Lahat ng Kabanata ng Alpha's Caged Mate: Kabanata 131 - Kabanata 140

Ava hit the mat with a thud, and her back screamed at the impact, but she didn’t take more than a beat to process and dismiss the pain before she swung her legs behind her, rolling over her left shoulder to pop right back up onto her feet. Without breaking eye contact with her opponent, she dropped seamlessly back into her ready position.“Not a bad recovery. You took that blow like a champ,” her sparring partner and instructor, Reyes, lauded. Despite his complimentary tone, he never once dropped his guard, staying seated low in his hips but light on the balls of his feet, ready to counter any sudden movement she might make.“Would have been better if you hadn’t managed to knock me on my ass in the first place,” she grumbled.Rey laughed, forever the easy-going type, “You’re good, A. But you ain’t that good.”She launched herself at him, twisting her body to deliver a powerful roundhouse kick. Quick as a

Ava awoke in a cold sweat, head throbbing, and every single muscle she had aching. Nausea rolled through her so furiously that it took her a lot longer than it probably should have to realize that she was actually moving and that the world hadn’t just gone all gooey around her.What the hell happened?She cautiously cracked her eyes open and was met with darkness. For a moment, she panicked, terrified that the blow to her head had been enough to render her sightless. Then, she saw a shift amongst the shadows directly facing her, and she calmed a bit, realizing that she wasn’t blind, just trapped in an enclosed space with who the hell knew who, being transported, who the hell knew where.Ava shifted and abruptly stilled as yet another wave of nausea threatened to make her sick. And if the strange pressure surrounding her mouth was any indication, she’d been gagged, meaning throwing up was absolutely not an option.Sudden pressure against her side

With a taser pressed against the small of her back, Ava was led down and down, even further into the bowels of this seemingly never-ending maze of concrete hallways. All the while, she took stock of what she could, noting the dozens of steel doors that most likely led to rooms that were just like the one she had just been escorted from.Holding cells.A chill ran up Ava’s spine as she was momentarily transported back into the Red Moon dungeon, where she often found herself shuffling down similarly long, dank stone hallways. Just like when she’d been locked away, Ava had no way of telling what dangers lurked around each corner. She had nearly no sense of time, either, and felt just as helpless as she did now.Except that she wasn’t helpless. Ava had to keep reminding herself that she couldn’t afford to fall into the trap that was panic. She wasn’t the frail, underfed, physically and emotionally stunted prisoner she had been when she’

“Xavier?” Ava asked, somewhat struggling to process the presumed unlikeliness of Xavier showing up right here, right now, in the midst of what appeared to be the beginning of some sort of uprising. “What are you doing here?”“What do you think I’m doing here?” He scoffed and moved further into the room, closing the door firmly behind him as sounds of shouting and even, she could swear, a few rounds of gunfire rang just outside. “You hit your panic button, didn’t you? Here I am.”Ava waved off his glib tone, “Yeah, no, I get that part, thank you. I mean, what are you doing here? In California? I thought you would call my brother to contact the Federation or something. I didn’t expect you to come all the way across the country yourself. You have so much going on already.”A loud crash at the door jolted them all into silence as they waited to see if the interruption was a legitimate threat or

Eight months ago, if someone had told Ava that just the sight of the Green Light Club’s garish neon sign would be enough to make her smile, she would have laughed in their face. Alright, well, she probably wouldn’t have, but she certainly wouldn’t have believed them either.And yet, here she was, grinning from ear to ear, at the prospect of feeling something familiar, even if the majority of her memories of the place were of the variety that was best left forgotten. She was fairly sure that there was probably some sort of clinical diagnosis with a long name used to describe the contextually perverse sense of relief she felt at her first glance of shiny black lacquer and crushed green velvet. Goddess, this place was awful, and she was so glad to be back.Then again, the journey getting back to the club had been fraught enough to make her eager to climb under the first black silk duvet she saw, regardless of the fact that it could never, under any cir