The chains tightening around my wrists bring me back to consciousness.
For a moment, I can’t remember where I am.
I blink my eyes open to see the cracked concrete ceiling above me.
Then, it all comes back to me like a brick settling in my stomach.
I fight back the urge to cry.
The silver shackles bite into my raw wrists.
You would think that I would be used to the pain after two years of being treated like a worthless animal, a science experiment, but sometimes it becomes unbearable.
The experiments—injecting microdoses of liquid wolfsbane into my veins and analyzing the effects on my body.
And my wolf.
I learned in the beginning that the burning feeling coursing through my veins was the wolfsbane as it weakened and cut off my connection to my wolf.
I’ve been a whole year without her, only feeling her faintly in the far corners of my mind, whimpering in pain and sadness.
Never in my life have I ever felt so overwhelmingly alone.
They took my family…
My friends…
And my wolf.
I keep using my mindlink to call out to my dad to come and protect me from these Hunters as he used to protect me from the monsters under my bed or from Natalia’s incessant tea parties.
But he never comes.
Has he forgotten about me?
I call out to Xavier over and over again, but he never answers.
He never comes to save me.
I was too weak to fight off the Hunters; perhaps he decided I was too weak to deserve to be saved.
That I wasn’t a strong enough wolf to potentially be his mate and Luna.
No… I could feel the strength of our bond that night as I waited for him.
We were going to finish what began when our bodies were pressed together in the arena.
Xavier IS searching for me, his lost mate, I know it.
The hunters are blocking our mindlink somehow; that has to be why he doesn’t respond.
I yearn for his touch every time that the darkness creeps closer.
My eyes start to flutter shut as the pain becomes too much.
I feel a sharp smack across my already bruised cheek.
“Don’t go passing out on me yet, bitch. We’ve only barely started today.” Kane, the leader of the hunters, digs his dirty fingernails into my shoulder.
“Go to hell,” I say, mustering up what little fight I have left.
Kane’s cold, gray eyes—as strange as it sounds—are the only things that have kept me going.
The thought of ripping them from his head…
I often think about the first time I saw those eyes.
It was the night I’d been accepted into warrior training.
The night I’ve been dreaming about.
Sitting by the lake, waiting for Xavier, my body yearned for a union that would never happen.
Instead, I was met with the hunter.
Those eyes, looking at me from the shadows, glaring at me with absolute malice.
I never saw Xavier after that day.
I never saw anyone I knew.
My past life was slipping away from my memory with every passing day.
Our pack has never done anything violent to humankind, but that doesn’t matter to hunters.
All they want is the complete eradication of werewolves.
But what they want with me—why they’ve kept me alive to experiment on me for two years—I have no idea.
“I think you need to be reminded of your place, mutt,” Kane says as he picks up a syringe filled with silver liquid.
“No… NO!” I scream as he punctures my skin.
My spine begins to stretch, and a horrible cracking noise echoes throughout the room as my bones break.
He’s forcing my wolf out somehow, but the silver is keeping my body from healing during the transformation.
The pain is unreal.
I feel my ribs puncture my lungs, and blood spills out of my mouth.
In fact, it’s spilling out of several places in my body as my bones penetrate my skin like a mangled mess.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Kane shouts. “I think I gave her too much! Medic! Get the fuck over here!”
I want to howl so badly from the pain, but all I can muster is a pathetic raspy wheeze.
The room is beginning to blur and close in around me.
“Get her fucking stable!” Kane yells. “We can’t lose our best test subject. She’s almost perfected!”
As the darkness settles in, I hear a soft and ethereal voice…
A searing pain wakes me up.
As the haze of the dream begins to wear off, one thing becomes clear.
Before passing out, my entire body was broken; my bones were jutting out of my body, and I was losing so much blood…
So imagine my surprise when I crane my neck to look at my battered body and find that…
All my wounds had been healed.
I feel a strength inside me that I haven’t felt in a long, long time.
Is this what the woman meant by the gift of healing?
She told me that I have to escape…
That I have to find my mate.
Xavier… It must be Xavier, right? He’s been waiting for me.
I struggle with my chains, but even though the silver isn’t irritating my skin like before, it still stings.
I hear a door open at the top of the stairs and uneven footsteps as someone stumbles down them.
That will probably be Kane, drunk again.
He loves to torment me when he’s wasted.
“You’re finally awake, mutt. Good. We’re gonna play a little game,” he says, slurring his speech.
Kane grabs a silver collar and clamps it around my neck, undoing the chains around my arms.
He yanks the chain attached to the collar on my neck, forcing me to my feet.
Kane stumbles as he starts climbing the stairs, pulling me behind him.
“Get a move on, bitch!” he says, tightening his grip on the chain.
I wait till he’s almost at the top of the stairs.
I can hear the voices of other hunters coming from the other side of the door.
Growling, my wolf comes to the surface, and I yank the chain as hard as I can muster.
Kane loses his footing and flies backward, tumbling down the staircase like a rag doll.
I calmly walk to the bottom of the stairs and stand over his body as he looks up at me, pleading for mercy.
“Pl—please…”
I dig into his pocket and find the key to my collar.
I unlock it, letting it fall to the floor.
I stare into his cold, gray eyes.
The eyes I’ve seen every day for the past two years as he’s experimented on me.
The eyes that have kept me going.
For that one day when I’d rip them from his head.
My claws lengthen from my fingertips.
“Filthy wolf. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill all of you,” he mutters as blood trickles out of his mouth.
I plunge my claws into his face and rip them back out in one swift motion.
I feel something inside me, but it’s not the strength of the Goddess.
No, this is something different…
Purpose.
I am going to follow Selene’s instructions.
But first, I’m going to make the rest of these hunters pay for what they’ve done to me.
I turn from Kane’s mangled body and start walking up the stairs.
With each step that I take, I feel more and more unbridled rage.
I don’t just open the door at the top of the stairs…
…I tear it off its hinges.
I walk down an empty, sterile hallway until I get to a closed door.
Party music is blaring on the other side, and I can hear several men—at least five—drunkenly dancing and carrying on.
I kick through the door and snarl, raging and feral, ready to kill.
The men look up at me, stunned, as my eyes flicker from one hunter to the next.
“Who’s first?” I growl, drawing my claws.
One of the hunters pulls a gun from his holster, but he’s too slow, and I knock it out of his hand before I tackle him and start ripping through his flesh with my claws.
I’m double-teamed by two of them as they jump on my back, but I swing around and slice both of their necks open.
They grasp their throats as the blood seeps through their fingers, crumpling to the ground.
The fourth hunter grabs a knife from his boot and charges at me, screaming.
He stabs at my face and the blade breaks my skin, producing a small cut.
As the blood rolls down my face like a lone teardrop, I touch the spot where he cut me and feel it already closing.
His eyes widen with disbelief. “H-how d-did you?”
I wrench the knife from his hand and plunge it into his chest.
He falls to the floor, his eyes still bulging out of his head.
I want to stop and take a breath, but my body won’t let me.
I’m running on pure adrenaline…or something else, but I don’t feel in control.
As I turn around to look for the exit, I see a young hunter holding a gun.
His hand is shaking as he points it directly at me.
I feel a silver bullet rip through my thigh, but it doesn’t leave the other side, instead it remains lodged in my leg.
Without a moment of hesitation, I pounce on the young hunter and break his neck, but a searing pain shoots through my body as I stand up.
As I look around at the carnage that I’ve caused, I can’t help but wonder what the Goddess would think.
She told me to escape, not to murder everyone in the building.
I grab a nearby lantern, limp toward a ladder that leads to a hatch, and climb up it through a dark tunnel.
As I emerge, I hold up my lantern to find myself in what looks like an old barn.
I’m about to push through the massive barn doors and leave this hellhole forever when I spot several kerosene containers in the corner.
My wolf stirs in the back of my mind, and I welcome her presence like a long-lost friend. Relief washes over me as I realize that my physical wounds weren’t the only healing I received from Selene.
I search my mind for the pack mindlink as I reach for the containers. If I can feel my wolf, then I should be able to feel my pack again. The faint humming of the link gives me renewed strength to pour the kerosene all over the barn.
Then I hear something, a faint whisper, barely audible, but there in my mindlink, the first time I’ve felt a pack member in two years.
I know the voice—Xavier.
Silence. Have I lost the connection again?
I dump the kerosene oil all over the barn and smash the lantern onto it, creating an instantaneous and raging inferno.
I noticed too late that the fire is spreading fast, moving toward something covered by a tarp in the corner—a pickup truck.
My feet lift off the ground, and I fly backward through the splintering wooden barn doors. I land on my back, and a searing pain shoots through my body. The twinkling stars in the night sky begin to turn into blurry black spots.
I’ve got to call for help before I pass out, so Xavier can find me before more hunters do. I summon the last of my strength and scream his name in my mind and out loud.
Silence…
It’s Xavier!
The fire crackles loudly as I wait for his response.
As smoke billows into the clearing and the scent of burning oil overwhelms my senses, I see the tall figure of a man approach me from the smoke. He’s here. He heard me! Xavier has come to save me and take me home. He wasn’t rejecting me. I reach my hand out to him even as the darkness takes over.
“Xavier,” I whisper at the person crouching down. I relish in the smell of another wolf for the first time in two years.
But it’s not Xavier… It’s not my mate…
My vision is blurred and my ears are ringing, so I can’t tell who it is. A rogue? I should be scared of what they’ll do to me, but all I can think about is Xavier.
I plead with him in my mind.
His words echo through my mind like an earthquake. My body seizes, and everything goes black.
