Eliza's POV
I woke as if someone had dragged knives across my skin. Pain flared along my back in hot, bright lines—each lash a brand on my skin, searing hot like pepper had been rubbed on the wound .The ground beneath me was coarse and gritty; sand bit into my palms when I forced myself to push up. I blinked against a single, meager shaft of light that slitted in somewhere high above, and for a moment I thought the ceiling was closing in. A dungeon wide and cavernous and the air carried the earthy smell of sweat and sand.
Could things get any worse? The question slammed against my skull, answered only by the steady, frightening rhythm of my own breath. If I had stayed with my husband maybe he would have changed at. Maybe. At least I won't be in this mess if I had gone back to Xavier.The words felt ridiculous as I thought them.
I let my eyelids fall and sank back onto the rough floor. The cloth that had been tucked uselessly over me smelled faintly of herbs and smoke; someone had tried to cover my nakedness . I curled my knees to my chest and let my head rest against the grit. For a terrible second I wanted only to close my eyes and not open them again.
Then a sound scraped at the edges of the darkness—long, keening, more a memory than a noise. A wolf's howl, far and close all at once, threaded through the stone. My heart stuttered. There was no wolf here. No trees, no moonlight, only damp stone and the feel of cold through the soles of my feet. But the sound lodged inside me; it vibrated on the same frequency as the ache in my back.
I scanned the floor with a slow, paranoid movement. Nothing. Only shadows shifting like breathing things. Perhaps I imagined it. Perhaps the fever from blood loss and the shock of the whipping had unearthed things in my head—things that pretended to be prophetic.
I closed my eyes again because my lids felt too heavy to keep open. Then I saw it: not with my eyes but like a photograph conjured behind my forehead—the image of a wolf, enormous and wild, its snout flecked with dark, wet stains. The sight was so vivid I could taste copper on my tongue. I opened my mouth to hiss, to tell myself it was only a dream, and something odd happened. My teeth itched.
It was a small irritation at first—the sort of animal itch one gets when wearing wool for too long; an oddness in the gums that made my jaw feel foreign. I licked my lips to quell it, and the motion felt clumsy, like the actions of someone learning their hands for the first time. Then a pressure rose from somewhere low and terrible in my chest, as if something inside me were stretching, forcing its way out.
The first howl escaped me without consent. It tore from my throat like a thing alive, resonant and unfamiliar, and it rattled in my ribs. I could feel my body answering; a trembling moved through my bones and muscle, not like shivering but more like the preparation for a leap. My fingers spasmed, claws of pain or instinct; my vision sharpened until the grain of the stone in front of me became a map of ridges and valleys. Sounds that had been dull and distant snapped into focus—the drip of water somewhere beyond the wall, the distant murmur of voices, the soft scuff of fur against wood.
Panic lanced me. I tried to pull myself upright and found the motion easier than it should have been, as if weight had shifted away from me. My breath lengthened in a rhythm too deep for the small human chest I remembered having. I looked at my hands. For a heartbeat I thought they were the same pale, trembling hands I had known, only to see, beneath the skin, the suggestion of dark fur. Hairs rose along my forearms like a rash. My nails felt wrong—too long, too pointed. I clenched them and the motion felt like closing a paw.
The wolf-image from earlier wasn't gone. It roared through me like a revelation, and with it came another thing: a voice not my own, not with words at first but with feeling. Rage. Possession. Possessive hunger braided with a fierce, obscene protectiveness aimed at no one and everyone. It pricked at the part of me that still remembered the warmth of a hand that had held me once—a dangerous mix that made me want to flee and to fight in the same heartbeat.
I rolled onto my side, the movement too sleek, the muscles moving with a lithe confidence I did not recognize. The sand ground into my cheek, but I barely felt the grit now; sensation had reordered itself. The world had acquired edges that ached with meaning. I could tell, with a clarity that frightened me, that someone had been in the room earlier—another set of footprints near the threshold, a smear of muddy blood by the door. I could smell the person's fear, a copper scent clipped with sweat, and beneath that—something else—marrow and smoke and the scent of the Alpha.
The name of the Alpha came like a bell toll in my mind, layered by memory and the wolf's insistence. His presence—tall, unavoidable, dangerous—hung at the edges of my awareness like a threat and a promise. The wolf inside me grinned with teeth I did not entirely own and curled toward that knowledge, as if it were a hearth.
I tried to speak. My voice came out lower, guttural, threaded with something that wasn't language so much as resonance. It startled me. Whoever or whatever had touched me here—whoever had brought me to this damned place—had left more than lash marks.
A scrape by the door made me flinch. The sound was careful, measured; it belonged to a human trying to be ghostly. Footsteps registered as sharp notes in the orchestra of my senses; the person hesitated in the frame of light. Through the slit of the doorway I saw a boot, then the collar of a heavy coat, then a face I recognized like a bruise: my brother-in-law, his expression blurred between hunger and guilt. A man used to taking what he wanted and excusing himself afterward.
The wolf I didn't know inside me flared, a living thing thrumming at the edges of my control. It wanted to pounce, to tear down the door and bite and claim. My human mind wanted to crawl backward into anonymity and die. The two were a war in me so violent it made my head spin.
He stepped closer, and as he did, the low voltage of his scent—blood and arousal and the musk of wolves—washed over me. Something inside him reacted, too; the way his jaw clenched, the way his fingers flexed as if they remembered a whip rather than a touch. He took in my face, the opened sores along my back, the wildness in my eyes, and for a split second his look softened. Then it hardened, calculating. He smiled without humour.
"Good," he said. His voice sharp "Awake at last."