Chapter 5

ELOWEN

~•~

“Move it!”

That was all I had been hearing since they pulled me out of that room.

The one directly behind me said it every time my feet slowed down, which was often, because I was exhausted and the corridors of this pack house seemed to go on forever.

I kept moving.

The pack house was nothing like what I had grown up in. Everything about it was larger. The walls were dark stone, the floors smooth and cold under my feet, the lighting dim enough that the far ends of every corridor disappeared into shadow.

We stopped at the end of a corridor that opened into a wide landing, and I saw the doors. Two of them, floor to ceiling, dark wood with iron fittings that looked like they had been there for a very long time.

Two of the guards stepped forward and took a door each, pulling them open in unison, then the one behind me put a hand on my shoulder and walked me forward.

I stepped across the threshold and the atmosphere changed immediately.

It felt sharp, and every instinct I had, every animal part of me that had kept me alive and moving through years in a pack that didn’t want me, every single one of those instincts stood up at once and told me to be very, very careful.

My heart was so loud I could hear it.

I stood just inside the doors with the guard at my back and I tried to slow my breathing down and failed completely.

Then the voice came.

It came from somewhere in the shadow ahead of me and it cut through the atmosphere of the room like a blade leaving no question about where the authority in this space resided.

“Who sent you to spy on my territory?”

My legs shook underneath me and no control over it. I locked my knees and stayed upright through sheer stubbornness and I looked toward the voice and that was when I saw him.

He emerged from the shadow, slow and deliberate, and I felt my thoughts scatter.

I caught myself and pulled my attention back to the fact that he had asked me a question and that my continued existence in this room was possibly contingent on how I answered it.

“I said,” he repeated, his voice dropping in a way that was somehow more frightening than if it had risen, “who sent you.”

“No one sent me,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had expected. “No one sent me on anything, I swear it. I didn’t even know where I was. I didn’t know I had crossed into your territory, I had no idea where exactly I was going, I was just trying to find somewhere to rest and I got lost and then your men found me and I—”

“You’re telling me,” he said, still moving, circling slowly to my left in a way that made every hair on my body stand up, “that you wandered into a marked territory by accident.”

“Yes.” I turned with him, keeping him in front of me. “I’m a rogue. I left my pack last night and I’ve been trying to find a place to stay before—” I stopped.

He had stopped circling. He was standing directly in front of me now, close enough that I had to look up.

“Before what?” he asked.

“Before anyone noticed I was gone,” I finished.

He looked at me for a long moment.

I looked back at him and tried to keep my face arranged.

I couldn’t tell him the full truth, not until I knew what kind of man I was standing in front of and what he was capable of, because I had no idea what he would do with the information that I was pregnant, and my child’s safety was the one thing I was not willing to gamble on.

He completed one more slow circle and came back to face me.

“You left your pack, alone,” he said. “In the middle of the night. With no destination.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“That’s my business.” I answered, sounding bolder than I actually was.

I couldn’t tell if he was going to sentence me yet.

“You’re either telling the truth,” he said, “or you’re the best liar I’ve encountered in a very long time.” He paused. “I believe you.”

The relief that moved through me was so immediate and so physical that I had to work not to let it show on my face. “Then let me go,” I said. “Please. I’ll leave your territory right now, I won’t come back, you’ll never see me again. Just let me go.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

The relief died as quickly as it had come. “Why not? You just said you believed me.”

“I do.” He moved away from me and toward the far side of the room, unhurried with his hands behind his back. “But you trespassed on my land, and I can’t let that go without consequence. People talk. If word got around that Dravon Pack lets trespassers walk away without anything to show for it, I’d have a different kind of problem on my hands.”

I watched him move. “So what does that mean for me?”

He turned back to face me from across the room. “It means you have a choice,” he said. “Two options. You can stay here, under my protection, as mine. You’ll be taken care of, you’ll want for nothing, and no one will touch you.” He paused, letting that sit. “Or you refuse, and I put you in my dungeon for trespassing until I decide what to do with you.”

The room was very quiet.

I stared at him. “Those are my options?”

“Those are your options.”

I looked at the floor for a moment and then back up at him.

On any other night I might have chosen differently.

I thought about my child growing up as a rogue. I thought about what that life looked like, what it produced, how it ended. I thought about Blackthorn and every morning I had woken up there and every night I had cried myself to sleep there and the promise I had made on the floor of a storage room with my hand pressed flat against my stomach.

My child was not going to have that life.

Whatever this man’s motives were, whatever being his meant, whatever was waiting for me on the other side of this decision, at least it was not the dungeon and it was not the road to a rogue wolf’s future for the baby I was already willing to do anything to protect.

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me. “Okay what?”

“I’ll stay,” I said. “I accept your offer.”

He crossed the room toward me and I held my ground even though every instinct I had was screaming at me to step back. He stopped close enough that I had to look up again, and he reached out and moved my hair back from the left side of my neck with a deliberateness that made my breath catch.

Then he bent his head and he marked me.

The pain was sharp as it spread through my whole body, and when he pulled back I stood there with my hand pressed to my neck and my legs unsteady as the reality of what had just happened settled over me.

One night ago I had been a pack slave scrubbing a floor for a ceremony that was going to destroy me.

Then I had been a rogue with nothing and no one.

And now, I was marked as the property of a dangerously mysterious Alpha whose name I didn’t even know.