Page 18 of Pack Kasen, Part 1 (Caught #1)

17

KAT

S nap .

Cold pressure compresses my throat.

I flutter my eyes open, my vision hazy, and so weak, I couldn’t lift my head if I tried.

A chain hangs from my throat, and the Wolf King, crouched beside me, holds the end of it.

I’m flat on my back again, in a position so vulnerable it’s not even funny. One I should get up and do something about.

And I will.

Soon.

I couldn’t even eat the sandwich or drink the water that materialized beside me before. Both are still on the other side of the open cage doors. My stomach is hollow and my mouth is dry, but nothing could tempt me to drink or eat.

I can’t seem to want to move.

“What do you want?” Is it just in my head that my words are slurred?

His face is a mask but lines bracket penetrating amber eyes. “To show you civility.”

It’s hilarious that he’s the one talking about civility when he’s barely stopped snarling and growling at me.

One time, shortly after he left my cage, a furious howl rang out, and even though I’d never heard him howl before, I knew it was him.

Civilized people don’t howl.

I’d been alarmed, as any normal person would be, but I’d shaken off my unease—and my fear—the way I have most of the things that scared me in the past.

If my head wasn’t pounding and I could shove aside this desire to close my eyes and sleep forever, I might remind him that his men abducted me from one of the best colleges in the country, where I was graduating top of my class.

He peers over his shoulder. “Finan.”

When he rises, there’s absolutely nothing between me and the open cage door.

Now would be an excellent time to leap to my feet and bolt to freedom.

But when even blinking requires effort, all I can do is watch Finan’s approach.

Finan bends, presumably to pick me up.

Just before he touches me, a vibrating, hair-raising growl fills my cage.

There’s no question who’s responsible for it.

Finan freezes. “Aren?”

“Get out of the way, you’re moving too slow,” the Wolf King growls.

Finan raises an eyebrow, but he moves aside, and I suck in a breath when the Wolf King scoops me up from the floor and carries me out of the cage.

I’m not heavy. Not sure I’m light either, but I feel utterly weightless in his arms, and I’m sure it’s just in my head, but I am almost positive he sniffs my hair.

I brace myself for him to complain about me smelling when he’s the one who stuck me in a cage without a shower.

The Wolf King doesn’t complain. I must be more out of it than I thought because I swear his arms tighten around me, like he’s trying to draw me even closer to his chest. But that can’t be right. He wants me dead.

Then he takes a step out of the cage, and I stop thinking about how strange it feels to be in his arms and how his wild forest scent is so distracting.

My wolf fills my head with the sound of her unhappy growls. They’re faint, barely audible at all, and she is not happy that I haven’t been speaking to her, but I couldn’t. Not when I was in the cage where, minute by minute, it felt like she was the one fading.

Or dying.

Swallowing hard, I try not to cry.

Foster care was the worst. The absolute worst. But I always had her. To have her back again makes me want to cry with happiness and punch the Wolf King in the face for taking her away from me.

“Can you stand?” the jackass growls at me like I just took a shit on his foot.

He picked me up off the floor when he could have let Finan do it, and now he’s acting like I inconvenienced him.

“Of course I can stand,” I say calmly.

Lips twisting in a rage that makes no sense to me, he sets me down on my feet and yanks his hands off me so fast that I stumble.

Finan catches and steadies me.

I nod, grateful I don’t have to pick myself off the floor. I might not trust him, especially since I haven’t forgotten he knocked me unconscious before, but I have a feeling I would be dead without him. I certainly wouldn’t have had any water.

The Wolf King snarls.

Finan yanks his hands off me, and I quietly sigh as I stick my hand out to brace myself on the wall before I can crash to the floor. Again. Because of him .

I feel the rumble of annoyance from my wolf.

Yes, I tell my wolf, he is a jackass of epic proportions. We’ll definitely kill him if we ever get a chance.

But that chance might never come.

I’m no longer in the cage that silenced my wolf, but when I try to change, there’s a block between human me and wolf me. I have a feeling that block is because of the chain the Wolf King has wrapped around his thick wrist.

It’s stopping me from changing.

The more I try to force it, the more my head pounds and my wolf whines, like it’s hurting her the way it’s hurting me.

The Wolf King stalks toward the closed cabin door, and since he’s holding the chain wrapped around my throat, I have no choice but to follow or be dragged.

And I don’t want to be dragged the way I’d pull my doll by her long brown hair and her head would thump against each stair and…

I stop, confused.

What stairs?

What doll?

I grew up in an apartment. A perfectly ordinary two-bedroom apartment with my mom and dad in a quiet suburb of the city. Because we lived on the fifth floor, we always rode the elevator up.

The house with the basement came after, and I didn’t have a doll then. I had?—

“ Move ,” the Wolf King snarls at me.

I stumble when I nearly fall, catching myself on the doorframe.

I don’t snarl or growl. He’s the uncivilized one here. Not me.

He flings the cabin door open and strides out.

It’s a struggle to hide my shock when sunlight hits my face as I emerge into a world I never could have expected.