Page 15 of Ensnared by the Pack: The Complete Series (Destined Realms #3)

AUDREY

I tossed this way and that on a dark ocean of agony, my whole body on fire. Sharp pain sliced through my face and chest while throbbing pain radiated through the rest of me. I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t, wasn’t even sure if I could turn thought into action, and was dragged deeper into the painful darkness.

A moment later — or was that an eternity? — I bobbed back up to the surface. Voices murmured around me and the agony in my body burned stronger. I strained again to open my eyes. I couldn’t just lie there. That monster was after me. It might have eaten Merrick, but that didn’t mean I was off the menu. But the painful darkness dragged me back under again.

Another eternal moment and a wave of power threatened to crush me. I hadn’t even clawed my way back to the surface. Sterling had to be furious to radiate everything he had and pound into my subconscious like that, which meant I was in danger. I had to wake up.

Wake up. Open your eyes. Run.

But the more I struggled, the deeper the darkness dragged me down. The pain and fear and knowledge that I’d been so stupid was too much. Better to curl into the darkness and hide from everything. At least in the darkness I wasn’t weak, wasn’t so pathetic that my life was considered worthless by my pack.

A trickle of cold seeped into the darkness.

I was so pathetic my fated mate didn’t even want me.

The cold grew, pushing the pain to the edge of my senses. But instead of something flooding into the hole carved inside me, the cold just kept pushing, making the hole bigger and bigger, leaving me frozen and achingly hollow.

Of course my fated mate wouldn’t want me. I was a shifter who couldn’t shift. I was so weak my wolf nature refused to wake or even acknowledge me. Who wanted to be stuck with someone like that for the rest of his life? No one. I wasn’t good for anything. Sterling had been telling me I was useless from the moment I moved into his house, and Royce had said the same when he’d refuted our fated mate bond.

Except the fated mating call hadn’t been real. Royce and Sterling had used magic to manipulate me.

But that thought only made my insides twist with shame. I should have known fate would never bond me with someone as powerful as Royce, and I certainly should have known that even if by some miracle the fated mating call had been real, Royce would never have accepted me.

And now I had who-knew-how-many months suffering this painful, hollow ache of the incomplete bond until it went away.

Except a part of me feared it wouldn’t go away.

It felt too powerful. A frozen emptiness that threatened to completely hollow me out into a lifeless shell. It felt locked within my cells, imprinted in my soul, a permanent reminder of how foolish I’d been.

To think I could be loved, be free, be anything other than myself.

I was weak and stupid and the only reason I was alive was because I’d gotten lucky and Merrick had stumbled across Sterling’s ritual before that monster could eat me.

Oh, God. That monster!

I woke with a start, my pulse pounding along with my head… and my face… my whole body, really. I was one enormous aching bruise. But strangely not much more than that when, given the injuries I’d had when I’d raced blindly into the forest, I should have been in agony.

The icy hollowness, however, was stronger than before, threatening to overwhelm me, so perhaps I was just too numb and heartbroken to notice how much pain I was in.

The rich scent of wood smoke and something else, something deeply masculine, hung in the air, wrapping around my senses, and while I had a strange feeling it should be comforting me, it couldn’t penetrate the icy emptiness consuming me.

I dragged my senses away from the scent and opened my eyes. I lay on my side, covered with a soft blanket, facing a plain white wall and a simple, large window. Outside I could see sunlight streaming through a large leafy tree branch and beyond that brilliant blue sky.

None of which gave me any clue as to where I was. I wasn’t in my room or anywhere in Merrick’s house — or rather Sterling’s house now that he’d murdered his father — since the window frame didn’t match any I was familiar with.

Something creaked behind me and my pulse leaped into a rapid beat again. I wasn’t alone. Wherever I was, someone was watching me.

Please don’t let it be Royce or Sterling… or that monster. I didn’t know why they’d have kept me alive and in a bed, when they’d tried to serve me up to that thing last night. I would have expected them to lock me in a damp basement to await whatever they planned. But being comfortable in a bed could easily be another way to torture me before putting me back on the menu.

I glanced over my shoulder. A large, intimidating, beautiful man sat in a chair between me and the door, watching me with moss green eyes. His expression was hard but that only seemed to accentuate his rugged, masculine beauty.

His shoulders were easily twice as broad as mine and his biceps probably the size of my thighs. Without a doubt he was a foot to a foot and a half taller than me, and I was about average height for a woman. His brown hair had been shaved at the sides but left long on top and twisted into a thick braid that reached the nape of his neck, making him look like a Medieval warrior. Add to that at least a day’s worth of scruff on his square jaw along with the enormous feral energy radiating from him, and it was obvious he was a powerful, dangerous wolf shifter.

Relief flickered through me, but the feeling barely burst to life before being consumed with fear. Just because I didn’t know this man, didn’t mean I wasn’t still at Sterling and Royce’s mercy. This man could be a mercenary hired to keep the pack in line now that Merrick was dead, or worse, to keep me in line until it was time to sacrifice me.