Chapter 76

Some metal shelving stretched from the wall out into the center of the room a good way. The shelves were covered in empty beakers and boxes as well as bottles of chemicals and other tools.

Amanda looked back over at Emma. “So how did you end up here? Did they catch you when they caught the grey wolf?”

Emma shook her head. “No. I—“ She sat on one of the other chairs and fidgeted with the sleeves of the sweater. “I used to work here.” She didn’t lift her head as she said the words and she subtly shifted away from Amanda.

“You mean you mated with the grey wolf here? In this place?”

Emma nodded.

“What happened?”

“Gibson brought them in about five years ago. I don’t know where they came from but they were both injured. None of us even thought that they would actually even survive but they did. And when Gibson was sure that they weren’t going to die, he put the stakes in their brains so that he could try to control them and use them.”

Amanda waited and watched the woman’s posture and expression as she spoke. “Go on?”

Emma hesitated, and then let out a long sigh. “It was my job to nurse them back to health and at the same time to draw blood and do whatever tests Gibson ordered done to them.”

She peeked over at Amanda and then continued on. “Gibson came in to check on them one day about a year after they arrived. He saw me feeding Sean—That’s his name, by the way. Sean.—So, anyway, he saw me feeding Sean and petting him. He called me a wolf loving whore and he locked Sean and me in a cage together. I felt something about him the first moment I saw him. I didn’t know what it was but I wanted to protect him and take care of him from the very first day.”

Amanda nodded as she listened. She could understand the feeling. She’d felt it herself. Even as hurt and as angry as she was with Cole, the idea of him ever being harmed ripped at her heart. “Yeah. I know that feeling.”

Emma nodded. “Well, he began to torture Sean. No matter what he did, Sean wouldn’t hurt me. He tried everything he could think of. He put me in the cage covered in raw meat. He took me out of the cage and had one of the other scientists cut me all over. I think I would have died if Sean hadn’t been there. He licked the wounds until they stopped bleeding. I lost so much blood though, I was weak and sick by that point. Gibson hadn’t been feeding us much at all, except for what he did to me to try to entice Sean to attack me.”

She lifted her shoulders slightly and then dropped them. “I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but Sean sort of bit my neck. I thought that maybe Gibson had succeeded and Sean was going to start eating me because I was obviously dying. He didn’t eat me though. He just nipped me a bit. Just enough to make me sort of bleed. I just gave in. Something inside me shifted and opened up. It felt like a dam breaking. If I was going to die, at least I knew that I would die to give Sean strength, to fill his belly and maybe help him survive.”

She blushed deeply and a soft laugh escaped her lips. “But that isn’t what happened. As soon as I felt that dam break inside of me, this light sort of shot out of me and into him and at the same time, it shot out of him and into me. It was like some kind of explosion that only we could feel. I felt stronger right away and I could tell that he did too.”