AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My thoughts moved from Mosa to Mallory.
How he must hate me! The last memory I had left him with was one of me shooting near him to stop his following me. He had been bound and determined to officially claim me as mate when my father had already engaged me to another, a marriage that was one of the linchpins in ending the Pack Wars.
The physical pain running through me drowned beneath a sudden stab of old heartbreak. I wasthatgirl again, old enough to call myself a woman, but still my father's daughter, cloistered, berated, abandoned and forgotten until I could serve some purpose in his ambition to gain or preserve his personal power. To lead the claw and expand its size, he had struck a bargain with Henric's father when Henric and I were still children.
I hated my husband-to-be even then, his cruel nature already obvious.
The whine of a mechanical pulley wheel brought me back to the cold, painful present. One of the guards had started the process of lifting the cage from the water. Henric must be bored and on his way to torture me in person again.
Wind whipped through the little holes. Tears betrayed me as they froze on my cheek. I would not cry in front of that bastard…but water was all I had left in me. No food for days, no warmth, no hope, just the stubborn refusal of my alpha power to let me die.
Slowly, the cage moved toward the shore. It came to a stop and remained suspended over frozen ground. Intent on taking whatever respite I could before Henric invariably arrived, I closed my eyes. I couldn't relax. Out of the water, my body found the strength to shiver again.
"Still one of the hottest bitches in the leap," one of the guards muttered as they hooked my cage and brought it to rest on land. "If he really wanted to punish her—"
A blonde blur dressed in a red outfit streaked past my cage milliseconds before claws sliced across the guard's throat, the resulting wound just deep enough to cut into his vocal cords and temporarily silence him while he healed.
I didn’t need to see the blonde’s face to know who she was or that her presence foretold the arrival of my husband. The sleek snow leopard was his mistress.
Well, one of them.
"You're too weak-minded to fuck the great Justine Acevedo,” Henric said, his tone full of an icy venom as he emerged from the trees lining the creek. "The slut would wind up seducing you and I'd have dead guards to replace."
"If I didn't kill you before you realized I was loose, husband," I said, my voice hoarse and breaking between each word.
"I've always realized you were loose, slut," Henric cooed.
“If only your claws were as sharp as your words,” I countered as his mistress came into sight. “Good evening, Kitka.”
"For me it is," she purred, stopping a few inches from my cage and brushing herself against Henric like a common house cat on her owner’s arrival home.
A smear of red at the corner of her mouth suggested she had licked the blood from her claws after injuring the guard. Had she sliced him so at Henric's silent command? Or had her constant jealousy of me been unable to tolerate the sick compliment the guard had bestowed?
We were rivals, Kitka and me.
Rivals for a man I hated with every cell in my body.
"Come forward," Henric commanded.
The bastard wasn't talking to the guards. I cast my gaze around, darkness and the small size of the cage's holes making it almost impossible to catch the slightest glimpse of the audience Henric played to.
But I didn't have to see to know. Their scents reached me. Dozens of cat shifters stepped closer. Present were men and women whose lives I had saved during the pack wars, lives saved not just by marrying Henric, but in battle with my own blood and pain.
"Everyone ready?" he murmured.
"I know I am," Kitka purred.
"Then here you go, darling. First honors.”
Moonlight glinted off a long, thin blade.
It was one of Henric's fencing swords.
Kitka took it, her totem's energy vibrating with blood lust as she approached my cage. Slowly, she walked around it, studying the angles that could be accommodated between the blade and the holes. She tapped the section of metal directly above my pelvis, then slid the tip across the cage's top until she found the hole above my heart.
"So many possibilities…"
There was a shiver to her voice, a shiver like she was on the verge of climaxing.
