ALANNA
The first thing my brain registered was the sound.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Sharp and loud. Sounding like something from a hospital
It sliced through the silence like needles through skin, sterile and lifeless. My mind clawed at the noise, trying to understand it, but it was foreign, too precise and too cold.
Then, voices. Distant and warped, as though I were submerged in deep water and the world above was trying to reach me through a thick, suffocating veil. The words blurred into one another, lacking meaning, like the muffled murmurs in a nightmare.
Pain bloomed in my skull. Not the sharp kind, but a deep, throbbing ache that made it impossible to think. Every inch of my body felt like it had been crushed, like the very bones had forgotten how to hold me together.
Am I dead?
I wasn't sure. It would've made sense. The weight in my chest, and the absence of warmth.
Do the afterlife have these types of sounds? I thought I wasn't supposed to feel any pain in the afterlife. From the stories my mother told me, I was supposed to be in my wolf form, without a shred of my humanity but I was feeling very much human.
I forced my eyes open. My vision burned and blurred. I recoiled instinctively, flinching from the brightness that stabbed at my eyes like knives.
Everything was too white, and too clean. The scent of antiseptic clung to the air, unnaturally sterile. As if the room itself was trying to erase every trace of the world outside.
Shapes slowly formed, a ceiling as blank as a slates, beeping machines, and tubes piercing my skin, leeching something from me, or maybe forcing something in.
A hospital?
No. It didn't feel like healing happened here.
I tried to move, tried being the key word, but my arms wouldn't lift, and my legs wouldn't respond.
That's when I noticed I was tied down like a sacrifice, to the bed with tight leather straps.
Panic slammed into me like a wave. Did Chase send his men after me to fish me out from the cliffs? Was the suffering not yet over? My heart thrashed wildly in my chest. My breath hitched.
Where am I?
And then, memory came.
Every single thing, the fall, the betrayal, Chase, the knife and the cliff.
I had plummeted into the abyss, air tearing at my skin, the earth roaring up to meet me. I remembered my scream. I remembered my wolf's scream too, raw, primal, and then nothing.
I was supposed to be dead.
Instead, I was here.
Alive. Barely.
Before I could think of anything else again, I slipped into the darkness again.
The first thing that hit me the next time I regained consciousness was a horrible smell.
At first, I thought, 'Ahh, this is more like it. Finally, the afterlife.' But the more my senses awoke, the worse the stench became.
The putrid smell of decay mixed with a whole lot of other things that my senses couldn't recognize.
It was so terrible that I thought I would hurl. I tried bringing my hands to my mouth when I realized that I was suspended in the air.
Had I been caught and kept alive by Richard and his sadistic son? How had they been able to revive me after all that? What more did they want from me?
Even as I ruminated on these thoughts, my gut kept insisting that I was eons away from Ivory Moon.
Then I reached inward, searching for her, for my wolf. That quiet, constant presence. My tether. My strength.
But there was nothing.
A hollow space where my soul used to echo.
I whimpered. "No…"
Please no, no, no. I tried to reach out again, maybe she was too weak from all we had endured. But she was gone, like she had never been there.
Heartbreak burned through my body, and I bit my lips and tried to swallow my pain, but it was too much. What was I without my wolf? Wasn't I better off dead?
I was so wrapped up in my pain to notice the arrival of my captors, and it was their scent that caught my attention.
My eyes shot up to see just glowing red eyes glaring at me. Terror like I'd never felt before crawled up my spine. I wasn't staring at any ordinary wolf.
Echoes of the childhood tales Mom teased me with rang in my head.
…So dark, they blend with darkness.
Red eyes that see the depths of your soul.
Savages. Nature's abomination…
They carry the scent of death with them
Worse than rogues…
They call them cursed, worse still untamed.
If you're unfortunate to ever meet them
Best believe you'll be ravaged to death.
Wild Wolves.
The wolf before me snarled and began to sniff me, and it was so huge.
From behind, someone lowered me until I was on the floor. I didn't dare move or make a sound, but within me, I was screaming. Scratch that, I was dying of mortification.
How was this possible?
How was this even my life?
I thought they were just a myth.
We all believed that wild wolves were a tale made to scare little children.
We called them untamed.
They didn't exist, and even if they did, they had to be extinct.
I was sure of this because mom had led a research to confirm their existence a few years ago, and she didn't find anything.
The red eyes disappeared suddenly. I let out a shriek and began to look around, but I couldn't make anything out.
"Trespasser," an unnatural voice hissed behind me.
Goosebumps scattered all over my skin, and immediately my eyes shut so tight that my eyes were about to burst.
"Spy," the voice continued. "What are you doing here? Who sent you?"
I swallowed.
Rough hands grabbed my face. "Did you really think you could sneak into our territory and survive?" A slithery voice added.
"Why are you here?" The first voice repeated.
My whole body quaked, and my teeth chattered together.
"Answer us!" The second voice commanded. "Why and how are you in our territory?"
"I—" I stuttered, "I…I don't know."
Tears had begun to spill out from my eyes. I was exhausted, and I had already been through too much. There was not a single inkling of stamina left in me.
Heck, I was supposed to be dead. At the moment, death seemed better than what I was experiencing.
The room was silent before both voices laughed. It sounded grainy and made me shudder.
They had barely stopped laughing before my head was roughly yanked backward.
"You think we are stupid. This is your last chance. Who are you? Who sent you, and why did you sneak into our territory?"
"I'm not lying. I swear." I bawled. "I don't even know where I am. I was running for my life. I was killed and thrown off a cliff. I am supposed to be de—"
I was cut short by a whip that landed on my back. The pain was so sudden that I screamed.
"Lies. Lies. Lies." The voices said simultaneously. "We are going to make you regret lying to us."
And they did. They kept to their word. They tortured me till I regretted everything about my existence. But I didn't regret lying to them because I didn't lie.
Instead, I told them through my screams and pleas for mercy the story of my life. Yet it wasn't enough. They tortured me until I began to regret telling them the truth.
I should have just agreed with their accusations from the beginning. Maybe they would have swiftly dealt with me and ended it all.
They tortured me until I began to lose my mind and even began to admire their techniques. I was sure that I'd spent days wherever it was, they kept me.
Time lost meaning.
I hung from silver chains that they used to bind me but they no longer burned me. Day after day, or was it all one endless night? I was there staring into the void.
I no longer healed like before. My wounds remained. My skin festered. My soul frayed.
I was half-alive, clinging to whatever remained of me.
They gave me just enough water to survive. No food. No comfort. No kindness.
Only pain.
Only whispers beyond the stone.
"She's getting weaker."
"She won't last, but she is not talking."
"I think it's time we bring her to the Alpha."
"But—"
"She's no use like this. He'll know if she's lying."
I heard footsteps before the chains were unlocked, and I fell.
My body hit the stone floor like dead weight. My knees cracked. My elbows split open. I cried out in pain.
"Get up." One of them said
I couldn't.
So he dragged me by the hair.
I faintly remember what I knew about the Alpha of Wild Wolves.
According to the rumors, wild werewolves were savages but all of them put together were 100 times more humane than their alpha.
The myths called him a demon and a heartless beast. All mirth vanished from my weak body.
Whatever he was, I already knew that he was only going to make my current situation a lot worse.
Through tunnels lit by wooden torches. It was like they were cut off from civilization. The air smelt rotten like dead bodies and I was almost not surprised when I saw bones, both of humans and animals. People had dared to venture here and had paid for it with their lives.
The guard pulled me until we reached a stop, I struggled to look up and saw a door.
Iron, tall, and unlike anything I had ever seen. Was it a monster that stays behind these doors? I really didn't want to find out
The guards knocked the door twice, waiting a while for a response before pushing the door open and I was shoved inside.
I crumpled to the ground, trying to get my bearings.
The room was dark, but charged. The air buzzed with power so dense it pressed against my lungs. My heart skipped.
The Alpha was here.
I didn't need to see him.
I felt him. His aura wrapped around me, choking and making it difficult to breathe.
He moved like a blade slicing through tension. Quiet. Deliberate. Dangerous.
He wasn't even in close proximity yet, and I could feel him. His power oozed into the dark room in a tantalizing yet suffocating way. It was weird. I chucked it up to being too weak to even keep my eyes open.
"I have no tolerance for spies," I heard him say as soon as he entered. His voice was gruff and hard, but it grazed my skin and sent thrills down my spine in ways I couldn't understand.
My eyes snapped open. The dominance of his wolf occupied the whole room. I was struggling for breath, but instead of saving my energy, I angled my head so I could get a better view of him. It was useless, of course. The room was still pitch black.
I couldn't see him, but I could feel him. He remained silent.
Then suddenly he said, "Lights."
At once, windows I didn't know existed were thrown open and… I screamed.
The intensity of the lights streaming in through the windows scorched my eyes and seemed to burn my skin.
It took a while before my eyes could adjust to the light. I squinted them open.
Angry charcoal-gray eyes stared at me. I could see the malice and pure hatred in them.
His dark hair was tousled in a way that showed that he didn't care. He was tall and huge. His lips were drawn in a taut line.
"Stray…" He growled, stalking me.
I swallowed. Feeling heat rises up to my cheeks. He smelled g...good. I didn't understand it, maybe it was because I had been exposed to the rotten smell of the prison for so long.
He grabbed my cheeks and growled into my face.
"You're going to regret trespassing what's mine." He said it with so much malice and disgust that it reminded me of where I was in the first place.