Chapter Six

Waves of nausea hit me with every quick stride we took. Skylar ahead of me had her fingers hooked into my chains, dragging me without a backward glance.

As we stepped out of the dungeon and into an unending hallway, light from the sky swam into my eyes. I hissed and tried to use my arms to guard my face.

“Faster,” Skylar yanked my chains.

I tried, but my knees and wrists stung with every step. The metal ate into my skin and I could feel the scars breeding in my flesh.

“What if I’m wrong?” I managed to whisper.

It was the only thing I could think about from the moment she pulled me from my cage.

“Then you get to say your last prayer today.”

I swallowed hard. Sweat pooled through my scalp and down my back.

She was bigger than me, especially now that my limbs had thinned to something close to twigs. I couldn’t run – she’d have my neck open in a second.

But I couldn’t face the alpha either.

What could I possibly do?

I wasn’t ready to face him again. And I knew it was foolish, but I didn’t want him to see me like this. Bruised, chained, and reeking of the dungeon. I was tired of being seen as the scrap they made of me.

We finally stopped.

My neck creaked with how far I had to tilt my head to take in the door before us. Dark silver with gold-plated fangs engraved into the face of it – open mouths, each one a threat.

Skylar raised her hand to knock when a deep voice cut through from the other side.

“Come in.”

I watched her take a slow breath, her grip on my chains tightening, before she pushed the heavy door open.

Its loud creak seemed to echo to my bones. Skylar jerked my chain when my feet paused.

The instant the doors shut behind us, his presence filled the room like smoke. I could feel him, like he was an inch from my skin and not on the other side of the room.

His back faced us. Hands disappearing into the pockets of a black leather jacket. Shoulders wide enough to block the window behind him.

“Ralph and the others are in position. Join them.”

Skylar nodded and left without a word. The door closed. Silence took her place.

Without her beside me, my knees struggled to stay locked. The anxiety in my bones felt like something corrosive, eating through my joints.

Still, when those mighty shoulders turned toward me, I used every atom I had left to stand straight. My eyes didn’t meet his. But I didn’t drop them to the floor either.

He crossed the room, and I almost buckled.

It was the first time I had seen him in daylight, and nothing about it was merciful.

He was enormous, not just tall, but built like something the earth had quaked to birth. Wide shoulders, arms that looked like they had been forged for war and never used for anything gentler.

But it was his face that caught me off guard.

His jaw cut like something cold and deliberate, dark brows drawn low over eyes the colour of a winter ocean, and a mouth that probably hadn’t curved into anything genuine in years. The kind of face that belonged to someone who had survived things unspeakable, and looked better for it in the most infuriating way possible.

He was, I thought with no small amount of resentment, an unfairly beautiful man.

Something impermissible stirred in me, like a faulty line under still ground. I felt it move and I quenched it immediately.

He stopped a few feet away. Studied me like I was a problem someone else had handed him.

I dropped my gaze and waited.

“Skylar vouches for you.”

I nodded.

“You speak when you’re spoken to.”

“Yes.”

“Are you a traitor?”

“No. I would never —”

“I don’t expect you to say if you were.” His voice was almost bored.

“I’m going to ask. You answer.” He came closer, “I hate liars.”

His claws traced the bruised skin of my forearm, following an old injury with a precision that felt deliberate. “I don’t need to tell you how I punish them.”

“You tear them slowly, limb from limb,” I said quietly. “For the pack to witness. Then feed them, still breathing, to the hyenas.”

“Good gi—”

Something shifted in the air. Sharp and unwelcome. His expression flickered – then went dead as the air resigned to its intensity.

“How did you know they were coming?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

His growl was low and rapid. “Wrong answer.”

“I mean – I don’t know how to explain it. I just felt them. It didn’t feel far to me. The distance, I mean. It felt close.”

“How.”

“Their heartbeats.” I swallowed. “I could hear them through the dungeon walls. I could smell something underneath the sound – intent, I think. I knew they were here to kill.” I forced myself to continue. “I’m not a traitor. What would I gain?”

He scoffed.

“They attack. You escape.” His eyes didn’t move from my face. “I know what you were doing at the maze that night. Running.”

“I was always going to run,” I said. “That has nothing to do with them. I didn’t know they were coming until I heard them. I was afraid.”

His claw found the edge of my wound and pressed.

I groaned, feeling warm liquid slip down my arm.

“I don’t believe you.”

He pressed deeper.

I screamed. The sound ripped out of me before I could stop it, ugly and raw, and the tears came with it.

“I said I don't know!” My words came out broken – irate. “I don’t know how I hear them. I’ve always heard things. I don’t know why.”

Silence fell across the room, like something heavy dropped from the air.

Oh, Aurora. You foolish girl.

What had I done?

That question curled through my whimpers as my chest heaved against my ribs. My body moved before my mind caught up with it. I scrambled backward, anchoring my feet toward the door.

It was agony to run. But it was death to stay.

I didn’t make it two steps.

The crack of my neck snapping backward echoed through the room. His hand closed around my throat from behind – one hand, effortless, lifting me until my feet barely grazed the floor.

I screamed. Vile tremors ripped through my skull. My hands clawed at his knuckles on instinct, the chains at my wrists swinging against my waist. I couldn’t breathe. The edges of my vision darkened, the air in my lungs burning as it struggled to keep up.

“Please—” I choked. “I’m sorry. Please.”

His grip tightened.

I coughed, hard and helpless, my body folding around the effort of it.

This was it.

All my hope, everything I had held together through every beating, every hole, every night in the dark was slipping through my fingers.

I wanted to scream. To rain every curse I had ever swallowed onto the goddess for bringing me into this world.

Then his breath hit my ear. Hot. Controlled. More dangerous for how quiet it was.

“You live because I allow it.” His voice was low. It carried the kind of certainty that had been true for so long it had stopped needing to prove itself.

“Forget that again… little pup, it’ll be the last time.”

He released my throat.

I dropped to my knees. Sweet, burning oxygen flooded back into my lungs. I pulled it in with both hands, coughing and gasping, one palm went flat on the cold floor to stop myself from going all the way down.

I pressed my fingers to my neck. I could still feel his grip like a ghost. But there was no bruise. No mark. Just the memory of it.

“Up.”

I stood without thinking. My eyes found his – I made sure of it. Let him see the disdain.

I didn’t know why, some part of me hadn’t learned to stop yet.

He tilted his head slightly. Studied me with something that lived in the narrow space between amusement and confusion, like I was a creature he hadn’t encountered before and hadn’t decided what to make of yet.

“I know what to do with you,” he said.

The next moment my chains were moving. He took hold of them and walked, and I followed because there was nothing else left to do.

The walk through the hall felt like the last corridor of something. I didn’t know what. I just knew that whatever waited for me on the other side of it wasn’t going to be kind.

He pulled me out into the open. The sun hit my skin, blinding my path. My knees wanted to give out. I didn’t let them.

By the time I could breathe without effort, we were in the forest.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Quiet.”

The trees were ancient, so tall their crowns disappeared into a canopy so thick the light came through in thin, slanted pieces. The air smelled of pine resin and wet soil and something darker underneath – something alive and watching.

The roots along the ground rose and curled like fingers reaching up through the dirt, and the dark between the trunks went back so far it had no bottom.

The first person I saw when we reached the others was Skylar. Then the beta, Ralph, standing close beside her, speaking low. When he glanced at her his expression shifted in an unmistakably intimate way.

From the surrounding woods, others emerged. Each one gave a slight bow to the alpha and a look of open contempt to me.

Ralph was the first to speak. “Is that the omega? Your ma—”

Damon’s expression cut the word off like a blade.

“I found a use for her.” He tossed my chains toward Skylar.

My weight dropped into her and she absorbed it without complaint. My thoughts were scattered, running on instinct and pain and very little else – but I was almost certain, in that moment, that I felt her palm press against my back. Brief. Barely a second.

Then she hauled me upright and held me steady as the alpha turned to face his unit.

His voice when he gave commands was a different animal from the one in the room. Not louder. But wider somehow, like it filled space by right rather than effort. I stopped trying to follow his words.

Because I could hear the others.

The army that hadn’t moved yet, positioned back in the dark of the trees, waiting. Their heartbeats came through the ground like a second pulse, low and overlapping.

They were scared.

So was I.

Why would he bring me here?

I turned the question over and over while my fingers pinched at each other. I was useless in a battle. Worse than useless – a liability, a distraction, something that needed protecting in a situation where protection was a commodity no one had to spare.

Then the answer slid into place. Like a block slipping right into its corner.

I felt his eyes on me before he spoke.

“Bait.”

The word was flat and bleak.

Before I could form a single word of protest, a hand that wasn’t Skylar’s shoved me forward. I hit the ground face-first, my lips and nose filling with cold soil, the taste of earth flooding my mouth.

An enforcer stepped forward and released my chains.

The metal fell away from my wrists.

My body felt the freedom immediately. The absence of weight after days of carrying it. The skin underneath, raw and newly bare.

This is not freedom, I told myself. Your brain knows this. Your heart knows this.

And yet my legs were already finding the ground beneath me.

“Run, little pup.”

His voice behind me was almost quiet. Almost gentle. Almost the worst thing I had ever heard.

There was nowhere to go but deeper into the forest.

His unit circled me, guarding any other point of exit I had.

The trees ahead of me looked like sentinels waiting to close. So I did the only thing I’d ever hoped for.

I fled.

The forest swallowed me whole.

And I felt them shift behind me – the ones still hidden, still waiting, drawn out by the sight of an unprotected omega alone in the dark. No werewolf could resist a hunt. Especially one this easy.

I could feel the pleasure of it radiating off them like heat. Specific, ugly hunger of something larger bearing down on something smaller.

It smelled like the drool of starving hyenas closing in on a wounded sheep.

Faster, Aurora.

I drove my feet harder into the ground, roots cracking under my weight, branches whipping past my arms. I pumped my shoulders and ignored the burning in my lungs and the riot in my knees.

They were faster. I knew they were faster. I could hear the gap between us shrink. Their footfalls like gunshots against the forest floor, eating the distance between us easily.

They weren’t afraid of losing me.

That was what made it worse.

Don’t stop. Don’t—

Something hit me from the side like a wall made of muscle and motion.

My back slammed into the ground. The air left my lungs all at once. I blinked up and above me was a wolf.

Fully shifted, its paws planted on either side of my chest, its muzzle inches from my face. Hot breath rolled over my skin in waves. Its eyes were pale, furious, fixed on me. It held nothing that resembled hesitation.

Its lips pulled back from its teeth. Drooling onto my forehead.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Panic crushed my chest.

I was going to die here.

The sound that tore from my throat, I didn’t recognise. Small, broken – powerless.

Eagerly, the wolf lowered its head. Its teeth hovered over my skin, the heat of its breath singeing my face.

Then it stopped—

A low whine crawling out of its throat.