AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It’s dark. I’m standing on a top stair, a closed door at my back. Though I know damn well it’s going to be locked, I give it a jangle anyway. A quick jerk reveals that its shifter-proof. Even if I was at full strength, I’d never be able to snap it.
Great. Fucking great.
So my choices are stay on the stairs until someone is stupid enough to let me out, or go downstairs and see who is making that awful noise.
Morbid curiosity wins out.
“Hello?” My heart is pounding so loudly, I hear it echo against my eardrums. “Is someone here?”
The grunting stops, but it’s followed by a harsh panting sound. Human. The grunts were canine, but the pants belong to a man. So a shifter. Even if his scent didn’t hit me the second they pushed me down the first few stairs—still so recognizable despite my busted sniffer—it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together and figure out who’s locked in this cellar room with me.
For the Alpha...
“Ryker?” He still doesn’t answer me, and maybe if I had my claws I could try to dig my way through the thick door and maybe escape, but I can’t. Since that’s out, they had to know I would go down the stairs if they left me trapped in a room with him. “Are you down there?”
I hear a snarl, followed by a raspy voice that I know all too well.
“Gemma, no! Stay away!”
Oh, Ryker. You can’t honestly believe that an order like that would work on me without the power of your wolf’s stare behind it?
I ease down the stairs, just in case. My instincts tell me that I have nothing to worry about—in fact, they’re screaming mate, it’s your mate at me—but I’ve been poisoned and wolf-napped so far tonight. Sue me for being a little cautious.
“Ryker?”
A muffled curse, then a sigh. “Luna damn it. You never fucking listen to me.”
Nope. I don’t.
Not about to start now, either.
I keep going, freezing when I reach the last step.
“Holy. Shit.”
Not surprisingly, the first thing I see is that Ryker is just about naked. He’s not wearing any shoes or a shirt, and the hems of his loose pants are shredded. A sign of a partial shift, where the wolf pushes against the human form without fully shifting to fur.
He’s not standing, either. He’s slumped on the ground, looking at a point just past me as if he can’t bring himself to witness the horror on my face as he demands in a voice too weak to be his, “What are you doing here?”
Honestly, I have no fucking idea other than that the packmates who tossed me in here seemed to think they were doing this for their Alpha.
The very same Alpha who is chained to the wall behind him.
I fly toward him.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? Who did this to you?” I grab the length of chain he’s trying to hide from me. Right. As if I don’t see two sets bolted to the cinderblock wall. The chains aren’t silver, but that only means that they’re not burning Ryker. Oh no, the chains are just keeping him trapped down here. “What the fuck? Why are you chained up?”
“Who did this to me? I did. I had no other choice.”
Is he kidding? “No choice but be chained to a wall like an animal? What’s going on?”
“Like an animal? Oh, sweetheart. I’m full feral right now.” His laugh is hollow. “It’s my fault for being such an arrogant prick. I dared the Luna, and she’s making me fucking pay for it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m a wolf. I worship her, and I’m a slave to her phases just like we all are, even if I thought I could pretend I wasn’t.”
In a way, I know exactly what he means. When I look at Ryker… the moon picked the perfect mate for me. I’m just the one who let my instincts get in the way. Plus his initial rejection, and how he all but tried to make my choice for me when he finally found me in Muncie again.
