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Chapter Seven
Maxim
Drugged…
I’ve been drugged…
By fairies.
I’m conscious just long enough to appreciate the irony—and to realize my body is still currently in one piece, despite feeling battered from head to toe—and I’m out again.
* * *
The second timeI wake up, I manage to drag my lids open and roll my head to one side on the rock-hard slab I’m laid out on.
I see a dimly lit room with a concrete wall only a few feet from my face. I catch a whiff of a strong chemical scent—rubbing alcohol, I think, and something fecund I can’t quite place—and then the drugs wrap their tentacles back around my brain.
I’m unconscious before I can rock my head over to see what’s on the other side of the room.
* * *
The third timeI come to—or maybe the fourth or fifth, I lose track of what’s real and what’s a dream—I awaken with a gasp, sputtering as I spit out the water flooding into my mouth and nose.
I try to reach up to block the flow and swipe at my eyes, only to find my wrists bound to my sides by something heavy and metallic that’s trapped me in my human form. I attempt to shift, but my fur only prickles beneath my skin like a thousand tiny needles before my wolf goes still once more.
I thrash against my restraints, raging against the assault of the water that’s making it nearly impossible to breathe.
But struggling only makes it harder to suck in air in the brief pauses in the seemingly unrelenting flood.
I hold on for as long as I can, fighting for survival, but eventually the pressure in my chest and the blackness spreading through my head grows too intense.
With a final silent scream that echoes in the increasingly close cavern of my mind, I’m snuffed out.
* * *
I…die.
I’m sure of it, so sure that when I wake up again to find a striking Fey man with cheekbones that could cut glass and dark gray eyes watching me from a chair beside my slab, I can’t make sense of him right away.
I just…stare, the disconnected gears spinning uselessly in my head.
When he asks, “Ready for more?” I can’t make sense of that either.
I can only blink and wonder where I am, who I am.
Then he holds up a small pair of pliers with a hard smile and says, “I think fingernails first, don’t you?” and it all comes rushing back—the capture, the torture, the punishment I’m beginning to suspect might never end, and the people who need me back in the real world.
Now more than ever.
“No,” I manage to croak out. “Please. My pack.”
“Your pack will still be there when we’re finished,” he says calmly. “If we finish.”
“They need me now,” I beg, not too proud to grovel if that’s what it takes. “Please, I’ll come back. I’ll come back, and you can do whatever you want. Just let me go now before it’s too late.”
“Oh, Alpha, it’s already too late,” he says, a hard light flickering in his eyes as his hand covers my tightly balled fist. “So much later than you know.”
I say something else, but I’m not sure what—my pulse is rushing too loud in my ears.
