Chapter 30 #2
Two of the operatives close in on me. The other six fan wide.
I move first.
I am not a soldier. I am not a fighter. Years of pack-house drills are ingrained in me, though, and maybe that will be enough.
My elbow drives into the throat of the man closest to me.
He chokes and falls. Before he has hit the floor, I’m on the second operative.
Knee to the inside of his thigh. Heel of my hand under his jaw.
The third grabs me by the hair, and I bite.
I get a piece of his hand. He howls. My boot comes up into his stomach.
He doubles over. I have one breath of clear corridor in front of me before two more men close in from behind, pinning my arms back hard enough that I feel a tendon strain in my shoulder.
I fight them anyway. My head jerks back and connects with a nose, the wet crunch of it loud in the corridor. Behind me, the man curses into my hair.
“Hold her,” Lydia says.
A sixth operative moves in. He gets a wrist around my throat from behind and applies pressure. Not enough to choke. Enough to make me freeze in place.
My pulse hammers against the inside of his forearm.
Lydia walks over. She comes so close that I can smell her perfume. Light. Floral. It makes me gag.
Her hand lifts and pushes the hair off my forehead with horrifying gentleness. “You have something on your face,” she observes.
She wipes the blood from my jaw with her thumb.
I jerk my head away.
The hand at my throat tightens in warning. I bite my tongue.
“Walk,” Lydia tells the operatives.
They force me down the corridor.
I do not give them an easy time of it. My heels drag.
My weight goes backward at the third step, and one of the men holding my arm has to brace against the wall.
At the next junction I trip another operative with my foot.
He goes to one knee, and his swearing follows me down the hall.
Lydia walks behind us at her own slow pace, as if I am an inconvenient thing she has to see safely tucked away.
The cell is at the end of a long stretch of corridor I do not bother to memorize.
I will not be using this knowledge. I’m being put in a hole, and I know it.
The door is iron coated in silver. Heavy.
Riveted. A door built for one specific type of prisoner.
The second I’m close enough, the mark at my collarbone becomes hot enough to burn, and my wolf staggers backward inside me.
An iron cell. Designed for shifters.
Lydia steps past me and unlocks the door it herself. The hinges scream as she opens it. Cold air rolls out across my boots, and inside, the dark has no edges to it. I plant my feet on instinct. The men shove me forward anyway.
I hit the floor hard, and the breath goes out of me in one short burst. White-hot pain explodes through my collarbone. I roll onto my back, blinking up at the rectangle of yellow light at the door. Lydia is standing in the frame of it, looking down at me.
“He was mine, Sienna.” Her tone is oddly conversational.
“He was mine for twenty years before you walked into his life. I helped him with his homework when he was nine. His hand was in mine at his father’s funeral.
The week his mother died and he could not eat, I sat at his bedside.
I built a life next to that man, one quiet, patient day at a time.
Then, you showed up, and you took twenty years of work from me in less than a month. ”
I drag myself up onto my elbow. The curse mark on my throat is screaming. A hot, live wire pulses in my chest, but I make my voice come out steadily. “He was never yours.”
The smile flickers. “I beg your pardon.”
“He never loved you. He cared about you, but love? Maybe a part of him knew that you weren’t loyal to him. Or maybe he just didn’t find you appealing.” I’m bleeding from somewhere on the inside of my mouth, but I don’t care. “Even when I wasn’t in the picture, he didn’t want you.”
Her eyes have gone very pale. The corner of her mouth twitches. “You’re going to die in here, Sienna.”
“Mm.”
“Slowly.”
I sneer at her.
She laughs once. Then, she steps back into the corridor. The door swings shut between us, and the sound of iron meeting iron is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
Her key turns in the lock.
The darkness is total.
I lie on my back on the cold floor, close my eyes, and let my body have one shudder, just one, before I push it down and lock it away.
A pair of handcuffs comes through the bars of the small grate at the bottom of the door.
I don’t fight when an operative’s gloved hand reaches in.
My wrist goes into the metal, which closes.
Then, the second cuff closes around my other wrist. Cold iron sinks into my skin, and my wolf, who was already weakened by the silver-lined room, drops away from the front of my mind.
The bond with Lucas dims at the edges. It’s not gone, but it is fainter now.
The hand withdraws. The grate slides shut.
Footsteps.
Lydia’s heels click down the corridor at her usual measured pace. I count them. Why I count them, I do not know. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. They round a corner, and the sound is gone.
I lie on the floor in the dark.
The cut on my jaw has begun to throb. At my collarbone, the mark burns against the chain around my throat. My shoulder is pulsating from pain. Both wrists are bound. Violet has been dragged off down a side corridor, and Lucas is somewhere in the yard, fighting things he has never fought before.
I let myself breathe in. I let myself breathe out.
The bond hums. Far. Faint. Real.
Through it, there’s Lucas. Even dimmed by the silver-coated iron, his fury reaches me. His terror. His fierce love for me carries under both his rage and his fear. So much that it strikes behind my sternum.
I close my eyes against the dark.
In my head, Violet’s voice keeps fading down that side corridor, swearing she’ll be the one to gut Lydia. And I can sense that Lillian is nearby.
An hour ago, Lucas was kissing my forehead in the moss above the compound. “Both of us,” he assured me.
The promise of it sits in my chest now, the only warm thing in this room.
I won’t die here.