Unleash The Moon (The Preternaturals Book 6) by Zoe Winters

yard from his runs.
    Many of his fellow prisoners had been taken as
adults. They had entire histories to reference back to. He’d
listened to them talk and had practiced sounding like them because
if he didn’t, he’d known when he broke out of there, he’d sound
like some stiff robot and would never be able to successfully blend
into life anywhere.
    Noah thought back to the escape. In so many ways
they’d been lucky. He’d been terrified they wouldn’t make it past
the service elevator. And then what would happen to Sydney? He’d
long ago stopped caring what happened to him. If his escape wasn’t
successful, he’d be happiest dead, but Sydney had given him the
will to believe failure wasn’t an option. Failing himself was
nothing, but if he failed her…
    He’d never killed anyone before. When the guard had
grabbed Sydney and took advantage of Noah’s distraction to jerk her
free of him, he’d reacted on instinct. And in the lobby, he’d known
it was them or Sydney. As he’d scooped her out of the laundry bin
and run for the door, he’d glanced back at the macabre tableau he’d
created with fangs and clawed hands. Why didn’t he feel
anything?
    Shouldn’t he have felt guilt, remorse, horror?
Something? But he was blank. He wasn’t even sure what he was
supposed to feel about it. But if he could just flip like that, fly
into a rage and take dozens of people out, was Sydney safe with
him?
    He’d become too anti-social locked away from the
world, isolated even from his fellow prisoners. It was too many
years without any socialization. The orders and routines had
substituted for pack hierarchy, and for a while it had fooled some
part of his brain into going along with it.
    He’d spent years repressing everything inside him
that screamed to fight, because he’d known it was the wrong time to
fight. He would only lose, and he shouldn’t start a fight he
couldn’t win. But tonight, all the pent up aggression and rebellion
rose up out of him with the power of the moon, and he’d reacted. It
was as if an invisible trigger had been pulled. He’d gone from
mild-mannered, quiet Noah, to crazy-killing-machine Noah in an
eye-blink.
    He looked up to find the alpha striding toward him.
For whatever reason, she was running this pack alone, and he
smelled the fear on her. If he could smell it, just having met her,
he knew her pack could smell it. He knew she feared losing her
wolves to him, but at this point, she may as well fear losing it to
any one of the werewolves in the bar. If there was one thing he
remembered from his dad, it was that the alpha couldn’t show fear
to anyone.
    Even if no one was waiting in the wings to take
over, it de-stabilized the pack and introduced petty squabbling
among the other wolves, testing boundaries, trying to find a
barrier they would bounce off of so they could feel safe and
cohesive again.
    Shira scanned the room. Noah felt a wall go up
around her as she pushed the fear down and tried to cover it. But
she wasn’t nearly the expert at covering emotion that Noah had
become, and everyone had already seen it.
    They watched curiously as she sat
in the chair across from him. A small table separated them. He
didn’t say anything. He knew everyone in that bar watched him with
as much scrutiny as they watched her. He wouldn’t speak first no
matter how much he wanted to start figuring out how he’d get back
home. Let her set the parameters of their engagement.
    “ I’m Shira,” she
said for the second time that night. “This is my pack. Since you’re
my guest, don’t you think you owe me a name?”
    Noah considered giving her the number tattooed on
his arm. But baiting her would be stupid right now if he still
wanted her help. He needed transportation and a plan. If her pack
had been holed up here a while—and it looked as if they had—they’d
know where he could get the things he needed for the trip.
    He watched her discomfort grow as he stared at her.
Finally he said,