Page 8

Chapter eight

Dirus Morales

By the time we made it to the village, I was famished. “Food.”

She led me to a restaurant and sat across from me. The waitress placed a menu in front of me and walked off. Odd, but it wasn’t uncommon for men to order for women. A place like this reeked of deeply rooted misogyny.

“What do you want to drink?”

She blinked as if she were taken aback. A light flush spread across her cheeks. “Can I have water?”

She was asking me for permission to have fucking water. This job couldn’t be over fast enough. There was only one problem.

Where there was one celestial witch, there was usually more. A witch’s affinity was pretty tightly bound to their familial lines. Protocol required me to search the pocket before I left. Since the blood was undoubtedly crossed over, that meant everyone was suspect. I couldn’t leave any omegas behind.

“Of course.” A growl built in my chest, startling the server walking back. I gave the server our drink order and a group of rowdy men came in. The women all noted every move the men made.

Astria didn’t even move her eyes, but I knew she was tracking them.

They walked past us to go to the corner booth, and one hung back to tell me, “Watch out man, that one is feral. She bit a man’s cock off a few weeks ago.”

She was in prison for mutilation, but that wasn’t anywhere near what I thought she did. I figured it was something stupid that the men were blowing out of proportion, because their prey dared to retaliate. Before I could control it, a deep laugh busted out of me. But her body language was tight and on alert.

“Is that true?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “He stuck it in my mouth.”

I laughed louder. I didn’t think I’d laughed like this since I was five-years-old. Before I became an orphan. “You heard the lady. Don’t stick it in her mouth, and you don’t have to worry about anything.”

They murmured and glared at me. “Traitor.”

“That’s not blending in,” she scolded me. “We talked about this.”

“That’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I wish I could have seen it.” These assholes needed to be humbled.

“You’re a strange man.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I violated one of your kind.”

“Suffer no delusions. Having a cock doesn’t make me one of them. They aren’t my kind.” I nodded to the pissants, whispering in terror because this tiny woman had the gall to stick up for herself. “I’m not scared of you. I’ll punt you across this diner.”

“Then why didn’t you just punt me a couple of nights ago?”

She was the exact opposite of what a celestial witch was supposed to be.

And I liked that about her. She wasn’t a prim and proper princess dressed in gold and unable to stand on her own two feet. No, she was nothing like the Celestial back home.

“Fair enough.” I grinned. “What do you want to eat?”

I shocked her again and her mouth fell open. “I’m allowed to order too?”

“Shut your trap or you’ll catch flies.”

Her mouth snapped shut hard enough that her teeth clinked. She opened her tote bag and riffled through it. Her lips twisted as if she was thinking about something. “Nothing.”

She hadn’t been fed in the two days that I knew of. Hell, one of the two things she asked about was food.

I grabbed her purse and held her back with one hand when she tried to come at me. I saw the coin bag she’d been looking through.

“Why don’t you want to eat?”

The men across the way all stared at us, so I gave her the bag back, so that she’d sit down and they wouldn’t pass out.

“I haven’t been home in almost a month. I’m sure my husband found the money I was hiding for groceries and blew it all.”

“Husband?” It was stupid to stutter. She’d already said all women were sold at age twelve. But for some reason, I was sure that as a celestial witch, she was exempt. Omegas were too precious to sell to a single man, much less one of these idiots.

But this wasn’t back home, where being a celestial was a golden ticket.

She nodded. “My baby needs this. Not me.”

She hadn’t eaten in days, and she was worried about a baby. She herself was a baby. In another world she would never have a want go unmet, let alone a need.

Suspicion tugged at my mind. How the girl in the prison affected her more than anything else that had happened. How she disassociated from the young girl being ‘broken in’.

“Is that who the second seat is for? Your daughter,” I asked quietly. She nodded slowly. “Okay.”

I tried to ignore the protective instincts clawing up my throat. To roar that I would protect her and her daughter for anyone. I did it all the time. I wasn’t in the habit of giving these witches what they wanted. But my eyes couldn’t help but go over her thin frame. She had plenty of money to give into her body’s needs, but she refused to take care of another.

Like an omega was supposed to do. And an alpha was supposed to protect them. This wasn’t right.

“What can I get for you?” The waitress didn’t spare Astria a glance, assuming she wasn’t eating.

“One of everything,” I told her, and she scurried off.

“Do werewolves have high calorie requirements? I read somewhere that the heavy increase in metabolism–” She stopped talking when the men shot her a glare. She never looked at them, but she felt it.

Because she was the victim, no matter what they said about how she was hostile and violent. Dangerous. She was exactly what they made her into, and they couldn’t handle it. All she was doing was trying to survive.

“That’s why you’re such a sorry excuse for a woman. What business do you have reading books?” one of the morons in the corner said.

She gave a resigned sigh.

“That’s why she’s been marked,” another man commented

She shook her hair as if to hide the still raw brand running along her left jaw. I assumed it was her proverbial scarlet A.

“Why would she need to know that?” the last one agreed.

“What does the brand mean?” I asked her.

Her tense shoulders tightened further, but she held her head and looked me in the eye to answer. “Feral. It’s so that other men are warned about how volatile I am.”

Yeah, she’s the volatile one.

“I assume it’s an uncommon brand.”

“I’m the only one who currently wears it.”

“Yes. Wolves require a lot of calories to be at full capacity.”

She smiled, but it was sad. “Sorry. It was wrong of me to ask.”

“No. It wasn’t,” I answered loudly. Shaming women for curiosity and seeking knowledge made it easier to control people who don’t know any better. It was a specific control tactic.

Plates poured out of the kitchen.

“Eat something.” I pushed a couple of plates to her. “I need you strong.”

She shook her head no. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. Eat.”

She picked at a plate, but I watched how much she ate. “More.”

“I don’t need more. It’ll go straight to my hips.”

“Good.” She needed meat on her bones. The instinct to hand feed her became unbearable.

She sighed. “I don’t need another battle to fight.”

I stopped stuffing my face long enough to level my gaze at her. “Do you know why they want you to think that?”

“It keeps us weakened.”

“Very good. It’s also because they are marrying children, and are annoyed that their child brides get older, bear babies, and start looking and acting like women when they age. I’m not in the habit of listening to pedophiles, and neither should you.” I slid another plate to her. “Right now, you’re under my ‘control’, right? I need a woman. Not a child. Tell them you were taking orders.”

She started actually eating, and I was satisfied once she ate a couple of plates worth of food. She picked slowly in a practiced way. Like she’d been starved countless times, and she knew how to pace herself. It had been much longer than two days.

“How long has it been?” I asked.

“A few weeks.”

I assumed she wasn’t eating great beforehand. She didn’t have the proper fat on her to sustain that long of a period. If she wasn’t a celestial witch, she’d probably be dead.

I sat back when I was done and watched her eat. It satisfied my inner instincts to provide for the omega, and I didn’t think I’d ever felt that before. Then again, my omega didn’t need me. She had droves of wolves looking out for her. She never needed anything from me but blood to spill.

A growl of approval rumbled in my chest, despite my best attempt to squash it. She startled and visibly fought the instinct to toss the fork to the side. Instead, she stared me down.

The waitresses behind the counter stopped and watched in alarm. They were waiting for me to strike her. I leaned back and made a show of lifting my hands above my head. Astria fingers tightened on the fork, ready to use it as a weapon if she needed to. But the other women scurried out of the room with yelps.

Her eyes narrowed on me and stayed locked as I finished the movement to put my hands behind my head. The whole interaction told me a lot.

“Your husband hates you.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Maybe.” But it was clear the goal here was to break women of their wills. Turn them into perfect housewives that would obey. A goal he hadn’t succeeded with, probably not for a lack of trying.

Funny thing was, that was what I liked about her. I hoped I would get the chance to kill that fucker before we left.

“I’m done.”

“No, you aren’t,” I disagreed. “Take your time. We have things to talk about, anyway. We should start on this bullshit task.”

“You think that it’s fake?” She asked, but her tone said she did too.

“I think he tried to kill me outright, and when he had me in a jail cell with dozens of guns pointing at the cage, he changed his mind.”

“I think that was more of a trap for me than you. My own special brand of a death sentence.”

“That doesn’t make much sense. A public execution, something gruesome, would help keep the other women from getting out of line.”

“They’ve tried.” She blinked. “I think at this point, if anything can get rid of me, they would be happy.”

“They’ve tried?” I lifted an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Several times. Something always goes wrong.”

“Be more specific.”

“The execution machines always malfunction.” She shrugged. “Guillotine stops just above my head. The axe shatters on my neck. They think my magic does it. That’s why I’m never allowed to take the collar off. They think my magic is seeping out to protect me.”

“You don’t think so.”

“When my magic tries to work, it shocks me harder. It didn’t happen during any of those times. But it’s possible some of my sisters covered me, not that anyone would dare to say the words out loud.”

“So you think they were hoping I could kill you?”

“It goes along with why you would be in my cell.”

“And they weren’t happy when we didn’t resort to violence.”

That would make sense.

She snorted. “We?”

“I was just encouraging honesty.” I grinned at her.

She smiled in return, amused by my words. “I guess you’re right.”

“Where should we start looking for this traitor?”

“The women would most likely know. We’re always in the shadows watching, and we tell each other everything. If one knows, we all do.”

“But not you.”

“I was in the box.”

I didn’t know what the box was, but it didn’t take a genius to take a healthy guess. Isolation and starvation, at the least, who knew what else at the worst? The question I should have asked sat on the tip of my tongue, but a part of me didn’t want a play-by-play.

I needed to keep my cool and complete the mission. Too many people were counting on me to keep a level head. I’d get pissed off after all my people were taken care of. Maybe I’d ask her then.

Maybe.

“So, how do we get them to talk?”

“ We don’t.” She glanced at the sun through the window. “At three, most of the women take their kids to the park. I can go see what gossip I’ve missed.”

Two hours. That gave me time to meet up with my team and get some surveillance set up. She was right. The women would never tell me anything, but they also wouldn’t suspect I’ve got eyes and ears in the park.

“Sounds good.”