Chapter 5 #2
“You’re…” She stopped. Started again. “You’re unconscious. Tied up. There are zip ties on your wrists. Lena, you’re in a cabin somewhere, and you’re unconscious, and someone was taking pictures of you.”
The world tilted. I gripped the satellite phone hard enough to make my knuckles ache, and I felt Raphael’s rage ignite like a gasoline fire.
Michael. Michael had taken pictures while I was drugged. While I was helpless. While he had me tied up in that cabin and was waiting for whatever came next.
“What else?” My voice came out steady. I didn’t know how.
“A lock of hair.” Clara sounded sick now. “Blonde. It’s wrapped in tissue paper. And there’s a note.”
“Read it.”
“Lena…”
“Read it, Clara.”
A long breath. Then her voice, reciting words that weren’t hers: “You’re still tied to me by blood. He can’t protect you. He can’t even protect himself.”
The silence after stretched like a wire pulled too tight.
I remembered. Fragments, surfacing through the haze of whatever Michael had used to drug me.
The sound of rustling, of things being moved.
My bag, its contents being handled by hands that had no right to touch them.
I had tried to open my eyes, tried to move, tried to do anything except lie there while he went through my possessions like he had every right to them.
I hadn’t been able to. But I had heard him. Heard him moving around the cabin, heard him breathing, heard the soft snip of scissors near my head.
He had cut my hair while I was unconscious. He had kept it.
“Lena?” Clara’s voice, distant through the phone. “Lena, what do you want me to do?”
“Call the police.” The words came from somewhere outside myself. “Tell them everything. Give them the photos, the hair, the note. All of it.”
“They’ll want to talk to you.”
“They can’t reach me. Tell them that too.”
Raphael’s fury burned hot enough to scorch. His hands had clenched into fists, and when I looked at him, his eyes had that amber flash that meant his wolf was close to the surface. The cabin felt smaller suddenly, charged with a violence barely contained.
Viktor had moved to the doorway, watching us both with that assessing gaze. Dmitri had come inside at some point, drawn by the tension that must have been visible from outside.
“I’ll handle it,” Clara said. “Be careful, okay? Please.”
“I will. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
I ended the call and set the phone down carefully. My hands weren’t shaking. I noted that with distant surprise. They should have been shaking. A normal person would be shaking right now, faced with evidence that their stalker half-brother had taken trophies during their kidnapping.
I wasn’t shaking. I was still. Frozen in a way that felt dangerous.
“He’s escalating.” Viktor’s voice broke the silence. “That’s good.”
I turned to stare at him. “Good?”
“An enemy who loses control is an enemy who makes mistakes.” He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “He wants a reaction. He wants you scared. The fact that he’s sending packages means he’s frustrated. Can’t get to you directly, so he’s trying to get inside your head.”
“It’s working.” The words tasted like ash.
“Is it?” Viktor tilted his head, studying me. “You don’t look scared. You look angry.”
I opened my mouth to deny it. To say that of course I was scared, that anyone would be scared, that having photos of your unconscious body sent to your workplace was the kind of thing that created fear in any rational person.
But the denial wouldn’t come.
Because beneath the shock, beneath the violation, beneath the sick horror of knowing that Michael had cut my hair while I lay drugged and helpless, there was fury. Hot and sharp and nothing like fear.
I was angry.
I was furious.
Raphael’s rage pressed against my awareness, a storm I could almost see. He wanted blood. He wanted to hunt Michael down and tear him apart with his bare hands, and the only thing stopping him was the pack that was hunting us, the kill order that made it impossible to go on the offensive.
His fury was volcanic. Explosive. The rage of a wolf denied his prey.
Mine was different.
Mine was cold. Crystalline. A blade being sharpened in the dark.
“He kept pieces of me.” I said it quietly, not a question. “He took photos. He cut my hair. He’s been carrying them around for days, looking at them. Touching them.”
“Yes.” Raphael’s voice was barely human. The wolf was very close now.
I thought about the photos Clara had described.
Me, unconscious. Tied up. Helpless. Michael had positioned me, arranged me, captured me like a trophy.
He had kept that lock of hair wrapped in tissue paper, treating it like something precious.
Like I was a thing to be collected rather than a person to be respected.
He had done all of this while I was unable to fight back. Unable to see what was happening. Unable to say no.
The anger built, ice instead of fire, spreading through my veins until everything felt sharp and clear.
“He thinks I’m his.” The fury crystallized, hardening into resolve. “He thinks he owns me. He thinks he can do whatever he wants, take whatever he wants, keep whatever he wants, and I’ll just be too scared to stop him.”
“Lena.” Raphael stepped toward me, and I felt his intention. Comfort. Protection. The desperate need to do something, anything, to make this better.
“No.” I held up a hand, and he stopped. I sent him a wordless request through our connection. Not rejection. Not anger at him. Just the need for him to wait. To let me finish becoming whatever I was becoming.
“I’m done.” My voice came out steady. Cold. “I’m done being the one who gets taken. I’m done being the one who gets saved. I’m done being prey.”
No one spoke.
Viktor’s expression shifted. He looked almost approving. “And what are you instead?”
I didn’t have an answer. Not yet. But I knew what I wasn’t anymore.
I wasn’t the girl who had signed away her freedom for a debt she didn’t owe. I wasn’t the hostage who had waited for rescue. I wasn’t the victim who had been drugged and photographed and violated while she lay helpless.
I thought about what Viktor had said. That Michael’s escalation meant he was losing control. That frustrated enemies made mistakes. That my fear was what he wanted, and my refusal to give it to him was a kind of power.
I had spent my whole life being underestimated. Being dismissed. Being told I was worth less than I was. My father had sold me to pay his debts. My half-brother thought he could own me through obsession. Even Raphael, at the beginning, had assumed I would break under the weight of his world.
None of them had been right about me.
Michael thought he knew me. He thought I was still the Lena he had watched and stalked and obsessed over. The one who needed protecting. The one who could be scared into submission.
He was wrong.
I met Raphael’s eyes. His surprise hit me first. Then his fierce pride. And beneath it, a question: what did this mean for them, for their survival, for the fight that was coming?
“Tomorrow we keep going.” I said it to all of them.
Viktor and Dmitri and Raphael, three wolves who had given up everything to protect a human woman they barely knew.
“We keep moving, we keep surviving, and we get Viktor to that challenge. But when this is over, when the pack is handled, Michael doesn’t get to keep hunting me. ”
“What are you suggesting?” Viktor asked.
“I don’t want him arrested.” The words came out flat.
Final. “I don’t want him in prison, writing me letters, getting out in twenty years.
I don’t want a trial where I have to sit in a courtroom and look at him while lawyers argue about whether drugging your half-sister and cutting off her hair counts as assault. ”
My voice was steady. The woman saying these words was not the woman I had been a week ago.
“I want him gone. Permanently. I want to know that he will never touch me again, never watch me again, never send me pieces of myself wrapped in tissue paper.” I met Viktor’s eyes, then Raphael’s. “I want him dead.”
The word hung in the air. Dead. Not justice. Not accountability. Death.
Raphael moved then. Not to stop me, not to comfort me, but to stand beside me. His hand found mine, and his fingers laced through my own. His fury matched mine at last. Not drowning me. Running parallel.
“Then he dies,” he said quietly. No hesitation. No moral wrestling. Just acceptance of what I needed.
I squeezed his hand. “Yes.”
Outside, the wind picked up. I heard the trees creaking through the cabin walls, branches scraping against each other in the dark. Somewhere out there, Michael was watching. Waiting. Planning his next move.
Let him plan.
I was done being afraid of a man who had to drug his victims to get close to them. Done being terrorized by a half-brother who couldn’t accept that I would never be what he wanted. Done being prey.
Tomorrow, we would run again. The pack was still hunting. Viktor’s challenge was still days away. Michael was still out there with his photos and his trophies and his sick little notes.
But in the cramped darkness of that safe house, I had changed. The fear had burned itself out, and what remained was something harder. Colder. Ready.
And when the time came, Michael was going to learn what happened to men who tried to cage women who had finally learned to bite back.