Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
But then why are we stopping in the middle of the woods?
Lenox and the gray-haired man squat beside me. He’s older—in his late fifties—and he’s got a close-cropped gray beard and a thick gold ring with a red stone. He shoves my curls out of my face. I jerk my head away. He laughs.
“She’s pretty.”
Lenox grunts. He’s squatting on the ground, rummaging in a rucksack.
“Did you fuck her?” the gray-haired man asks him while smirking at me.
Lenox flashes him an irritated glance. “No. You don’t want to mess with the bond,” he says. “It defeats the purpose.”
What is he talking about?
Lenox finally stops rifling through his bag and takes out a metal thermos. He shakes it a few times, and then he carefully pours a measure into the cup that doubles as a lid.
“Sit up, Mari,” he says.
I curl myself into a tighter ball.
The gray-haired man jabs the taser under my rib and fires. My neck snaps back from the jolt. Hot liquid trickles down my inner thighs. I mash my lips shut against a whimper of pain.
“Sit up,” Lenox says again, voice calm, almost unconcerned.
The gray-haired man spears his fingers into my hair, his nails scraping my scalp, and he drags me upward, hard. It hurts. I scramble to my knees, grappling for his wrists. He lets go, and I drop back to my butt, panting.
“Just do what I say.” Lenox hands me the cup. I take it automatically. “Drink.”
It smells like herbs. Like Abertha’s cottage. My eyes prickle. Ice seeps into my chest. “Wh-what is it?”
“It’ll calm you down.” Lenox urges the cup toward my mouth.
“I don’t want it.”
The gray-haired man raises his taser. I startle. The drink sloshes over the side of the cup.
“Careful, Smith,” Lenox hisses. That’s the gray-haired man’s name. Smith.
“Drink,” Lenox repeats in a sterner voice. It’s hard to believe that he ever looked harmless. It’s like he turned himself off, and his gray eyes are a one-way mirror, and whatever’s behind them isn’t really shifter at all.
I clamp my lips tight together.
“Miller. Jones. Hold her,” Lenox says. The men move so quickly, my terror-numbed brain doesn’t have time to react. They seize my arms and legs.
“Open her mouth.” Smith tucks his taser under his armpit, kneels in front of me, digs his nails into my cheeks, and cracks my jaw open. His fingers taste like tobacco.
“Tilt her head back,” Lenox orders.
Smith forces my neck to bend backwards until my spine screams. Inside, my wolf shakes and whines.
The sound escapes my throat, and Smith sneers. “That’s right. Open up and drink. If you spit it out, I’m going to stick my cock in after to keep it down.” He nods at Lenox.
Lenox pours the contents of the cup down my throat. I gag, but before I can spew it up, Smith shoves my jaw shut and holds my mouth closed in a vise-like grip. I hack and choke, but I have no choice but to swallow. The drink is cold and bitter. It burns my nose when it comes back up.
For no reason, Smith violently jerks my head from side to side a few times before he shoves me back to the ground by my face and dusts his hands off. “Phase two?” he says to Lenox.
Lenox nods. “String her up,” he says and busies himself reorganizing his rucksack.
Again, Miller and Jones follow orders quickly like they’ve done this before. Like they’re trained. The other two men stand in position at the perimeter of the clearing, rifles aimed into the woods.
With arms hooked under my armpits, Miller and Jones drag me under a sycamore tree. They buckle a collar around my neck and restraints around my wrists, jerking the straps so tight that it almost crushes my throat and cuts off the feeling to my hands.
Then they run chains through the attached loops, hoist the chains over a branch and pull until I’m stretched almost past my full height. My arms are wrenched from my shoulder sockets, the collar biting into the underside of my jaw. I can’t breathe unless I balance on my toes, and if I sway, if I stumble, my air is cut off. I fight a wave of panic, struggling with everything in me to keep my balance.
I need my wolf.
Come. Shift. You have fangs. Claws. Please.
She flashes a picture into my brain—a small white wolf dangling from a collar, lifeless in mid-air, its neck snapped.
My toes dig into the dirt. The foul drink sloshes in my stomach, scoring my esophagus. I’m not going to die. I’m not going to give in to the fear.
Lenox and Smith come to stand in front of me, arms crossed, faces undisturbed. Clinical.
Smith raises the taser. Without thinking, I jerk my torso away and lose my footing. I gag as my toes scramble for purchase, and by the time I steady myself, blood is roaring in my ears. The men watch me impassively, Smith’s thin lips curving in amusement.
“You don’t like choking out, do you?” he asks. “You’re going to do what we say, aren’t you?”
I can’t speak. I can’t nod. I can only balance and gasp down as much air as I can.
Smith sneers. He wants a response. He wants me to bare my neck to him.
Lenox cuts in, cool and even. “Of course she is.” He reaches up and grabs me by the chin, bracing me in place, allowing me to suck down a decent breath. “Mari? You listening to me?” He squeezes my jaw. My wild gaze drops to his empty eyes. “Good girl,” he says. “Now, I want you to call your mate.”
My mate? Darragh? How?
“Yank his leash,” Lenox says as if he can read my mind. “Or—what do your people call it?” He snaps his finger. “Pull the reins? Is that how Quarry Pack puts it?”
I don’t know what he means.
“Call him through the bond,” Lenox spells out.
My head draws back of its own accord, away from his unyielding grasp. The leather cuts into my neck, but I can’t loosen his grip. I can feel my eyeballs bulging. They want Darragh? That’s what this is about?
“Now, please,” Lenox says.
Smith takes a step toward me. Lenox drops my chin. My full weight goes to my numb toes again, and my legs quake as I desperately try not to move, not to stumble.
I don’t know how to call Darragh, and I can’t tell Lenox. The collar is too tight, and I don’t have enough breath. Lenox stares at my face, blinking like an owl, like he knows I can’t speak, and he doesn’t care. I close my eyes.
Ringing his bell. That’s what our older mated couples call it.
I never have. Obviously. I don’t acknowledge that the bond exists. It was a lot of work to ignore it at first, but like a car alarm or a chirping fire detector, eventually, if it doesn’t drive you crazy, you tune it out.
I haven’t let myself notice it in years. I scurry past it like it’s a graveyard.
I can’t do what he’s asking. I don’t know how, and if I could, would I really call Darragh here? Could I do that?
Would he even come?
With every second that passes, my lungs get tighter and tighter. My head feels overstuffed, like it’s close to bursting. How long before I pass out? Before I strangle myself on this collar?
I don’t want to die.
I can ring his bell. A distant memory flickers at the corner of my fuzzy brain. The lodge at dinnertime. Darragh by the dais. Me by the kitchen. My fingers tangling in a bright, glowing brand-new bond.
I can do this. I can do whatever I have to do to survive.
And if he doesn’t come—
I have to try. I close my eyes, and for the first time in four years, I search for the bond. At first, all I hear is the pounding of my blood in my ears and the wild thumping of my heart. A flare of panic rises in my chest. Maybe it’s gone, atrophied, shriveled into nothing.
My wolf whines. She’s inched closer to the border between us, worrying at something. She’s got something. She wants me to check it out.
I’m scared.