Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Fawn
I swallow down bile. Dread seeps into my bones from the frigid room. I’m naked, and although I have been around shifters all my life, it makes me feel vulnerable today.
Before us are monsters.
I already understood that Marigold was a cruel woman, yet those spiteful things she said to me, in which she pretended to be favored by Seven, barely scratches the surface of what she is.
The men are Eiden’s brothers. The ones who hurt him when he was young all because he was an omega and, at that time, could not shift. My heart breaks for him. As I look upon men who should have nurtured him and read their intentions in their unflinching gazes, I see the truth of Eiden’s words.
My body may be enclosed in a cell, but in my mind, I stand on a lonely hill, watching a storm approach. I have no protection or shelter. It is bearing down upon me. There is nowhere to run nor hide. I can only stand here and endure.
My lip quivers. I feel dampness upon my lashes and a stingy pressure at the back of my eyes.
I must be brave. Seven, Nox, and Wolf will be coming for us. I know they will. I just need to survive until then.
But a haze is settling over me—a terrible, sickly awareness of inevitability. Marigold said bluntly what these cruel men will do. The frantic churn as my mind conjures up ways to escape and false hopes while knowing that none will come to pass.
We are deep underground. The brief flashes of consciousness while they brought me here linger like a nightmare. The twisted wooden gate rising like the maws of hell. Dark, desolate buildings that seemed to suck the light. Litter-strewn cobbled streets. A fight breaking out between monsters too hideous to comprehend as they spilled out a weather-worn tavern doorway to the roar of a crowd. The flash of a blade. The arc of blood. And then a body upon the floor. Distant screams. Violent guttural language.
A howl, but not a wolf, something dreadful and wretched.
Wormwood.
I know almost nothing about this place besides Nox’s teasing comment about trolls. Now I wonder if there really are trolls in this secret, dark side of the beautiful stag city locked behind a soaring wall.
If I cannot conjure the route between the gate and the building we finally entered, my hope of escape is further thwarted by the blur of stairs and under passages I stumbled down, caught between the two guards. Even if they should unbind me and set me free, I might never find my way out. And when I reach the surface, how would a helpless Fawn flee through a district filled with beasts and dread humans?
My trembling becomes so violent that my teeth begin to chatter.
Marigold sneers, her nails rake lightly down the naked chest of one man.
Eiden’s brother. Not only his brother but undoubtedly his twin. The same red-gold hair, the same regal line of his nose and brow. He looks like Eiden in every way, yet there is bleakness in his deep, brown eyes. He caresses the back of Marigold’s neck and inspects me with villainous intentions.
He releases Marigold and steps forward. My chest catches with a sob, and my frantic gaze shifts to Eiden.
The horror on his face lights into my own fears. He strains against the chains holding him to the wall.
The brother on the left snickers. “Rut her well, Crael. Show her how a real man fucks.”
I flinch back, but Crael still fists my hair. I claw at his wrists. He only grins down at me.
“Let her go,” Eiden snarls.
The brothers only laugh.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see his hairline shimmering like he is trying to shift.
Shivers wrack me. So cold. My thoughts become a jumble as Crael drags me onto my back, the rough stone floor scraping painfully over my naked flesh. I fight, kicking out my legs, mind lost to a slow churn of my disbelief that this is happening.
“Very few shifters, wolf or otherwise, can escape bindings placed on their human form by shifting—my stag can,” Eiden told me on the very first day I arrived. “He is indomitable and sees everything as a threat…”
They think the bindings will contain him and that they have him trapped.
But he is not. His stag is powerful, more powerful even than Seven and Nox. He is feral. No binding can hold him back.
Why has he not already shifted?
Crael leans down over me, taking a long lick up the side of my throat.
“Eiden!”
A terrifying new understanding blooms.
“Eiden, please!”
Another lick that makes me shudder and thrash.
“I cannot!”
I sob, feeling his conflict and anguish in those words. He does not trust his stag. He thinks he will hurt me, maybe kill me, if he unleashes him, so he holds that part of him in check.
Were I not here, he could save himself.
His twin insinuates his knees between my thighs with terrifying ease. With my wrist pinned cruelly to the stone floor, my weak struggles are nothing to him.
My vulnerability is absolute.
“You can, Eiden!”
“Shut up, bitch,” Crael growls. He slaps the side of my face. The blow rattles my skull against the hard floor and leaves me clinging to consciousness by a thread.
I taste blood and defeat.
Survive.
I can survive anything, even this.
“You’ve made your point,” Eiden says, a dark edge to his voice I have never heard before. “Let her go!”
“Fuck you, brother,” one of those standing snarls. “You killed our father. Sent us all into exile. Do you think anything you have to say will deter us from defiling your mate? Not a fucking chance. When we’re done, your king will give up a pretty penny for his ruined queen. She’ll be no more than a broken shell by then. But he’ll pay it anyway. He could tear Wormwood apart brick by brick and never find us. We’ll be long gone by then, living in luxury on the other side of the Lumen Sea while your remains rot in this cell.”
I cry out as his brother squeezes my breast roughly.
“LET HER GO!” Eiden’s voice is like a clap of thunder, but it only stirs the brothers into hoots and cackles, well pleased that their games gain a reaction from my chained mate.
“Hurt her.” Marigold calls. “Use her. I want to see her bloody by the time you’re done.”
“Eiden, please,” I beg. “I trust you. I believe in you. I believe in your stag. He won’t hurt me; I know he won’t. Set him free. Let him have his revenge.”
Another blow sends me into darkness briefly, but I shake it away.
Eiden’s next roar is full of pain and anguish.
“Eiden,” I sob, the blood pooling in my mouth, making the words slurred. “I love you. I’d rather you killed me than let this monster hurt me. Only I know you won’t.”
“Silence!” Eiden’s twin spits on my face, unbuckling the belt at his waist.
My mouth is throbbing from the blow, and I can feel blood trickling down my chin, merging with his spit.
“Eiden, I love you. No matter what happens.”
Eiden
She loves me.
She loves me even though I am pitiful and cannot help her.
This sweet, joyful doe shifter, who romps in her new nest and skips with bunnies in the Royal Woodland, who is passionate and giving.
She does not judge my weakness.
Nor me.
She believes in me.
And she believes in my stag.
Unworthy.
The specters of my past taunt me, but their power wanes.
Reality slams into the daze and I see— really see—what is happening.
The two sides of me that have sat separate and distinct, that even Nox, with all his love and acceptance, could not mend, come together like a thunderclap.
They come together for my Fawn.
Fawn
The air crackles. A savage roar of a raging beast. Only filling the room is not the stag I have met before. No. It is a bipedal beast with glowing blue eyes. A towering form with the head of a stag and the body of a huge, impossibly muscular man.
Beast Eiden spreads his arms and roars.
Then his head dips, and he charges his twin brother, Crael, who is caught, eyes wide in horror.
Eiden’s huge antlers slam into his brother, lifting him high before tossing him against the nearby wall. He falls to the ground in a broken heap.
A high scream rents the air.
“Guards!”
Another scream. A roar of men shouting and a clamor behind the door.
I scramble backward.
The remaining two brothers shift to their stag forms. Marigold darts behind them.
Eiden roars again and charges. They are no match for him. Their screams echo off the stone walls as he skewers them and tosses them aside, broken and bloody.
Distracted, I don’t notice Marigold approaching until she is on me. Grasping my hair, she yanks me to my feet. A cold glint of metal catches the light, and I freeze.
“Come any closer, and I will slit her throat.”
Eiden snorts out a breath, turning to face us slowly, his chest heaving and his body is smeared with blood.
Beyond the closed door, I can hear shouts and the clamor.
“Get crossbows!”
“Eiden, hurry. They will kill you!” I cry.
“Silence,” Marigold hisses, the edge of the blade nicking my flesh.
Eiden’s beastly nostrils flare. His brilliant eyes have a crazed, whirling aspect. Does he even understand in this form? Is he beyond cognizance?
Freedom is a tantalizing possibility. I’d rather die trying than be subject to whatever Marigold and her cohorts will do to us now his brothers are dead. I just need to give Eiden’s stag an opening. For that, it is worth taking a risk.
I can feel the blood trickling down my throat. The sickly sting where it cuts into my flesh.
Bracing myself, I grip her wrist and slam my head back into Marigold’s.
Dull pain blooms at the back of my skull. She screams. The blade slices into me before I can shove her arm aside and twist away.
Eiden is on her. Her shrill scream accompanies a slick squelch.
My head is ringing. Sticky blood leaks between my fingers where I clamp them to my throat.
My eyes flutter— so heavy .
A crossbow bolt whistles through the air. Eiden staggers forward. Snorts and turns.
Another crossbow bolt whistles through the gap in the small, barred cell window. This one slams into his shoulder.
He pivots and charges the door.
I feel myself slipping—the strength cutting from my legs, my nails raking the stone wall, trying to gain purchase, and finally catching on a notch in the stone.
Before me, Eiden grasps the bars of the small window and rips the door clean off the hinges.
Tossing the door aside, he plucks the man from the doorway and smashes him against the wall with a roar.
He glances back at me.
“Go,” I croak. “If they regroup, we are both dead.”
His supernatural eyes go to my throat.
“It’s not bad,” I say.
His nostrils flare, and he steps toward me only to halt at the pound of approaching footsteps coming from beyond the cell.
With a last look, he pivots and leaps through the doorway, disappearing from my view.
Screams and cries of terror bounce off the stone walls.
The blood is still tickling between my fingers. I feel a little sick.
“Oops,” I say.
I imagine Wolf rolling his eyes and muttering about this being a bit more than an ‘oops’ moment.
As my weak grasp on the notch gives and blankness comes for me, I reflect that, in this case, Wolf might be right.