Page 11 of Betrayed Mate (Rejected Fate Trilogy #1)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

M y mouth opened, and I froze, trying to process what I was seeing. The vampire lay on his stomach against the rocky embankment with Ryker straddling his waist, his arms looped through Simon’s so the vampire couldn’t move them. He submerged Simon’s head in the shallow yet gushing water while the vampire kicked and bucked, trying to throw Ryker off without any success.

I dashed toward them. “What are you doing ?” My voice came out way higher than I intended, but I had never seen anyone being tortured before. Dad never used these tactics.

“Finding out everything he knows.” Ryker didn’t bother looking my way, completely fixed on his task.

“How can he tell you anything if he’s dead?” I reached their side and clutched Ryker’s arm, trying to yank him off Simon. “Let him breathe.”

“He’s a vampire, Ember.” Ryker’s head lifted while Simon continued to struggle. “He can stay underwater longer than us, you know that. And believe me, he won’t tell us shit if I don’t torture him.” The sheen over his eyes had thickened as if the moon was reflecting on his irises even though the real moon had risen behind him.

My hand dropped, and I stumbled back. How was that even possible?

At that moment, Simon’s thrusts lost some force, so Ryker fisted the hair on the back of his head and lifted.

Water sluiced from Simon’s face as he coughed and took huge gasps of air. He sputtered, “Why are you doing this to me? Just kill me and get it over with.”

“I’m not going to kill anyone right now.” Ryker clenched his jaw. “Stop deflecting. I want to know who attacked the vampires tonight.”

“If I told you, you would definitely kill me.” Simon’s face twisted with disgust.

Without hesitation, Ryker pressed Simon’s face into the water once again.

The vampire thrashed wildly, and my heart broke. This man had just endured an attack that had ended in the deaths of his friends, if not his family, and he was being tortured by the person they’d called for help against their attackers.

This time, I wrapped both hands around Ryker’s arm and yanked. “You’re no better than the ones who attacked our packs and the vampires!” I hated that my strength hadn’t completely returned. Still, even without tapping into my still-weak magic, I’d managed to yank hard enough for Ryker to lean in my direction.

“Maybe not,” he spat, and the veins in his arm bulged as he straightened. “But it’s the only way we’re going to get answers from him.”

This wasn’t right. Why would anyone want to share information with us after being treated so horribly? “You didn’t even try to talk to him! How can you possibly know that?” Back at the vampire houses, Gage and Xander had already detained Simon because he’d tried to run away. Then Ryker had showed up and immediately treated Simon like a prisoner and not a victim.

“Just trust me.” He narrowed his eyes at me.

I scoffed bitterly. Trust him. I didn’t trust anyone but myself and Briar. That had been a recent and hard lesson that would stick with me forever.

His brows rose ever so slightly like he hadn’t expected that reaction.

Good. Screw him. I wouldn’t tuck my tail between my legs, nor could I be forced to obey him because he wasn’t my alpha.

His eyes glowed, enhancing the unusual sheen, and I knew what he was doing—calling the rest of his pack.

If I were going to attempt something, I needed to do it now and quickly before the others arrived. This time, I yanked at my wolf, borrowing some of her strength. I’d hoped I wouldn’t need to tap into my magic yet since neither my human nor my animal side was at full strength, but I couldn’t allow Ryker to continue torturing somebody.

Before I could change my mind, I raised my arms, causing his eyes to widen. He shifted his grasp, but before he could fight off my attack, I shoved him in the shoulder. He wasn’t prepared for my strength, expecting me to be weak based on my previous attempts to take him down, and he wasn’t able to offset the motion.

He grunted as his side hit the ground, and I used my leg to remove his from Simon’s waist.

“Stop,” he rasped, rolling over to his knees.

The vampire lifted his head from the water and crawled away. He coughed as he tried to stand, but Ryker spun around and kicked him in the back. The vampire fell forward onto his knees again, his hands splashing as he used the riverbed to keep his face out of the water.

I’d hoped that my sudden burst of strength would’ve had a larger impact on Ryker, but I should’ve known better. He was a strong wolf after all.

I jumped over Simon, and Ryker turned toward me and raised his arms to stop my momentum, so I changed my approach and tapped into my wolf again. As his hands gripped my waist, I punched him in the jaw.

His head snapped sideways, and he stumbled back.

“Run!” I exclaimed and threw all my weight onto Ryker, sending him sprawling.

My body jerked as I landed on him, and a few rocks scattered at the impact.

Footsteps pounded behind us, and an overly sweet-scented breeze curled past me as a few drops of water hit my arm.

A little bit of the tension left my body. Simon had gotten away.

My relief was short-lived. Ryker’s massive hands grasped my arms and shoved me off him. My body flew through the air before I landed hard on my side. Sharp pain radiated down my shoulder as Ryker climbed to his feet.

His face was flushed, and his nostrils flared as he sniffed the air. “You have no fucking clue what you’ve done. You better hope like hell I can find him.” Though vampires ran quicker than us, they couldn’t sustain their speed for long periods, and their overly sweet smell lingered in the air longer than that of other supernaturals.

“I stopped you from torturing someone who just lost everything .” My voice cracked on the last word. I understood exactly how Simon had to be feeling. He’d lost everyone in that house like I’d lost my pack, and I still was barely functioning despite not having been tortured right afterward.

I stood, ignoring the ache in my shoulder, refusing to allow him to continue to look down his nose at me.

Bastard.

I’d never been able to stand the alphaholes in other packs who seemed to believe they were superior to not only their packmates but all others as well. They had an arrogance that caused anger to boil inside them, which was one reason that my pack had kept to ourselves as much as possible.

Ryker didn’t even flinch, but his face set into deep grooves, conveying his disgust. “You know nothing,” he snapped and vanished between two large oak trees, chasing the vampire.

My heart ached, and I fisted my hands at my sides. Other than causing frustration and anger, his reaction shouldn’t affect me, so feeling anything else should not be possible.

Unprocessed grief. That was what had to be making my emotions all crazy, and it clearly had nothing to do with him . However, I needed to keep the emotions at bay until I located my sister. That was the reason I was here with Ryker; I had to remember that.

A cold, heavy knot dropped into my stomach. What if he decided I wasn’t worth keeping around and I had to locate my sister on my own? I knew, without a doubt, after what I’d just witnessed, that going it alone could be a death sentence for not only me but my sister too.

I was about to go after him when Gage, Kendric, and Xander jogged into view.

All three wore varying degrees of a frown, with Kendric’s scowl being by far the deepest. He gestured to me and said, “Xander, stay with her while Gage and I go after Ryker.”

Xander’s head tilted back. “What? Why me? I should be part of the hunt.”

“That right there is why.” Gage shook his head and didn’t slow down even a step, rushing past me to follow Simon and Ryker’s trail. “You don’t know how to keep your mouth shut.”

Huffing, Xander stopped in front of me and pursed his lips. “I guess I get babysitting duty.”

I lifted my chin, ignoring the burn of the muscles in my injured shoulder. “I don’t need babysitting. That’s insulting.”

He arched a brow. “Says the woman who ran while her pack got murdered, lost her sister, almost drowned, and now pissed off the one alpha who is the most driven to find her missing sister’s captors.”

His words echoed the same fear that sat uncomfortably within me. I hated feeling exposed and worthless, but ever since I’d been rejected by my fated mate in front of hundreds of shifters, I seemed to keep finding myself in worse and worse situations…something no true alpha would experience. Not that my sister or I had a choice now of who would lead the two of us. I was stronger than her, and my wolf would never be able to submit to hers even if she made the most sense as a leader.

Still, I refused to appear weaker than I already did to all of them. “I couldn’t stand by and let him torture someone like that. It’s not right . That vampire almost got killed after surviving an attack on his nest. How can you even try to justify that?”

He straightened, but his shoulders drooped. “I can’t, but I don’t have much choice right now with how Ryker’s acting. I keep hoping he’ll snap out of this and go back to normal.”

My hands relaxed, and I tilted my head. “Normal?"

“Yeah. He’s only been like this since our pack—” He cut himself off as his face twisted into what could only be described as agony.

He didn’t need to finish the statement because my heart shattered all over again. I knew exactly what he was going to say because he looked like I imagined I did whenever I thought about my own pack. “He wasn’t like this before?” I arched a brow, daring him to contradict me. Even before the royal and protector packs were slaughtered, there’d been so many stories about the way the Grimstone pack handled threats. They had no issues with torturing, starving, cage fighting, and beating individuals to get information or make a point, which was what I’d just witnessed from Ryker.

Xander’s head jerked back. “You’d know if I were lying. Why would you even ask that?”

He was right. There was no hint of sulfur in the air…but none of this made sense to me. However, my end goal was unchanged—find my sister. “It doesn’t matter. We just need to start searching for answers again instead of wasting time hunting down a vampire.”

Every second that passed could put my sister’s life more at risk. My only comfort was that the connection was still present. If we didn’t get a lead soon, I’d have to shift into my wolf and focus purely on our connection to locate her. It would be long and tedious with the connection so faint, but it might be better than what we had, which was nothing.

“The one thing we’ve learned since that day is once Ryker is set on something, there’s no deterring him. He’ll alpha-will us the second we don’t listen, making things even more tense.”

The more I learned about Ryker, the more it validated my opinion of him. He was an arrogant know-it-all who could cost me locating my sister. But whoever I was up against had slaughtered two packs and a massive vampire nest, which made it clear that going alone would essentially be a death sentence for me.

Maybe they were using my sister to lure me somewhere so they could finish us both off.

“I made the right call.” I crossed my arms, ignoring my aching shoulder. “You can’t just torture someone like that, especially after what he witnessed. It’s inhumane.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Ryker is trying to get justice for our pack, and I can’t blame him at all.”

Huffing, I dropped my arms. Talking to him was a waste of energy, and I didn’t have much to spare. Ryker was his alpha, so even if Xander agreed with me, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. “So we’re just stuck here until they’ve captured Simon or they tire of searching for him?” If they didn’t get their shit together, I’d have to go off alone and hope for the best.

“Yes, because if we ”—he pointed at himself and then me—“keep interfering, it’s going to make things take longer, so just sit tight and stop causing problems.”

Problems? Yes, me saving someone from torture was such an issue .

Not bothering to tell Xander where I was heading, I spun on my heels and marched back to the vehicle. There was no point in standing there, and now that the adrenaline from my outburst was wearing off, I realized how much energy I’d used. My legs were harder to lift with every step, but I gritted my teeth and kept going.

I took a deep breath and glanced at the now-dark sky. Another day gone with no leads on Briar. My heart ached, and the chill in my chest seemed to grow colder. Only the deep ache left reminded me that something pleasant used to be there. Even Briar’s faint link reminded me that I could lose everyone I loved. She was just out of reach.

A vise tightened around my heart, squeezing to the point that I thought it would implode.

My blood tingled through my body, and my head screamed that something strange and different was hiding about fifty feet ahead of me deep within the woods. But that didn’t make sense. There were no sounds, smells, or other signs that someone was there.

The hair on the nape of my neck stood up. Someone was watching me.

My heart began to race, and I snapped my head in the direction of a sudden noise, searching for the culprit.