Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
LIANA
The chemical smell hits me as soon as I open my eyes.
Where am I?
My head pounds.
A deep, deep throb happens behind my eyes and makes the light hurt. I try to bring my hands up to press against my temples, but my hands don’t move. They’re behind my back, wrists crossed, bound by something thin and hard that has bitten into my skin while I was unconscious.
It feels like zip ties. The plastic has cut two shallow grooves into my wrists, and when I flex my fingers, fresh blood wells and goes sticky against my skin.
I’m lying on a thin, lumpy mattress on a wooden floor.
The ceiling above me is water-stained, a wide brown ring blooming out from a central point like something rotted from the inside. The fan in the corner sits motionless, blades furred gray with old dust.
The wallpaper along the far wall is a faded pattern of hunting dogs and pheasants, yellowed and peeling at the seams, so ugly I remember hating it.
The crack in the window pane runs the same diagonal it has run for years, a thin silver seam catching what little light gets through the boards nailed over the glass.
I know this room.
This is where Magnus broke my left ring finger when I was twenty, because I cried too loudly at dinner and he said an omega who cries at the table embarrasses her pack.
This is where Silus pinned my wrists to this same bedframe when I was twenty-one and bit into my shoulder hard enough to leave a scar, competing with his father over whose mark would finally take.
This is the room I slept in for almost three years of my life.
The air smells like them.
My breathing speeds up without my permission. I can’t stop it. My chest goes tight, a vice cranking closed around my ribs, and my vision narrows at the edges into a gray tunnel.
I am hyperventilating.
My body remembers this room faster than my mind can catch up to it — the bites, the nights when every alpha in the pack took his turn with me in this exact bed while my face was pressed into this exact mattress, and no one could hear me because the cabin sits two miles from the nearest road and the trees swallow every sound.
I remember Magnus’s mouth at my ear, telling me I was being a bad omega.
I remember Silus’s hand clamping over my mouth.
I remember each failed marking attempt and the slow, sick weeks it took for each wound to close, if it ever fully closed at all.
For one terrible moment I am eighteen again:
Magnus carries me up the gravel driveway, his big arms locked around me, after my entire family is dead.
“Please let me go,” I cry, begging him, but he laughs. He is actually laughing, the sound rolling out of his chest like this is the best night of his life.
I curl onto my side on the mattress.
My wrists are still bound behind me. I make myself small, knees to my chest, and I bite down hard on the inside of my own cheek until I taste copper, because the sound trying to claw its way out of my throat cannot come out.
I breathe through it. I make myself count.
Seven boards nail the window shut. Gray, warped, swollen with old damp. Between them, thin strips of afternoon light fall across the dusty floor, and I watch the motes drifting slowly inside each pale strip.
I make myself sit up. It hurts more than it should.
The door opens.
Silus steps inside wearing the same dark coat he wore in my shop this morning.
His hair is brushed back, not a strand out of place, and he looks calm.
He crosses to the small wooden chair against the wall and sits, crossing one leg over the other, and looks at me with an expression that mixes disdain and disgust in equal, careful measure.
“Please,” I say. My voice comes out cracked. “Let me go. Ezra will be looking for me.”
“You belong to me now,” he says, mild, unhurried. “You’re going to stop this business with the Frostwoods, and it all ends tonight.”
“Why am I here?” I whisper, though I already know, and hate that I have to ask anyway.
“I’m going to try again,” he says.
My stomach drops through the floor. “Try what again?”
I know. God help me, I know before he even answers.
He smiles. Small. Private. “Marking you.”
I know what a failed bite feels like on the body. The burn doesn’t fade for weeks, and the wound won’t close because the alpha behind the teeth isn’t my mate.
He rises. Crosses the small room. Kneels in front of me on the floor, the old boards groaning under his weight, and I try, and fail, not to flinch away from him.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“Let’s just say you should never have gone to the little fair with your new useless alpha,” he says, leaning in towards me. He puts his face near my stomach and inhales. One long breath. His expression shifts. He inhales again, slower, deeper, and frowns, and pulls back to look up into my face.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“You’re pregnant,” he says. Quiet. Dangerous.
The room tilts sideways. My heart slams so hard I feel it in my throat, in my ears, in the tips of my fingers. I don’t breathe. I don’t blink.
Silus stands. Paces the narrow room, boots scuffing dust into the strips of light. Confusion crosses his face first, and then, horribly, a laugh breaks out of him.
“The Frostwoods got you pregnant,” he says slowly. “I’ll raise it as mine.”
“You’re delusional,” I say, low, though my whole body is shaking on the inside where he can’t see it. “They’re going to find me. I would rather die than raise my children in this house.”
His eyes go cold instantly. He kneels again, lifts my chin with one finger.
“You won’t take anything else from me,” he says.
“My father made an agreement with your father, years ago, that you would be mine. Your father broke that promise. That is why your family died.” His thumb presses harder into my jaw.
“My father kept you for himself instead. And he let me have you only after he’d already used you first. I spent three years watching him consume what was promised to me.
” His voice drops, low and final. “Now I have you. Only me. I won’t even let my pack touch you. ”
He stands and leaves. The door locks behind him with a heavy, final click.
I’ve been drifting in and out against the wall, my wrists raw where the plastic has worked itself deeper into my skin, when the noise starts.
I jerk awake.
My mouth is dry, my head still throbbing where the chemical fog hasn’t fully lifted, and then I hear shouting.
Somewhere beyond the door. A door breaking open somewhere in the main room, wood splintering loud enough that I feel it in my teeth.
Glass shatters. A gunshot cracks the air, flat and enormous in the small cabin, and a second gunshot comes right behind it.
“Where’s Liana?!” shouts a voice. I recognize it. It’s Ezra’s voice.
“In here!” I scream, my voice coming out scratchy.
A man screams. It’s Hugo. I know his voice even through the wall, that low, mean rasp gone high and animal. Then footsteps. Running. Heavy, fast, coming toward my door across warped floorboards that groan under the weight.
The door bursts open.
Cole fills the doorway. Blood runs from a cut at his temple down the side of his face.
His chest heaves from how hard he’s breathing. There’s a small knife gripped in his right hand and a handgun shoved into the waistband of his jeans, and his eyes find mine and lock there. A look of relief comes over him when he sees me.
“Thank god you’re alive,” he growls as he crosses the room in three strides. Drops to his knees in front of me on the dusty floor. The knife slides between my wrists and the zip tie, and the plastic falls away, and my arms scream with pins and needles as blood rushes back into my hands.
“You’re here,” I croak out, crying and shaking with relief.
He pulls me into his chest. His arms lock around me, tight, shaking slightly, and his mouth is against my hair.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “You’re safe. I’ll get you out of here, love.”
He kisses the crown of my head once, hard, and then he’s lifting me, one arm under my knees, one behind my back, carrying me out of the room.
We cross the main room of the cabin. Two long streaks of blood smear the floorboards where something heavy has been dragged. Hugo’s body lies face down in the doorway to the kitchen, unmoving, and Cole steps over him without so much as glancing down.
Julian has Bram pinned against the far wall.
Blood pours from Bram’s nose, broken and swelling fast. Julian’s face, when he looks up and finds me over Bram’s shoulder, is a face I’ve never seen on him before.
No dimple. No grin. Just a man standing at the very edge of his own control, nodding once at me like it’s costing him everything not to bury his knife in the man in front of him.
Cole carries me toward the open front door. Afternoon light spills gold across the threshold.
Silus steps out of the side hallway.
He has a gun raised, leveled dead center at my chest, and time goes thick and slow around me.
He’s smiling.
“Put her down,” he says to Cole. Calm. Pleasant, almost. “Or I put her down myself.”
Cole goes still as stone. He looks at me once, and then he lowers me gently to my feet beside him. He moves his body between me and the barrel of that gun without a single wasted motion.
“I’m not doing this,” Cole says quietly.
“You absolutely are.” Silus’s eyes shift past him. “Come to me, Liana.”
Cole doesn’t move an inch. Silus lifts the gun a fraction higher.
“Walk,” Cole says to me. Very soft. Not looking away from Silus. “Liana. Walk.”
My legs shake as I step around him.
The floorboards creak under my bare feet. My heart is a fist slamming against my ribs, so loud I can hear it over everything else in the room, over my own breath, over the low, terrible quiet that has fallen across the cabin.
I walk toward Silus.
His free hand shoots out and wraps around the back of my neck, hauling me in against his side. The gun barrel presses cold under my jaw.
I don’t breathe.
The crack of a single gunshot splits the room from the direction of the front door.
Silus’s whole body jerks against mine. His arm loosens around my neck. He starts to crumple, and I scream. As he goes down, he shoves me away from him. I crash into the cabinet and hit my head on the hard corner.
White light explodes behind my eyes.
I crumple to the floor. The boards are warm under my cheek. Through the white haze, I see, very far away, Ezra standing in the front doorway in his charcoal suit, gun still raised, his face torn wide open with shock, his eyes locked on me.
His mouth opens.
He’s shouting my name, I think, but the sound comes through water now, slow and warped, arriving from somewhere much farther away than the length of the room.
I can’t move. I can’t speak. My hands won’t answer me.
The last thing I see is Ezra dropping the gun. Starting to run.
“Liana!” he shouts again with pure terror in his voice. Then there is nothing at all.