Page 23 of Pack Kasen, Part 1 (Caught #1)

22

KAT

T he door swings open without warning.

I’m back to sitting cross-legged in the middle of the cage. My wolf is once again a presence I barely feel but I desperately miss, and I am trying not to think of all the damage this cage is doing to her.

I’m afraid, but I am trying very hard not to show it in front of the Wolf King because he seems like the sort of person who would snatch up your weaknesses, hoard them, and use them against you when you’re at your weakest.

He will never see me at my weakest.

“So you’re here to finish off what your girlfriend started,” I say, trying not to stare at the plate he’s carried in with him. It smells delicious, probably because I can’t remember the last time I ate.

“ Ex -girlfriend.” The door slams shut behind him. “I need answers.”

The emphasis surprises me, as does the mound of food he’s decided he wanted to bring along for this next round of interrogation. It’s nothing less than cruel. He knows I’ve barely eaten, and he’s here to rub it in my face.

I’ve been to the house now, so I know how many places he could have sat to eat his meal before coming here. He’d have had to walk past the armchairs in front of the fire, and the large wooden dining table where some of the pack were playing cards.

Why must he eat his delicious smelling food here ?

“How’s your throat?” he asks, stabbing his fork into a piece of steak.

It feels scratchy, sore, and it hurts to swallow.

“It’s fine,” I lie.

If I was anywhere but here, I’d have healed by now. The metal in the chain and the metal in this cage steals my strength, prevents me from changing into a wolf, and slows my ability to heal to a crawl.

His gaze drops. “It’s still badly bruised.”

“Someone hanging you by a chain from a deck railing will do that. Was this going anywhere?”

He studies me then, and all I can hear as he observes me is the growling of my stomach that I couldn’t silence even if I wanted to.

“Are you ever not calm?”

“I’ve found it serves no purpose in letting people provoke me into a response.” Robert taught me the value of keeping quiet until I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

He rarely took on fosters, but the ones he did were troubled, prone to violence, and had been bounced from more homes than any other. The ones who would age out of the system and probably wind up on the streets or dead.

The lost causes, some of the social workers and foster carers would say when they didn’t realize I could hear them.

But I wasn’t lost. I knew my way, even if no one else did.

People don’t listen to an angry person, Robert would say. They see you bristling with rage and they think they are better than you.

“Don’t give them that power over you,” he said.

And he was right.

There’s power in silence, in letting people work to figure you out while not knowing the first thing about you. In deciding who to let in and who to shut out.

Anger shuts out everyone. It chases away the people who might have stayed.

“And how has that worked out for you?” the Wolf King asks between bites.

“Given I’m not howling my frustrations into the sky when things piss me off, I imagine my blood pressure is quite low.”

He lifts his fork to his mouth, though not before I glimpse one corner of his lips twitch in something so subtle it could almost be a smile. “Howling is quite liberating. You should try it sometime.”

He looks at me as he chews, head slightly tilted, eyeing me as if I’m not a bug under a microscope the way he viewed me before.

No, that’s not right, Kat. He looked at you with so much disgust it’s like you were a dead thing he stepped in.

I’m not sure what changed but there’s a level of interest in his gaze that wasn’t there before and I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.

“Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” His soft admission surprises me almost as much as it must surprise him, because he freezes for a split second.

I’m not the least bit surprised when his expression hardens. Suddenly he’s back to being the same coldly furious Wolf King he is when he isn’t growling or snarling at me.

“You’re a feral, and we don’t let ferals live.”

“No, you have decided I am a feral and are too stubborn to admit you’re wrong. And you are wrong. Even a seven-year-old boy who snuck into my room knew I was no threat. What’s your excuse?”

He eats another bite and slowly chews before swallowing. This is a punishment. Or it’s torture. A little of both from the sounds my stomach is making.

Behind him, the door swings open, and my gaze clashes with Finan, who seems surprised to find the Wolf King eating his lunch here. He steps into the room and stands off to the side.

“There is no record of you from before college,” the Wolf King says.

I make my face a blank slate.

I should have known he would dig more into my past and learn something I have spent the last four years fighting to keep hidden.

Namely, that I don’t have a past.

Once I became Kat Meadows, I let my old self go and I’ve worked so fucking hard to forget her. Only in my dreams and nightmares does the terrified little girl I used to be still exist, and no amount of scrubbing can dislodge her from my memories.

I hate her because she was so weak, and I refuse to be weak anymore.

I won’t.

His gaze is watchful, but since I know to always keep my guard up around him, I merely cock my head. “Was that a question or an observation?”

“For someone threatened with death, you show no sense of self preservation. Tell me what I want to know, and maybe I’ll let you go.”

He seems like the type who wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than everything.

I’d be cracking open so many secrets and so many vulnerabilities for him to mock, laugh at, and use against me.

Some things are worth dying for. My secrets are one of them. They’ve been used against me before. I don’t intend to let it happen again.

“No.”

“Then I will kill you,” he threatens.

I get up and I walk up to the bars of my cage, far closer to the metal—and the man on the other side of it—than I’d like to be.

My brief time out of the cage has at least restored some strength. Not all, but I no longer feel like one hard shove and I’ll topple over. It won’t last. The weakness will return, and if I stay here any longer, my wolf will die. That’s what this cage has been doing to me all this time: killing me. That piece of knowledge makes it easier to lift my chin and say something that could get me killed.

I speak quietly but firmly. “One day, you will learn that you were wrong about me. If I’m still alive when that happens, no matter what you say, no matter what you offer me, even if you were to drop to your knees and beg for my forgiveness, I never will.”

He doesn’t speak for several seconds.

I’ve had years to learn how to wipe all expression—and emotion—from my face.

He is just as good at masking his expression. Maybe even better.

What does he see when he looks at me? He had to have heard the ring of truth in my voice.

Without saying a word, he sinks into a crouch and places his half-finished meal on the floor and walks away.

He stops at the door, his back to me. “I am never wrong.”

The door slams shut after he leaves, and I turn to look at Finan.

He nods once, a subtle motion, and I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean, but it seems like I did something right? Who knows?

Finan walks out, leaving me alone with a half-finished steak dinner on a plate just outside the bars of my cage.

My stomach growls at me.

I wait for the sound of their footsteps to fade, then I sink to my heels and carefully drag the plate under the bars without touching them.

I eat with my fingers.

I shovel food in my mouth, barely chewing, never slowing until the plate is empty and my stomach is aching. For the first time in what feels like forever, I’m not starving. Only then do I sprawl onto my back, rest a hand on my bulging gut and stare up at the bars of my cage.

“You’re becoming an animal, Kat,” I whisper.

He’s reducing me to the girl I was before that I’ve worked so hard to forget.

Trash Girl.

All this time, he’s made me feel like I’m an animal.

It takes a lot for me to hate. It’s easier to walk away and not waste my time on the people who treat me like crap.

But hatred burns in my gut for the Wolf King.

Not just for what he has done to me.

For what he has done to my wolf.