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Vaclar’s dark chuckle sent ice through my veins, especially since I couldn’t see him. “Oh, I doubt he wants to kill her.”
For a moment, I thought I’d gone blind. Then everything else winked out, and I fell into the dark.
Chapter 37
Freya
I woke up with a massive headache in an unfamiliar bed. As I sat up, I held a hand to my temple. My heart raced when I caught movement at the side of the room, but the woman standing there just pounded on the door and said, “She’s awake.”
She was of the Ironwood pack, but my head hurt too much to remember her name.
The room was small, but the beautifully carved hardwood table near the bed told me I wasn’t in some crappy prison cell. Heavy drapes covered the small window, allowing only a small amount of light to leak in. I looked up and noticed a nice light fixture. The guard flipped on a light switch, and I blinked away spots in my vision before glaring at her. She returned my gaze steadily.
A few minutes later, the door opened. To my shock, Willow came in with a tray of food, which she sat on that nice hardwood table. She didn’t say a word to me, and I noticed fresh bruises peeking out of her threadbare clothes.
“Go,” my guard said, and Willow left.
But just before she did so, she glanced back at me with such a look of despair that it brought me to my feet. She shook her head as the door closed behind her.
“Eat,” the bossy guard told me.
I wanted to resist just to be disagreeable, but my stomach growled, and decided I should keep my strength up for whatever happened next. Recognizing both my guard and Willow from Ironwood confirmed the pack had kidnapped me.
“Does Luka still plan to execute me?” I asked after I had a few bites and could slow down.
“I’m not privy to the pack alpha’s plans,” the guard grumbled.
I remembered she was a beta, but her name still alluded me. Something with a C, I thought. Cora? Clara? Crimson?
Then her words caught up to me. “Wait, when did Luka become the Ironwood pack alpha?”
“When Pack Alpha Jameson met an untimely end. Don’t pretend you know nothing about that.”
“I don’t.” I shrugged. Couldn’t say I was particularly sad about it, though.
When I was done eating, I got up and stretched, pacing back and forth on the other side of the small room from my grumpy guard. I thought about asking if they’d let Pandora go after she sold me out, but my guard probably wouldn’t answer me. Pandora had interrupted the pack alliance between Ironwood and Frost Fang, but now Nira was dead, and so was Jameson.
Which meant Luka was the only alpha left from that deal. Maybe now that the situation had changed, I could talk him out of executing me. After all, what would he stand to gain?
I whirled when the door opened suddenly. Luka stepped into the room.
“You can go, Carlyn,” he dismissed the guard.
My moment of triumph at remembering her name started with a C died when she closed the door behind her.
A shiver ran down my back. I didn’t want to be alone with Luka, my fake fated mate. The alpha who’d sent me to die in the wildlands when he rejected me.
“What do you want, Luka? Come to kill me yourself?”
He chuckled. “Hardly.” Then his gaze sharpened, and he used his alpha-bark. “Show me his bite.”
His alpha power washed over me without any weight to it, and I crossed my arms. He growled and stalked toward me, making me shy away from him. But there was nowhere to go. My wolf recoiled at the thought of him touching me. My back hit the wall, and his hand reached out and yanked the neck of my shirt aside to reveal Gage’s mark… and the strange mark below my collarbone. He scowled and stepped back.
“What the fuck, Freya?”
I turned my back on him to throw back the curtains of the small window for all the good it did me. I didn’t recognize the trees right outside, and I couldn’t see any other buildings. Deeper in the woods, I caught sight of a wolf on patrol.
Luka’s alpha presence filled the room behind me, tainting the very air I breathed. Being alone with him felt wrong. It made my skin crawl. Neither my wolf nor I wanted anything to do with him. To think I’d ever believed I might truly be his fated mate…
