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CHAPTER SIX

GRACE

“ Y aaah,” I scream, as I’m abruptly woken up and yanked from the abyss.

I’m being unceremoniously dumped in a cage when I come to, rolling on a concrete floor.

When I push away, hands shoot out and hold me down.

I wriggle, not able to put up much of a fight from sheer exhuation.

Something is being tied around my head, straps pulled tight against my skull.

My field of vision narrows into two large circles, the bottom half of my face free from whatever mask was placed on me.

Moments later, I’m collared and chained like the bitch in heat I am.

Then, the shadow is gone and my blurry eys see that it’s him, my stalker, my savior, and now it seems, my captor.

“Ugggh,” I groan, barely able to sit up as I pant.

“You’re so beautiful, bunny,” he chirps, as if he didn’t just locked me inside a metal cage like a dog.

No, not quite. As I slowly stand up, fighting nausea, I realize my cage is more like a cell, one that was made for a human, only it’s freestanding in the middle of the warehouse like it was ripped out of its former cellblock.

I turn away from my fox, and look out, and try to get a grasp of where we are.

Somehow, I’d fallen asleep in this freak’s arms, the fox masked alpha smiling down at me so sweetly as he bolts the lock.

He steps away, and just like I guessed, I’m in one of the warehouses.

But it’s nothing like the empty, rusted tombs I saw on the side of the road.

What I’m looking at is like a scene out of an active apocalypse.

Around a grand bonfire, alphas and betas circle a great flame under a hole in the ceiling where moonlight streams in.

They stomp and chant and dance, if I can call their jerking, grunting, thumping their painted chests, smacking the floor, and howling dancing at all.

There’s some type of purple colored drink sloshing around tin cans they take to the head and share with each other.

There are two circles, and the inner circle is wearing red masks.

Those men don’t carry a scent, so I now know the red-masked foxes and wolves are betas.

So the black is reserved for alphas, the outer circle that simply stands, unmoving, gazing up at the rising sun.

My sense of time is all messed up, but I almost think I’ve lost another day and not an hour or two in Leo’s arms. Maybe I did hit my head so hard during the crash, and then when I fell, I gave myself memory loss.

I shudder, trying to ball myself up as far away from the gate of the cage as I can from the grinning manic just staring at me.

His mask is gone now, and the rest of his face is more handsome than I care to admit, his cheeks carrying the hollow curvature of a high fashion model, eyelids turned down slightly at the corner.

And now with the full effect on me, I can’t maintain eye contact.

Those emerald eyes aren’t trying to pin me down, it’s like he can undress me and lay me bare

“What the hell?” I shout, jerking away from a skeletal white hand that appears from nowhere, reaching through the bars of my six by something longer prison cell, what I assume a standard cell size is.

I shake all over as the thing flashes me a gummy, toothless grin, sunken in features like that of a witch, hair a shock of white and their eyes steel gray and unseeing.

Just as I think I’m safe from being spirted away by some ghost, I pull away from the ghost of another touch, catching a glimpse of yet another skeletal figure before it retreats into the darkness.

And this one had teeth sharp enough that it could compete against a rate.

So two beings came after me. And I can hear the clattering of chains and thought I made out the impression of a collar on the snaggletoothed one.

Other caged omega maybe? I pray not because they look like they haven’t seen sunlight or eaten food in weeks.

They barely resemble people. The short glimpse I got of them.

“Don’t mind them,” the formerly fox-masked alphas says, clucking his tongue disapprovingly as he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Fang and Chain are harmless. Betas. They’re just curious and easily overwhelmed, so we tend to keep them chained away from the crowd.

You’re actually in their home, more or less.

But just temporarily. Soon, we’ll build you a proper nest.”

“Didn’t ask,” I whisper, preferring my nicknames Snaggletooth and Gums, and forcibly ignoring his promise to build me a nest.

When I don’t give him another reaction, my kidnappers sighs and slides down the bar, still watching me.

I sink down to the floor, and avoid looking at him.

To distract myself from the very realy possiblilty I might soon be killed, cooked, and eaten by some undiscovered remote island pack of cannibals, I decide to remove what’s left of my gel set.

My nail tech deserves some type of award.

I chip away at the edge of the bonding glue, just as gingerly as I climbed the hill to this city.

One by one, they all pop off, and I’m left with my natural stubby nails.

They aren’t the best to gouge out eyes with, but at least I don’t have to worry about ripping one of my nail beds off anymore.

I glance up, and when I notice Leo’s gone, somewhere in the crowd, I try to get the collar off.

It’s a thick black collar hooked to a light, compact black box—I assume it's a lock—that’s unreachable to me.

Even if I managed to twist it around, by the feel of it, I don’t think I stand a chance of unlocking it or breaking it without access to a tool. I slump in defeat, fuming silently.

“Hungry?” the alpha asks, who’s been silent the entire time I worked on my task, startling.

“No thank you,” I say, not sure why I suddenly so polite as I try not to stare at the plate full of… something burnt and leafy vegetables.

“Hog meat,” he says, as if he can read my mind. And sure enough, when I squint back at the fire, I see the large, carved up carcass of an enormous pig-shaped animal spinning around, it’s hollowed out tusks used as flasks by two coorning alphas who dance around.

The crowd’s thinned out enough so I can see more of what’s going on.

Maybe it’s just a lull seeing as many of the masked member of my captor’s pack are pouring things into their cans.

But I don’t want to understand what they’re doing, so I look away and back up, tentatively, at my alpha.

No, no! The alpha who took me. But he’s the devil I know.

So I find comfort in looking at him and not at how outrageously outnumbered I am.

“So it’s some kind of animal meat. I can live with that,” I murmur and take the plate through a slot in the door the alpha, my stalker, leaves open as he continues to stare at me like he’s smitten.

As I nibble on the surprisingly tasty meat and attempt at a salad, Gums peeks out from the darkness in the corner of the warehouse.

He grins at me with a gummy smile that will surely haunt my dreams as I drift off against my will, exhausted from the chase, knowing tomorrow will only bring new and stranger terrors.

I can’t go to sleep, I think, despite yawning and rubbing my eyes the second I think that.

“Leo!” a booming disembodied voice rudely wakes me up, what feels like seconds after I finally get to rest. “Did you bring the omega?”

“Leave her alone, Raphael,” the alpha who dragged me here says, then bears his fangs and growls at a massive shadow quickly crossing the thrashing drunks partying around the bonfire.

“So this is the Wilder girl you tried to hide from us, Leo,” a deep voice drawls with barely masked contempt that finally gets close enough to make out.

Ah, so he’s Leo… I think, unable to lift my eyes up and over to the other man.

Instead, I stare at his boated feet near the edge of my cage.

They’re in front of me, to my right, and something about his scent, his aura, it’s vicious.

And as cruel and crazed as Leo has shown himself to be, he hasn’t directed any of the crazy cruelty to me.

But this man, this alpha, Raphael, I fear he will turn every ounce of his fury onto me.

And I don’t even know what I could’ve possibly done to make him radiate hatred for me.

I focus back on the celebration again as they stand chest to chest, Leo and Raphael silently fueding with one another, if you can even call it that.

The smell of honey and berries is thick in the air, and I figure they’re sipping on crude wine and beer now, tin cans clinking like glasses as more betas and alphas join in.

But I can no longer ignore how, Leo and Raphael talk about me like I’m a piece of meat, like I’m not a living, breathing person they have chained up and collared in a damn cage.

“She’s fierce. A worthy pack princess and future,” Leo says, and his tone is defensive and a little tentative. How strange.

Raphael’s fist slams against my cage, and my eyes go wide when he pulls away. He left a dent in a metal bar. Holy shit!

“I don’t give a fuck if she’s fierce, loyal, or has the slickest cunt in the world, Leo. I will never accept a Wilder in my pack,” he grits out, and I go still.

“ Our pack,” Leo counters, but Raphael isn’t listening to him. “And yes, you will.”

It’s then that I force myself to look at him. And what I see leaves me stunned.

Raphael is sinfully sexy, and apparently, my sworn enemy, holding a grudge against my family.

This new, vengeful alpha is clutching his mask beside his leg, dressed in what appears to be black military fatigues, with thick black, steel-toed boots.

His hair is shoulder-length and raven-black.

He radiates power, like a feral animal that has assumed a human shape.

I gasp as a screaming skull tattoo stretches out on Raphael’s neck as he tips his chin.