Elowen's POV
Freya's eyes were unusually on me, staring at my skin. It seemed I couldn't get a break from all of the tension with Alpha Asher.
"You sure survived…" Her breath was heavy as she took my hands in hers. "Alpha Asher had stopped… too rare to be real…"
My fingers still quivered, and tears poured out of my ears.
I hardly let out tears, and that wasn't because my heart was too hardened to let emotions hit strongly at me—strong emotions that could pull my soul off her feet. She was pulled off after discovering Logan's betrayal.
"I… I was to be a kind of sacrifice?" My voice cracked.
Freya stepped back as though for her eyes to capture a full frame of me. And slowly, she came closer like a thread connected our eyes and that she was walking on it.
"Concerning what he said about a mate bond," she said. "If that's what it is, you know you can't refuse him, right?"
I froze. She gripped my arms, her face all eyes on me.
Mate.
I'd heard about this strong bond between werewolves that always came with a bizarre connection that always dismissed the fact that the male and female might not know each other.
But for a human like me?
"You know you wouldn't refuse if that was the case?"
The candles behind me quenched.
The gammas who stood around me, who had gotten me back into the room after the meeting with Alpha Asher and after he said "she's my mate", turned back to face the candle.
"Leave her," Freya said. "Leave. I'm here now."
The room had become too dark for me to see them, but I heard their footsteps and the bang of the door—the same bang before Logan's betrayal.
"Elowen, lie down." Her voice turned softer than it was during our first meeting.
I obliged.
She lit the candles again, and that same scent of herbs and smoke began to fill the room—the scent had always been from the candles after all. I found my body going soft, sleep forcing itself into my eyes.
I jerked up, closed and opened my eyes in sequence.
"You are here now." Her lips curved, but the smile never reached her eyes. "Alpha Asher owns you."
My breath ragged. The scent was like hands pressing me against the bed, also injecting me with needles that carried the fluid through my bloodstream.
"No one!" I shook my head. "No one owns me."
"So?"
"I've never been owned by anyone."
Perhaps Logan's giving me out for a price meant I was sold?
"I've been kidnapped by the pack." My fingers dug into the bedspread, I screamed. "He should let me go!"
This pack—the Moonlight pack. I'd only heard about it but had no knowledge. Such knowledge should be meant for werewolves, so I thought. How would I have known I would be in it?
As though my words caused a twist in Freya, her look layered up—not a thick texture, but tiny pieces of materials being placed on top of each other, each material a thought of hers.
"But what he said… you became his mate." She rubbed her palms on her eyelids.
"Never."
She drew closer to me. Her fingers touched my leg, and it sent a cold feeling through me. I jolted before keeping my leg in place. She smiled like that was intentional—expected.
"He was supposed to go on with the blood moon ritual." She sniffed in the air. "But he didn't."
"He—"
He'd looked at me almost the same way he did in this room, but deeper than that. There were many things about him—it wasn't just about the way he looked at me. The smell of blood replaced his scent. Not just the smell of blood as it came along with the memory of my parents, laid dead on the floor.
But what about that?
"Elowen."
My breath caught like I'd been pulled out from a nightmare. "Ahh."
"The blood moon ritual. He stopped without proceeding," she said.
"What about that?"
All I knew was that my life could have come to an end.
She got on her feet, her face all eyes on me, took slow steps until her fingers reached for my neck. I tilted my head, just a bit, breaking the smoothness of my breath.
She started grazing me with her fingers. "The ritual of seeping out your blood to cure his curse."
His curse…
The strange fur I noticed growing out of his skin, the suffocation I saw in his face, and the way he rushed out.
Everything began to take on a meaning.
"But he stopped." Her voice raised slightly, her eyes wide open like a mouth to swallow me whole. "Have an idea?"
He was standing so close to me, his eyes on my necklace. The last moment before he stepped back, the smell of blood which only seemed to be an illusion from my thoughts, changed—something else—a feeling I'd almost got from Logan, but never the same.
"I don't know."
She released her hold on me, her palms rubbed against her eyes again.
"Your eyes…"
"Do you remember him?" She asked, diverting my attention.
"Who?" My brows furrowed.
"Alpha Asher, do you remember him?" She gripped my arms tightly. "Do you? From your memories?"
"I don't know him."
"Think!" She pulled closer. "Your parents' death, everything! Think!"
"I… I can't remember." I struggled to pull her off me.
"Your memory is vague?" Her eyes fell on the necklace around my neck. "You refused to pull it off."
I didn't speak, just moved back from her. She was crazy.
I couldn't bear to pull off my necklace—the last thing I could ever do.
"It's the last piece of her," she said. "Poor Beatrice."
My eyebrows raised like a live wire touched me. "You knew her? You knew my parents?"
She went silent, and her palms didn't go for her eyes. Tears streaked her cheeks, but her jaw stayed rigid, as if her body fought itself. Was it grief? Guilt? Or something sharper—like fear?
"Maybe I knew them." She touched the necklace. "But that isn't important. Not now."
She left the bed, her face smiled as she approached the door.
"What then if not your knowledge of them…"
"Deciding your fate to stay in this room or not is more important." She opened the door.
"But… how do I decide that?"
She walked out.
"Freya!"
I heard footsteps, but no answer.
Soon, all that followed was silence, no footstep, almost as though the clock above the door had stopped. I pushed myself off the bed. Somehow, I'd been able to withstand the smell of the burning candles and just one of them was left. It already burned low.
I pushed the door open, and darkness covered my eyes. My eyes barely adjusted to see faintly, and I didn't see a gamma guarding the room. Nothing.
Three steps from the door, my heart began to race. I needed to get out of this place.
What if I didn't?
But then… that same scent that triggered the smell of blood, the smell of rain on grasses, came strongly to my nose.
My legs weakened like it was a drug acting against my body, and slowly, it crept up to all parts of me.
I heard faint footsteps—too faint that I'd thought it came from my imagination.
A soft pant, but also too faint.
Then… I staggered back—but too late. His body blocked the hallway, and his scent coiled around me, wrong and familiar all at once—the same scent from hours ago.
His eyes glowed, carving through the darkness.
"Elowen." My name was a growl. "Running already?"