Page 9

I came around slowly. First, there were only voices in the darkness, voices I didn’t recognize, talking about—about something I couldn’t grasp.

My eyelids were heavy, and it took effort to lift them.

When I did, the world was out of focus; I could see only that I was somewhere dark.

I could see figures moving around me, smell the rancid stink of them: stale sweat and tobacco ash.

That was what brought the memory flooding back. I was alone on the bridge—until I wasn’t. I was trapped, struggling; there was a chemical-smelling cloth over my nose and mouth—

“Good morning, sunshine.” The voice came from my blind side, making me flinch.

“Where the hell am I?” I croaked, trying and failing to stand up.

I was still woozy from whatever they’d used to knock me out, and as I rose unsteadily to my feet, I realized that my hands were tied behind my back, and my captor was forced to step into my field of vision in order to catch me before I fell.

He wasn’t as big as most Alphas I’d seen, but no one could argue he wasn’t one.

Authority rolled off him in waves, and his smirk said he knew it.

He was younger than I would imagine such an Alpha to be, with dirty blonde hair and only the suggestion of lines around his mouth.

He smelled better than his hunters, but not by much, and beneath it I could smell the same fresh earth that was common to all Arbor wolves.

“You’re with us,” he said, lowering me back into the rough-hewn chair I’d been sitting in. “That’s all that matters.”

He smiled as he looked down at me, trussed up and barely conscious. All right. So he was one of those males. The ones who liked their women bound and helpless. Not to be cowed, I raised my head, my good eye meeting his gaze.

“Lowell Axton, I presume.”

Lowell Axton grinned. His canines were long and sharp, like they never fully shifted back from his wolf’s, and I shivered.

“She’s smart as well as pretty,” he said. “We’ve caught ourselves a prize.”

He was clearly enjoying our little hostage situation, and I was swiftly moving from terrified to pissed off. If they were going to do something awful to me, the least they could do was warn me first. The cryptic shit was boring.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

“Surely you’ve heard about our little enterprise. Humans are willing to pay an impressive sum for shifter brides, you know. It’s all over the islands, much to my irritation.”

Ah, shit. If I got out of this alive, I was going to have to tell Caleb he was right. I hated it when Caleb was right. I especially hated it when his being right involved me getting kidnapped and sold off by a bunch of asshole shifters who hated every member of my Pack.

“Oh, I’ve heard about it,” I said. “I just thought it was so cartoonishly evil that it couldn’t be real.”

Axton’s expression darkened at that, his eyes glinting in the meager light.

“It’s easy to call other people evil when you’re sipping out of a silver spoon,” he snarled.

“Silver is from Argent. I’m a Lapine girl,” I pointed out because I had absolutely no self-preservation instincts. This time, however, my jab didn’t land. That mocking smile was back in place, and Axton’s voice was once smoother and even when he said,

“I’m very aware of that, Julia.”

I froze—how did he know my name?

“Don’t look so surprised,” he continued. “It’s well known that the Lapine Alpha’s sister has a cursed eye—a bad omen, you know.”

“You don’t think it’s stupid to kidnap the Alpha’s sister?

” I said, grasping at the offered straw.

“I’m sure you remember what happened last time Arbor threatened someone he loved.

” Admittedly, they hadn’t known at the time that Alyssa was Caleb’s mate, or that Jack and Emmy were his children, but surely Arbor wouldn’t risk another conflict with Lapine over one defective female.

“It’s a risk, yes,” Axton admitted, “but I’m willing to bet that your scent, and the scent of my hunters, will have faded by the time anyone thinks to look for you. For the price a female with Alpha blood will fetch? It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

He was right about one thing: no one was going to look for me.

Caleb wasn’t expecting me back until late afternoon, and Ethan was hardly going to come looking for me after the fight we’d had.

He’d assume, correctly, that I didn’t want to stay on his stupid island any longer and had gone home.

If anything, I could console myself with the thought that if I did get sold off to some human and was never seen again, he’d feel really fucking bad about it.

“So what?” I asked Axton. “Your predecessor started a war with a couple of toddlers, and you’ve decided to commit to the bit? Arbor’s the Bad Pack now?”

Axton only sighed.

“Connor Slade was a stupid man with very little vision,” he started, clearly ramping up to some kind of villain monologue.

“He took us to war over a slight, and he got what he deserved. The rest of us, however, had to live with the consequences of his incompetence. With half our fighting males dead, we’ve found ourselves with a surplus of females—their mates, their daughters, and so on—who are no longer of worth to the Pack. ”

Yep. There it was.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said, and Axton’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re very mouthy for a female,” he observed, and I smiled.

“So I’ve been told.”

“We don’t suffer females like that on Arbor.”

“No, I imagine it’s the females doing the suffering.”

The back of his hand cracked against my cheekbone, hard enough to throw me off balance. Without my hands to catch me, the wind was knocked from my lungs as I hit the ground. Stars danced before my eyes, and when they cleared, I was confronted by Axton’s dirt-encrusted feet.

“Didn’t need a demonstration, but okay,” I slurred.

When he crouched down, I flinched, expecting another blow, but he only looked at me with cold contempt in his eyes.

“The only reason we spared your life, witch, is because those stupid, soft humans think it makes you valuable, and I’m not going to disabuse them of the notion.

” Axton hissed. I wanted to deny it, but he’d never believe me over his men, and I didn’t know how much good it would do me anyway.

Arbor might hate witches, but the more valuable I was to them, the more likely I was to survive.

“Run out of smart remarks, have you?” Axton sneered. “Good. Get her ready.”

It took my addled brain a moment to realize that the order wasn’t directed at me.

Axton’s hideous feet disappeared from my limited vision, and I heard a door open, then slam shut, leaving me alone with whoever was tasked with preparing me for sale.

I expected another gnarled hunter to loom over me, but all I heard was shuffling from the corner of the room.

“You go.” The voice was a whisper, but definitely female.

“I’m scared,” another voice whispered back.

“She’s tied up. What’s she going to do to you?” The third voice was clearly the one in charge, not bothering to whisper, and there was the sound of uneven footsteps, as though someone had been pushed.

“She’s a witch,” the first voice insisted.

“She’s literally lying with her face in the dirt right now,” I pointed out, and someone gasped. “If I had the power to stop it, do you really think I’d let your Alpha backhand me?”

There was a long, loaded silence before two brand-new sets of feet came into view, and I was hoisted back into a sitting position.

This time, I faced a woman who appeared to be in her mid-fifties—she might have been younger, but life in Arbor wasn’t easy for women—with a stern expression.

She was dressed conservatively, her hair pulled back into a neat bun, and she observed me like a piece of meat about to be taken to market, which I supposed I was.

I could only see one of the two younger women: the one on my good side.

She must have been around my age, shorter and stockier than I was, with brown hair pulled into the same neat bun.

The two girls on either side of me hauled me to my feet, and I was surprised to find that I was able to stand, just.

“Off,” snapped the older woman, gesturing to my dress.

“You’re going to have to untie me if you want—” I started, but then I felt the coldness of a blade against my skin, and my pretty party dress was cut from my body.

I watched it fall to the ground in tatters, blinking back absurd tears.

I’d been kidnapped and beaten, and I was about to be sold to the highest bidder; I wasn’t about to be defeated by the loss of my favorite dress.

“If you’re going to act like males, why even bother sending you?” I growled. “Axton should have just left me to the hunters.”

“The hunters like to sample the goods before they go on sale,” the woman said matter-of-factly. ”Are you sure you’d still prefer them?”

The very thought of it sent shivers down my spine, and I could only shake my head, speechless, for once.

I stayed quiet as the three women bustled around the room, which I now realized was not a dank cave or the dungeon of some castle but rather the main room of a cottage not so different from my own.

The structure was clearly made of wood rather than stone, but it featured the same modest kitchenette and a dining table pushed to the side in favor of a large wooden tub, into which I was unceremoniously dumped.

“Does this place not have running water?” I asked before I could stop myself, and one of the younger women—the one with the brown bun—looked at me as if I were immensely stupid.

“There’s a shower upstairs, but you can’t wash yourself, so what’s the point? Rosie, get me the shampoo.”

The third woman was clearly the lowest-ranking, and as I looked at her properly, I realized she was barely a woman at all.

Fourteen, maybe fifteen at a push, she was small and round-faced, with huge blue eyes and wispy blonde curls that tumbled from her attempt at the austere Arbor bun.

Grabbing an unmarked bottle, she began washing my hair, rinsing the suds with cups of water in the same way Caleb used to do for me when I was little.

It might have been soothing if not for the ache in my shoulders and the burn at my wrists where they were tied behind my back.

While Rosie worked on my hair, the other two scrubbed the dirt and grass stains from my body. Their touch was neither careful nor kind, and I flinched when the older woman shoved my legs apart, tutting as she cleaned away the remnants of my tryst with Ethan.

Was that really just a few hours ago? It felt like a completely different world. What I wouldn’t give for my biggest problem now to be that Ethan didn’t want me as his mate.

When the older woman was satisfied with my cleanliness, I was allowed out of the bath and brusquely rubbed down with a towel before being shoved back onto my chair. I thought they’d just leave me there, but the older woman was still scowling at me as if I’d failed to meet her expectations.

“Fetch some salve for her face, before it starts to swell,” she snapped, and Rosie scuttled off to rummage in a bag next to the tub.

“Aw, thanks,” I said. “I didn’t think you cared.”

“I don’t care about you, Witch. The less marked you are, the more you’ll fetch. The more you fetch, the less likely it is that one of our daughters gets sold next.”

It was a bleak way to view the world, and I almost felt sorry for her—until she turned her head to snap at the little one, Rosie.

“In the brown pot, idiot!”

“S-sorry, Ma’am,” Rosie stammered, her hands shaking as she reached for the correct pot.

She brought it over with trembling hands, struggling to unscrew the lid.

I tried to give her an encouraging smile, but it only made her drop the lid.

Her fingers were clumsy but gentle as she applied the strong, herbal-smelling salve, and my cheek grew cool beneath it.

“Thank you, Rosie,” I said softly. She didn’t quite smile, but a little of the terror dropped from her expression as she continued to rub the salve into my skin.

Once my blooming bruises had been tended to, and my hair was once again dry and shining, I received an approving nod.

“Those humans will pay through the nose for you,” the older woman declared. “Someone will be along to collect you in an hour or so.”

With that, I was dismissed. She turned to go, the two young women at her heels, and I was so taken aback that I could only blink after her for a few seconds before I found my voice.

“Hey!” I called. “Hey, you didn’t give me anything to wear.”

All three women stopped by the door, looking back at me with three very different expressions. Rosie’s big blue eyes were pitying. The older woman looked at me as if I were profoundly stupid, but it was the other young woman who spoke, her voice full of gleeful spite:

“How does a man know what he’s buying if he can’t see all of you?”