Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Lark
They have us lugging rocks again today. But we have barely started—and haven’t even had our breakfast, which, aside from bedding our mate, is the one sorry highlight of our day—when Pete turns up and announces that it is training time.
I share a look with Rafe. He shrugs. He looks as battered and broken as I am. Worn down. And now this new fuckery? Fuck knows what this means.
When we enter the training pit, the same griffins are there as were present the very first day. The pelt at the back of my wolf’s neck rises. Atlas and his two lieutenants have their wings out on full display like they are not already impressive enough without them. Assholes.
It is not the big bastard Vander who moves first today. No, it’s Atlas who splits from the pack. His wings suddenly disappear. At his nod, Vander approaches, grasping Rafe in a no-nonsense way.
“What are you doing?” I demand. Not that I can make demands of anyone here. My belly tightens as I’m left alone in the center of the room.
Atlas shrugs out of his shirt, tosses it aside, and rolls out his shoulders. My eyes dart between him and whatever the fuck Vander is doing with Rafe.
“The hell,” Rafe snarls.
Chains rattle. My eyes shift from Atlas’s looming presence to find Rafe secured to the wall, arms drawn above his head, heavy iron circling his wrists. The chain looks thick enough to hold an orc. He growls and yanks on them.
My gaze snaps back to Atlas, who has stepped closer while I’ve been distracted. He doesn’t smile. His face is a blank slate.
Yet a tendril of something soft and sweet lingers on him, reaching my nose as he stops a few paces from me. Our mate. Aroused.
She doesn’t tell me what he does with her, beyond that she delivers his breakfast each morning and waits until he’s finished before taking the tray away.
I come out swinging.
He blocks the blow easily and slams his fist into my jaw. It rattles my skull and stars burst behind my eyes.
Fuck. He punches damn hard.
He grins, curling two fingers in a little come-hither gesture.
“Don’t fight him!” Rafe calls. “Don’t play into their games!”
Easy for him to say. He doesn’t have an inner wolf who’s going feral from the scent of our mate on this bastard.
I charge.
He tosses me aside and kicks my ass to help me hit the rough, sandy floor with force.
With a roar, I launch myself at him again.
We go at one another. It's a small satisfaction that his blood stains the floor beside mine, and bruises soon mottle his flesh. Only he is strong and tireless, and for every blow I land, he lands three.
I was already worn out when we walked into the training pit. Up half the night plowing Violet’s sweet cunt, and lugging rocks or chopping endless supplies of wood all day.
And I didn’t even get my breakfast today!
I’m beyond spent. And still the rage inside me roars. Burning with the need to know how her aroused scent came to be on him. Has he taken her? Will I smell his seed when I join her later in her nest?
Something breaks loose. Something dark and primal.
It doesn’t matter how tired I am. Doesn’t matter how many blows land. Doesn’t matter that I recognize he is toying with me.
Rafe’s hoarse voice echoes off the stone walls, begging me to call it time. “For fuck’s sake, Lark. Yield!”
Nothing can reach me. I am lost in the haze of rage and madness. Nor am I close to yielding.
I’m on the floor face down, mouth full of grit. I drag myself off the ground, spitting out a gob of blood. My legs barely hold me. I sway.
“I know what this is about,” I grit out.
Atlas arches a brow. There’s a bruise blooming on one cheek, his left eye swollen, yet he is not beaten, barely winded.
“And what is that, pup?”
“You’re trying to kill me,” I sneer, “and pass it off as a training accident. She’ll know.”
He punches me again.
The blow sends me sprawling into the sand.
“Damn whelp,” he growls, shaking out his fist.
It gives me grim satisfaction to know that beating on me is hurting him as well.
“If I wanted to kill you, I’d have tossed you off the cliff and been done with it,” he continues in the same low, more irritated than angry tone. “I’m trying to fucking help you.”
“Help?” I croak. My vision swims. My head rings. “This is not fucking helping. This is beating me within an inch of my life.”
I force myself to my knees, teeth clenched against the agony. Before I can gain my feet, he grabs me by the throat. His sheer power, and how little beating on me has troubled him, is made apparent when he plucks me from the floor like I’m a bag of feathers and not a heavy-assed grown man.
And I’ve got nothing left. No resistance. No fight.
His face is all harsh planes and savage beauty. So close. So terribly inescapable.
My eyes start to roll back. I’m slipping.
He taps my cheek, rousing me.
“Fuck off.”
“Pitiful.” He drags me closer still, until our bodies are flush, until I’m left dangling and the only thing holding me up is his fist around my throat.
“Shift, wolf. I know you’re in there, that you can feel my alpha calling to you. Even if we’re not the same kind, you recognize me as your leader. Open your fucking mind. Open or I shall keep beating you until you do.”
He shakes me.
“Open yourself. Now. Yield.” The command is a thunderclap inside my skull. It’s not just a voice—it’s a force. A storm. A tidal wave slamming through every fragile place I’ve kept hidden.
My wolf whimpers, sinking deeper into the recesses of my mind, cowering away from the ungodly power bearing down on us. “It’s not safe.”
“It is safe.” He’s inside my mind now, and there is no escape. “You are safe. I am your alpha now, and I call you to my command. I bind you. I claim you. Not to a lowly pack, but to a pride. Come. Take your place. Take your birthright. Take your destiny!”
I stare into his silver, swirling, bottomless eyes.
The air rumbles like distant thunder, and the very rocks of the mountain shudder. A great whooshing sound fills my ears like wind tearing through a canyon.
My will breaks.
And I break with it.
Shattered into infinite pieces only to be smashed together and rebuilt.
Scents slam into me, sharp, visceral, unrelenting.
I shake out my coat.
Wait? Coat!
“Big bastard,” Vander says, stepping up beside Atlas, rubbing his jaw. “Where does he contain this much beast?”
Atlas rolls his eyes.
I glance down at paws. Then up at Atlas. My gaze is level with his.
I spin. Jump. Catch a flash of white fur and tail in my peripheral.
“Fuck! What am I?” This is not a regular wolf.
Atlas steps forward, sliding his fingers into the fur at my jaw. It feels…nice, indescribable. My wolf presses into the touch, idiot.
“Quite a surprise, Lark,” he says dryly. “And you’re a direwolf shifter.”
My tail starts to beat. My entire body wriggles with sheer joy. I yip. And then, without a second thought, I give Atlas a good, solid shoulder-barge. Twelve distinct presences fill my mind—the pride.
Not human minds. Nor wolves. Something far older.
I go to them, licking and bumping them until they pet me.
“Like a giant frisky pup,” Darrion grumbles in my mind, although he rubs the scruff at the back of my neck in a way that has me drooling with sappy pleasure.
But then, I come to a stop as my circle of the room brings me to where Rafe is chained to the wall.
My tail stops beating. I gently nuzzle into his hand, and his fingers grasp my fur.
I cannot feel him in my mind the way I can the others…
sadness overcomes me that he is on the outside.
I sit down and turn expectantly to Atlas.
He is still a bastard. But I sense he is a bastard with a plan.
“Is he a wolf shifter, too?” I never sensed it, yet there is an expectation in the air, a premonition of something more.
“No,” Atlas says. “He is not. But I intend to claim him anyway. You are part of this, both of you. Part of her.”
My pulse quickens. I have long suspected they have a plan, one that would eventually see us outed as Violet’s mates.
But that was never their intention at all.
Fate? Destiny? Violet has ever been at the center of something far more powerful than me.
Rafe and I are merely ordinary men caught in her sweet snare.
Only now we are all something more than we were—more than ordinary.
Without Violet, I might never have met my wolf.
Yet, I understand, too, that we are but small pieces in a greater puzzle.
I have claimed a part of her. A mate. Gone from a lone, mute, wolf shifter to a member of a griffin pride.
But my first loyalty was always to Rafe, the man I knew and befriended before Violet stormed onto the scene.
“She loves him,” I say. “She will not want you to hurt him unduly—I do not want you to hurt him, either.”
As Atlas cracks his knuckles and sets his sights on Rafe, I may understand what is coming next, but that doesn’t mean I shall like it.
Rafe
Lark is a direwolf. I cannot get my head around it.
I’ve met wolf shifters, a good number of them, and I’ve seen them in both human and wolf forms. So I know that a shifter’s wolf is generally a big bastard compared to a regular wolf, and that one might wonder how something so huge can be contained in a regular-sized man.
Fine, the alphas are generally tall, strong men, but beta shifters, which I presumed Lark was, are average for want of a better word.
Lark is a soldier, and he’s strong… yet never would I have expected this much beast to be lingering within him.
He is fucking huge—not much smaller than a griffin if one were to ignore their great wingspan.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I choked up when he transitioned, and his inner animal broke free.
I hate Atlas, the lordly bastard in charge of this pride. We’ve lingered under his threat from the moment we arrived. And yet, I can respect him too, that he was the one to coax Lark’s wolf to the surface.
Lark’s part is over, accepted, and now Atlas has his sights on me. To what end, I have no clue. “I’m no wolf shifter,” I say.
“I did not think you were.”
Smug bastard. Like he knows something I do not.
Well, good luck with trying to beat something out of me.
There is no animal of any kind lurking in the back of my mind, not a bear, not a wolf, nor anything else.
My parents are regular betas, as were my grandparents.
I can trace my family back five generations in the little village where I grew up.
Lark gives the side of my face a big, wet lick.
I grunt, distracted from Atlas’s looming presence, and then Lark slinks off and takes up a position out of the way.
Atlas glances across at his men before stretching out a crick in his neck like he’s limbering up.
I suspect they can communicate telepathically like shifters do, maybe all the time, even when in human form.
The way they’re all eyeballing each other and not saying a word certainly gives that impression.
Also, their griffins are distinct beings, something I noticed from his very first introduction.
The big blond one, Darrion, shrugs.
Atlas turns back to me, a determined glint in his eyes.
He is going to beat on me, the way he did Lark. My stomach tightens. Why the fuck would he do that? Is it some test? An acceptance ritual I must pass?
“Fine,” I say through gritted teeth. “Do your worst.”
A hint of a smile graces his lips. He steps forward.
A bell begins clanging somewhere in the distance. Atlas halts abruptly.
I tense. What the fuck does that mean? All the griffins and Lark turn as one toward the entrance.
“Damn it,” Atlas mutters before turning to scowl at me. “You’ll have to wait.”
The other griffins are already storming out the door. With a last lingering look at me, Lark follows them.
Now it is only Atlas and me.
“If we do not return promptly, I’ll send servants to tend you. Don’t give them trouble. I’m not your enemy, and neither are they.”
Sermon delivered, he strides away.
“What is happening?” I call after him. “What is the bell?”
He ignores me. The door shuts behind him, leaving me alone.
“Bastard.” I yank half-heartedly on the chains. I’ve already established they are well secured. No chance I’m breaking free.
The bell stops ringing.
Are we under attack? If we are, I want to help, not stay here chained up like a dangerous criminal.
Only something has begun. It started with Lark, and it will end with me. A test of some kind. One I pray I will pass.
Alone, the fear of failure rises and consumes my mind. The worry that I’m not enough, not the one, an outsider, just a beta man with no special telepathy, nor inner beast. The one ordinary mate amid so many extraordinary ones. And if I don’t make the cut, what then? Am I out?
A sting forms at the back of my eyes, and I blink it away quickly.
Violet. He said she was my mate. He promised he wouldn’t separate us.
Well, he lied, didn’t he? Because I’m here. And she’s… fuck knows where she is.
And whatever that bell is about, they’d better keep her safe.