Hero's Bride

by C. J. Scarlett

  “So, what is it about him? Is it the muscles? The bad boy image? The forbidden fruit of a professor?” Lana asked with a smirk and a tip of the emptying flask.

  What was it about Drake? It was one of those things where she never sat down to think about why it was she liked someone, why she felt attached to him. Certainly, with little crushes she could say someone was handsome or smart or had a good sense of humor. Alessia wouldn’t say that Drake excelled in any of those departments. And he pissed her off more often than he didn’t

  But something drew her in. Maybe it was the red string of fate like the Japanese said or all those frilly quotations about soulmates. She didn’t have to like someone to love them—not that she loved him. They weren’t there yet. But he occupied her thoughts so constantly she knew it was more than a crush; it had to be more than just lust. Especially since she’d slept with him, she got it out of her system, and she still managed to find herself wanting more. Even if it was just his arms holding her, she liked the idea of having him near her, the smell of him on her.

  “Jesus, I didn’t mean to make you flashback down romantic memory lane,” Lana said when she didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t really care all that much.”

  “Why does anyone like anyone?” Alessia finally said.

  “Oh fuck, I’m cutting you off. You’re at poetic drunk level.”

  “No. I just mean I think that’s why you know you like someone, right?” Alessia said. She was certainly rambling and the contents of the flask were the cause of that, she was sure, but she felt as though she was moving towards something profound. “Like, I could look at Erik and say I think the annoying way he plays devil’s advocate is endearing—”

  “So, there was some Erik action for you then,” Lana said with a smirk and a little too much excitement.

  “Can you shush?” Alessia said, stumbling forward a little bit to place a finger over her lips. “As I was saying. I can list all the qualities about Erik that I like and that sort of draw me to him. But I can’t list a single one for Drake.”

  “And that’s supposed to be a good thing?”

  “I still want him and I can’t pick out a formula of why. That means it’s spiritual and that it matters,” Alessia said.

  “If you say so.”

  Lana went back to rolling her eyes and throwing back her flask. Alessia knew she was right though. It was like a personal revelation for herself as well. She hadn’t seriously been considering Erik as an option, despite Lana’s teasing. They worked well together and recently he’d been on her good side more than he ever had been before. But that didn’t make them bedfellows or anything like that.

  Drake was a constant presence in her mind while Erik was a few blips of bright light that occasionally stole all her attention. It was interesting while it was there, but there was a bigger prize for her to focus on. She just needed some time alone with Drake. They’d been nothing but nonstop for weeks now and even while they were still at the college, their relationship hadn’t had time to breathe. It was a lot of tension just begging to boil over.

  “Well, time’s up for figuring out your shit, princess,” Lana said. “You jailbirds are going free tomorrow.”

  “What?” That woke Alessia up out of her trance very quickly. “What’s happening?”

  “It works better if you don’t know,” Lana said. “Or it hopefully will. Who knows? Maybe we’ll all be dead by this time tomorrow.”

  “Is that what the drink is for?”

  “There’s only one way to face the end of the world.”

  Alessia didn’t get any sleep after that. A mixture of alcohol swimming in her head and the anxiety that Lana had placed there. The plan was happening, whatever strange plan it was. Alessia wondered how the pieces would fit together in it all, she couldn’t see the grand design—if there was one—of whatever it was Lana tried to create for their great escape and revenge against James.

  Alessia, Erik, and Drake were pawns. That much was clear. She would be moved across this board however Lana and her cronies decided. Hell, they might even end up killing her at the end of all the action. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t at least fight for herself.

  She’d gotten this far in life, she was working on her doctorate, she wore down Drake, she managed to find him. She wasn’t nothing. These weren’t some earth-shattering achievements like Joan of Arc or Elizabeth II but for her, it meant that they built her into the woman she was now. She was an adult, she had a good head on her shoulders, and knew one thing—she didn’t want to die.

  So, whatever happened, she was getting out alive to call her mother and eat an entire pint of ice cream and then maybe run for president one day. The possibilities were endless. She just had to get out of this prison hellhole first.

  Chapter 8

  Whatever Lana’s original plan was, it had broken down profusely, that much was clear from how the day started. The first signs that something was going on was that breakfast didn’t come and Lana wasn’t there to greet her in the morning. Something had already begun, and Alessia was on guard. She was groggy, she had a headache, she refused to admit she was a little bit hungover in a jail cell of all places, but she quickly made herself ready to deal with whatever was coming.

  That was just it though. There was silence. There was nothing. It was like some episode of After People where they talked about how Earth would continue to spin without humans and all the weird stuff that would entail. Nobody was here and the sounds of distant footsteps couldn’t even be heard down the corridor. Something was off and Alessia wasn’t even necessarily sure it was off in her favor. If Lana had shared her plans, she could know if she was meant to panic or not.

  So instead, she did the one thing she hated more than anything else in the world: she sat there and she waited. Lana had told her that she would have to go along with whatever was happening. So, she did what she thought she was meant to do. She sat and listened to new sounds that she hadn’t noticed before, the drip of some far-off pipe, not quite tightened. There was the rattle of the heat which was, evidently, still working.

  It felt like she might be the only person in the world and it was after what easily could have been an hour that she realized there was a very real chance she had been played. Maybe Lana had decided to head out with her gang on her own. It would make sense. After all, it wasn’t like she and Alessia were necessarily good friends or that she warranted some kind of rescue attempt. Sharing a drink and some pop culture references didn’t exactly inspire a need to die for one another.

  So, what would her next move be? What would she do for herself to get free. And that was when the next thought she didn’t like came to her: she was helpless. She’d been at the mercy of Erik’s knowledge, then Diego’s, and now the promises of Lana.

  If she got out—when she got out—she would snuff that out while she could. Relying on others had gotten her absolutely nowhere so far.

  Why wait?

  Solid metal bars stood between her and freedom. She couldn’t do much about that. The keys to open the gate were off on the hip of someone who could be several counties away by now. She wasn’t versed at picking locks even if she could find an object suitable for that. She didn’t have the strength to bend them in any way to try to squeeze herself through.

  “This is going well so far,” she sighed.

  So, the master escape wasn’t exactly a thing. Meanwhile, God knew what was happening around outside her. Her friends could all be dead. Or maybe they’d left without her. Would Erik do that? Would Drake? She felt a chill up her spine. No. They wouldn’t leave her behind. If they weren’t here for her, that meant something was wrong. It just wasn’t time for that part of the plan yet.

  “Oh, come on!” she yelled and kicked into the wall and immediately regretted the action as pain sprang up from her toe all the way to her ankle. So apparently, that’s all she was good for, breaking her foot in the middle of a crisis and being left behind. “So glad I dropped the twenty grand on grad
school.”

  It was another twenty minutes of wallowing in self-pity before, suddenly, there were sounds. A crash echoed from somewhere down the hallway. Then there was a yell and she felt like Noah after he first found the fovea that brought the olive branch to him proving there was, in fact, life out behind his eyes.

  “Hello?” she called down the hallway. “What’s going on?”

  It was better to pretend she knew nothing over admitting her guilt. She could still play that card. She was still in this.

  “Calm down, princess,” Lana called from down the hall. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  She felt a weight lift off her shoulders. She hadn’t been left behind. She hadn’t been forgotten. She still had friends. But that didn’t alleviate the fact that she was still just at someone else’s mercy. That wasn’t exactly what she was hoping for. It was better than nothing though when Lana turned the corner with a jangle of the keys and a smirk on her face.

  “Say please.”

  Alessia glared and Lana left, putting the key in the lock and turning and it seemed like it would take forever. But when the door opened, something happened that she didn’t expect. Suddenly, she found a cloth in her face and the world went black around her just before she felt herself hit the floor.

  Chapter 9

  When Alessia woke, she was in another place entirely. She’d come to regard the dank and damp smell of her cell as her home. It had built up a familiarity she tried to avoid. She didn’t want that place to become her home. But she had no choice. After a certain amount of conditioning, the mind will do what it does. So, when she woke again, with only a vague and fuzzy memory of what transpired before she got out of the cell, without the familiar hard floor beneath her thin cot and the smells of a dungeon, she was alarmed.

  She opened her eyes to night air and felt grass beneath her face, tickling her skin and providing a somewhat soft pillow for her to rest her head. But it was wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be outside. And why was her head throbbing? Had she hit it? Was she drugged so bad? Would the chemicals that knocked her out cause lasting damage to her neurons or brain? As these questions built up, so did the energy inside her.

  She sprang up. That was a mistake. The headache doubled and her stomach turned over on itself.

  “Whoa there, killer,” said a voice she knew but didn’t have the wherewithal to place. The owner placed her hands on her shoulders and suddenly, she was hit with a familiar smell. Lana. “Calm down there a bit.”

  “You drugged me,” Alessia slurred out, falling back into Lana’s arms.

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” she said back, holding tight to Alessia’s shoulders and helping to steady her. Lana came around to kneel in front of Alessia, giving her full view of the woman who seemed a bit disheveled, a few bruises forming here and there, but for the most part fine. “You just breathed in some night-night gas.”

  “Said every kidnapper ever.”

  “Hush.”

  Alessia took in her surroundings. They were, in fact, on grass. They were out in some kind of wild. She’d hoped she’d wake in her apartment and find herself in the comfort of her own bed to the smell of coffee that had been magically set to brew. But instead, she was out in God knew where. Were they even still in California? Had she somehow been ferried away to some unknown part of the world? Was she ever going to see her friends or family again?

  Speaking of them…

  “Where is everyone?” Alessia asked, managing to shake off Lana’s guiding hands and sit of her own power.

  Lana’s face went grim and Alessia knew she wouldn’t like whatever was about to come out of the woman’s mouth. “This is the rendezvous point. My partners, Jack and Asher, have your boys. They’re meant to meet us here.”

  “‘Meant to’?”

  “Well obviously, they’re not here yet.”

  “And does that worry you?”

  “It’s not late enough for it to worry me.”

  Alessia looked around. She wanted to ask exactly how long ago they were supposed to have met up, but she decided it was best not to know exactly how late their companions were. Instead, she looked around. They were in a forested area and Lana had started a small fire. The familiar chill that came with California nights seeped into Alessia’s skin now that she was coming to completely. She shivered, slightly.

  “Don’t be a baby,” Lana said.

  “Easy for you to say when you are your own furnace,” Alessia snapped back.

  She had cultivated an odd sort of friendship with Lana but now she found herself a little bit more irritated with the woman in every conversation they had. Her snark never seemed to disappear and she dealt only in sarcasm. They were in the middle of nowhere, on the run from a shifter cabal and Lana made jokes about how their partners and fellow escapees were somehow nowhere to be found.

  “Do we have food at least?” Alessia asked, her stomach suddenly kicking up in the sounds of growls.

  “Jack and Asher are bringing it,” she said.

  “Of course they are.”

  “I could have easily left you back there to be James’ scapegoat for the escape,” Lana said, for once sounding truly irritated. “I almost did.”

  “Is that why it took so long?” Alessia snapped.

  Lana glared at her before getting up in a huff and walking a few feet away. Alessia wouldn’t let her be the angry one here. She played her like a fiddle, forced her around the dungeon base and Alessia had played her games. She just admitted to nearly leaving her behind and then drugging her, and was still keeping secrets. She wasn’t the one who needed to be storming off to take walks to blow off steam.

  She let Lana walk away and stared at the fire. She shuffled closer to it, wondering if Lana had breathed it into life. She had yet to truly see any of the shifters in action. She’d been witness to Drake’s transformation and flight as a dragon after they had sex. But the things they said dragons could do, breathe fire, have extreme strength. She had yet to see that.

  Not that shifters were there to be her entertainment or personal zoo.

  She shifted closer to the fire and stared at it, trying to find hints that it was somehow different from an ordinary fire, trying to find the signature that revealed it was Lana’s. There was nothing different about it. It burned at the wood all the same and put off waves of heat that Alessia just wanted to roll herself up in and sleep.

  But she had to stay awake. Erik and Drake and even Diego were out there somewhere. She’d feel a lot better about the whole situation if she could somehow know they were okay. Lana seemed so nonchalant and unconcerned. Even if she didn’t care for her partners in the breakout, they were responsible for the safety of people that Alessia greatly cared about.

  So she sat there, cold and shivering in the nighttime, glaring into the mirror of the fire in front of her while Lana stewed. The whole breakout from prison plan was less exciting than she thought. It was a lot more sitting and waiting than she expected and, when her adrenaline ran all over the place, it didn’t exactly make her feel any better.

  **

  Alessia hadn’t managed to fall asleep at all, which meant she was forced to endure the grueling hours of sitting and waiting for someone, or anyone to make their presence known and she wouldn’t feel so alone with nothing but Lana there and her foul mood. It made the waiting that much worse when she could feel the minutes into hours tick by.

  “I can hear you thinking,” Lana said.

  “At least one of us is.”

  “You certainly know how to be grateful.”

  “Grateful that you lied and drugged me and almost left me for dead?”

  “Princess, you don’t even know what ‘dead’ means to James if I hadn’t risked my ass to get you out of there,” she said. “You’d wish you were mangled in a car accident by the time he was done with you.”

  Alessia stayed quiet with her lips forced out into a pout. It seemed all she was lately was talked down to, whether it was from Drake or Lana or even
the few times Erik decided to tell her his opinions. She’d sat around in her cell and waited to be rescued only to find she very nearly wasn’t rescued at all and left as a punching bag for her capture to occupy himself with. She was completely at the mercy of people around her.

  And here she was again, sitting and waiting for someone to tell her what to do or give her some sort of orders.

  Well fuck that.

  “Where are you going?” Lana asked when she watched, with careful eyes, as Alessia stood up.

  “To have a look around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m sick of waiting around. Maybe I can meet them halfway.”

  “Do you know which direction they’re coming from? Do you know how to find your way back? Do you even know where you are?”

  But Alessia walked away, not interested in the frustrating things that Lana had to say. She could manage a bit of a hike in the woods without someone criticizing that as well. As Alessia moved closer to the edge of the forest, she could hear Lana calling after her, teasing her and calling her all sorts of names but she ignored her. She’d rather be attacked in the woods at this point than suffer having to watch Lana’s face do anymore smirks and sneers.

  Chapter 10

  They must be somewhere farther north because there was very little sign of the desert of southern California. Any dry, desert brush had been replaced with trees and things far too green to exist in the heat and sweltering dryness of the desert. There was a coolness here unlike the nights spent at school. She realized she must be very far from home. Especially when she looked up and saw the plethora of stars in the sky.

  There were points of light in every direction and some even formed together to create what seemed to be rivers in the darkness above. They were light, frothing places that had mists of stars and galaxies and all sorts of other things. Even if she was far from home and a little too scared out of her mind, this was gorgeous and beautiful and more than a little bit worth the stress and struggles that had brought her there.