she left the garage he was shifting to wolf.
    Her first thought was to run down the driveway to the main road. A car was bound to pass in a minute or two. But then that car could very well just be Scarborough. A glance at the woods as she ran across the grass showed her a lone wolf standing on the edge of the tree line. It was too far away to see who it was, but she veered towards him. If it was Sebastian, she had to assume that, angry with her or not, he would protect her. If it was one of their cousins, she would pray for the same.
    But then as she got to the edge of the woods, ten feet from the wolf, she realized there were three more with the first, none of them recognizable to her in wolf form. She just knew they weren’t Sebastian.
    A glance behind her showed Scarborough running effortlessly behind her, keeping pace about twenty feet back.
    She didn’t know what the wolves could understand, having no real memory of being one herself, so she just ran past them yelling, “Help me!” hoping they would understand.
    Then her dream popped into her head as she leapt over brush and a fallen log, her lungs already straining with the effort of running as fast as she could. The cold and the wind slashed her cheeks as she remembered standing in the woods in her dream, facing down the dark wolf with the angry eyes.
    While the others simply watched.
    Scarborough was the dark wolf.
    She was truly alone. No one was going to help her.
    Slowing down, she realized for the first time in her life, that being alone wasn’t the enemy. Fear was.
    Liv halted her steps. Whirling on one foot, she turned and confronted Scarborough.
    He drew up short, obviously surprised that she had stopped running. Back twenty or thirty feet were the other wolves, moving warily as they watched.
    No Sebastian.
    “Go ahead,” she told Scar. “Rape me, kill me, do whatever you want. But I’m going to fight you. And I’m going to spit in your face while you do it.”
    Scarborough stared at her, his dark eyes flashing, his teeth baring, a low growl deep in his throat causing the hairs on her arms to stand on