Chapter 6

LYRA

"Come to me before tonight and apologize to the families…I mean it." His eyes searched my face. "I'm trying to give you a way back."

"You gave me a way out three years ago," I said quietly. "You chose the other direction."

His expression hardened. "Because you were—"

"Guilty." I finished it for him. "I know…You've mentioned it hundred times you fucking hypocrite!"

"Your attitude isn't helping you."

"Neither is your hand on my arm." I held his gaze. "Last time…Let go."

He let go and I turned toward the door but the shove came from nowhere.

One hard flat palm between my shoulder blades with no warning and I stumbled straight through the door behind the buffet table before my brain had finished processing that it was happening.

The darkness swallowed me whole and the door slammed shut.

The lock drove home with a sound that went straight through me like cold water.

I spun around and hit the wood with both palms. "Darian!" I yelled in anger and horror, not expecting he'll do this to me. "Open this door right now."

Then his voice came through the seal, muffled but deliberate. "When you're done performing and you're ready to have a real conversation."

His footsteps faded and I stood in the dark with my hands against the door and told myself to breathe, but I was failing badly. My lips trembled and my eyes burned, from betrayal and reminding me of my wolf.

The cellar was built for temperature. Airtight. Soundproofed by design, the kind of construction that kept the pack's wine stores at perfect cool and kept every sound I was making from traveling more than three feet in any direction.

Nobody was going to hear me.

I knew this the way I knew things now, quickly and without hope, the part of my brain that prison had sharpened into something ruthless.

The dark pressed in.

And my lungs began to disagree with me…. Panic attack slips in, because I've gone through this horror many times in the prison.

The edges of my vision softened. The cold stopped feeling like cold and started feeling like nothing. I thought, with a strange quiet clarity, that this was a terrible and deeply undignified way to end here. In a wine cellar because a man who used to love me had run out of patience.

My eyes closed, slowly….I can't breathe so I let go.

But the door burst open and I felt strong arms sliding under my knees and one around my back, pulling me up and out of the dark before I'd even fully registered that the door had moved.

"Hey…." The voice was low and close, but there was a hint of authority in it, right beside my ear, warm against the cold of the cellar air. "Stay with me…Keep your eyes open mate."

Mate? I tried to listen to him.

"There you go." The arms adjusted, steadying me. "Breathe in….You're out. I've got you."

I pulled in a breath of real air and my body seized on it like something drowning.

And then ....deep in the hollow place where I thought my wolf, Ash, had gone silent three years ago, a howl tore through me. Coming from somewhere inside me I had given up completely.

“Mate,” Ash whispered, like a woman waking slowly from a sleep she had never chosen. Her voice cracked at the edges with three years of silence. “My mate. He's here.”

My eyes opened fully.