I kept my mouth shut and stared at the space over his shoulder.
“No? Well, how about how you managed to get stabbed with a silvered knife, Jade? I can only assume you were fighting with other shifters. Worse, the police were called!” I caught his glare from the corner of my eye as he swept it over the five of us. “Are you too stupid to understand the concept of keeping a low profile – or too arrogant to think it applies to you?”
None of us answered, and he slapped his hand down on the desk, the sound reverberating around the room.
“I will not have the sanctity of this academy jeopardised because you five can’t control yourselves.”
“With respect, Alpha, it wasn’t–” I stared, but that was as far as I got.
“If you dare tell me it wasn’t your fault…” He glared at me. “We have an understanding with the owner of The Wolf and Sheep, and part of that understanding is that we will not bring trouble to their door, and never in front of the local mundane population. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t confine all of you to the academy until the day you graduate.”
“We saw Brad,” I blurted.
“You what?”
I took a breath. “We saw Brad, Laura… and Ryan.”
“They were waiting in ambush for you?” Blake asked with a frown.
“Kind of… Well, not exactly. We knew Ryan would be there.” I took the coward’s way out and stared at my feet. “We went to meet him. I mean, I did. I went to meet him.”
I was still staring at my feet, so I couldn’t see if Blake’s face had turned purple with rage, but I could hear his sharp intake of breath, and his teeth grinding together.
“And how long have you been in contact with him?”
I winced. I’d really hoped we would avoid that question.
“He came to visit me before the start of the semester,” I confessed. I gnawed my lip. We hadn’t even gotten to the bad part yet.
“How long exactly,” Blake said, his voice carefully measured, “did you intend to keep this from me?”
“We were going to tell you this morning,” I said. “I swear.”
“Really? And I’m expected to believe you suddenly had a change of heart right before you were caught?”
Cam spoke up.
“No, Alpha Blake. We had a change of heart when we realised Brad had bitten a mundane.”
The blood drained from Blake’s face, and I didn’t know if he was going to faint, shift, murder us, or all three. His voice came out quiet.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded. “We all smelled him.”
“This could have been prevented,” he said, and locked eyes with me. I flinched and dropped my gaze to the floor. “Ryan is a wanted fugitive. If you had reported him the moment you saw him – as the law requires – there is every chance he and the others would have been captured before anyone was hurt.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t even close to good enough! This isn’t a game, we’re talking about people’s lives here!”
“I know, I–”
“I don’t want to hear it. You are all banned from leaving the academy for the rest of the semester, until you remember where your loyalties lay.”
“But Alpha–” I started, and the others’ protests mingled with mine.
“Silence!” We all shut up immediately. “One more sound out of any of you, and you’ll spend the rest of the semester in the dungeons. In fact, you can spend the weekend there thinking over the implications of keeping something like this from me.”
“Please, Alpha Blake,” I said. “The others didn’t know about any of this until last night. Punish me, that’s fair, but they don’t deserve it.”
“I knew,” Cam said.
“Me, too,” Leo said.
“We all did.”
Fuck’s sake, this wasn’t the time to be playing Spartacus.
“I don’t give a damn who knew what. Your actions have consequences. There is no telling how many lives have been ruined because of your recklessness – not to mention you could have exposed our entire community. And if you can’t give me your personal guarantee that this will never happen again, I will see to it that you don’t leave that dungeon before you turn fifty.”
Chapter Eleven
“Why this one?” I asked, freezing in the doorway.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Fletcher said, sounding anything but. “Is this cell not good enough for you? Get in there before I tell Alpha Blake that you’re defying his orders – again.”
I shuffled into the stone room, with its lone barred cell at the back. I thought I’d seen the last of this damned place. This was the exact cell I’d been locked in when I was first bitten, and again when I tried to escape. It was about my least favourite place in the entire academy. I was pretty sure that was why Fletcher had brought me here. There were half a dozen other cells in the academy’s dungeon, but he’d chosen this one for me.
He marched across the room and pulled open the cell door with a particular glee. Yeah, he knew what he was doing, alright. But that didn’t mean I was going to let him see he was getting to me. I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, and walked into the cell without sparing him so much as a glance.
“Give me your wrist,” he commanded.
I turned, and my heart sank as I saw what he was holding – a single cuff, about twice the size of mine, and engraved with dozens more symbols. Wordlessly, I lifted my arm, and he clamped the suppressor cuff around it.
“Just in case you were getting any ideas about using your magic to unlock your door and go for a wander.”
His lips curled around the word ‘magic’, leaving no doubt about what he thought of the druid magic pumping through my system. As if there ever had been. He’d despised me for a freak from the day he’d first met me, and truth be told, I hadn’t exactly been falling over myself trying to change his mind. But why the hell should I? He was my instructor. He was supposed to give everyone a fair shot. Like fair existed at Fur ‘n’ Fang.
“I always suspected you’d end up back here. And one day soon, you’re going to push it too far, and end up in front of the alpha pack facing Alpha Draeven’s judgement.”
When he realised he wasn’t going to get a reaction, he closed the door and shut me in.
“Enjoy your stay. Maybe it will teach you some respect for your betters.”
With that, he turned on his heel, left the room, and locked that door, too. As if I could even get out of this cell without my magic, never mind out of the room. And I knew, because I’d spent a whole lot of time trying to do exactly that two years ago.
Silence settled over me like a smog, heavy and oppressive, and I couldn’t quite make out the shadows in the corners. Even my sense of smell was muted. The suppressor cuff didn’t just cut off my magic, it muted all my powers – my ability to shift, my heightened senses, everything. Between the thick stone walls surrounding me, and the cuff’s wards, I couldn’t make out a single sound outside of the room. I was utterly isolated.
I moved to the far corner of my cell and sank to the floor with a heavy sigh. I knew from my last little stay that this was the least draughty corner of the cell, and I could see the door from here. The cell was solid stone on three sides, and a row of thick, reinforced vertical bars created a fourth side. It meant that anyone could walk in and see what I was doing at a glance. It meant I could see them at a glance, too.
The rest of the room was barren, except for a single chair set off to one side. Last year, Underwood had conjured some furniture for our magic lessons, but that was long gone, and everything was coated in a layer of grime. They’d really let this place go since we’d given up hiding my lessons down here.
All in all, it wasn’t going to be the most comfortable day of my life. On the other hand, it wasn’t going to be the least, either. Hell, at least this time I didn’t think I was losing my mind, and I’d stopped trying to fight what I was.
…But had I, really? The cure ha
dn’t been far from my mind since Cauldwell had dumped his revelation on me, and part of me wanted to jump through the first portal I could find and beg him to give it to me right away. But I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could just go waltzing back into my old life like nothing had even happened. I had friends here. I had Cam.
And I had a rage spell whispering to me constantly.
I groaned and shoved the thought aside. This was not the place to be thinking about it. Besides, I had a whole lot of other things to torment myself with – like the fact my friends were all locked in cages, too, because Blake had some stupid grudge against me. I mean, sure, I probably shouldn’t have kept Ryan’s reappearance from him, but what was I supposed to do? Ryan was my friend, and they’d done a pretty good job of screwing up his life when they dragged him here the first time. I wasn’t going to let that happen again – or worse, let Draeven throw him in front of the alpha pack to be torn limb from limb. It was barbaric.
In fact, the whole shifter judicial system was barbaric, and archaic, and forty kinds of fucked up. Dean was almost killed last year for sabotaging the academy. But if he hadn’t done it, his father and alpha would have killed him. The only reason he survived was because I managed to convince Draeven to let me represent him – something that wasn’t even allowed in shifter society, because I wasn’t of alpha blood. If I hadn’t found some crazy loophole, Dean would be rotting in the ground by now. Even then, I’d had to agree to forfeit my life if I lost the case. What the hell kind of messed up society calls that justice?
Shit, maybe I should just take the cure and get out while I still could. Better than being locked in a cage for trying to save a friend’s life – a friend who was as much a victim as I was. Ryan needed help, not Draeven’s warped idea of justice.
I paced around the cell, counting the laps off in my head. I was in the low hundreds when I thought about Mei’s words. Had Ryan known that Brad was biting mundanes? He couldn’t have. He went through hell after Kelsey bit him – we all did. Surely he’d never stand by and watch that same hell be inflicted on another innocent person? I didn’t care what their agenda was, I couldn’t see him sacrificing other people in its name. And yet, there was no denying that guy had been bitten. I wished I’d convinced Ryan to give me his number. I needed to know if he knew what Brad was doing. And I needed to know if there were others.
The day wore on, and I alternated between sitting and pacing. I tried to keep my thoughts away from the darker places in my mind, but there wasn’t much else to distract me down here. I’d already memorised the entire room during my first year stay.
Somewhere during the day – there was no clock down here – Fletcher brought me an unpleasant looking lunch, dumped it in my cell, gloated a while, and then left me alone again. I was almost sad to see him go. Almost.
Dinner was a repeat, though I was hungry enough by then not to complain, and I felt the temperature drop as evening fell over the academy. My meal finished, I left the tray by the cage door, and settled back in the corner.
Nothing to do now but nothing.
*
It was a quiet night. Too quiet. I was used to the hushed sounds of the academy as I fell asleep in my dorm – other students talking in low voices several rooms along, the wind blowing outside the window, the whisper of nocturnal wildlife scurrying around the grounds. None of that penetrated my cell, and sleep was a long time coming, but eventually it came, and morning followed.
I stretched out my aching muscles – the solid stone floor didn’t make for the best mattress in my human form – and paced round the cell, easing out the kinks in my spine.
But if Blake thought a bad night’s sleep was enough to make me regret standing by a friend, then he was mistaken. Even if that friend helped attack innocent people? I shook the thought right out of my head. Ryan didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. He was a better man than that, and that was all there was to it. Brad and Laura had done it behind his back.
I skulked irritably back to my corner and closed my eyes. Might as well nap until someone showed up with food. It wasn’t like there was anything more pressing to do.
The thought had barely crossed my mind when I heard a key scraping in the lock. I sniffed, but I couldn’t smell whatever they were bringing me this morning. Stupid muted senses. I didn’t bother opening my eyes. Maybe if Fletcher thought I was sleeping, he’d leave the food and go, sparing me whatever sanctimonious speech he’d prepared this morning.
“Every time Alpha Blake tells me there’s trouble at the academy, I find you at the centre of it.”
My eyes flew open and I leapt to my feet, then remembered myself and dropped back into a crouch.
“Alpha Draeven,” I said, staring at his shoes.
“Some alphas would leave you in that position for days to teach you your place. Others would kill you outright.” He paused, and I wondered if he was trying to decide which would solve his problems faster. “Luckily for you, I’m not one of them. You may rise.”
“Thank you, Alpha Draeven,” I said, getting to my feet and taking care to keep my eyes averted. When someone holds the power of life and death over me, I tend to make more of an effort to remember my manners.
“Why is it,” he asked, “that you seem incapable of keeping your nose clean?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one, so I kept staring at the ground. I could feel the pressure of his gaze on me, compelling me to keep my eyes averted. If I raised them, I would find myself looking at a heavily muscled, dark-skinned man with an ageless face. And the most powerful shifter in the United Kingdom. The Alpha of Alphas.
“Well? Cat got your tongue?” he snapped. “Answer me, girl.”
I bristled, and then sucked in a breath. He was goading me, probably in the hopes of making me say something I shouldn’t. I had no intention of making it that easy for him.
“I’m not sure, Alpha Draeven. I suspect it has something to do with being bitten by a rage-cursed shifter who evaded your enforcers.”
…Or I could just blurt the first thing that came into my mind and try to get myself killed. Fuck’s sake, Jade, when will you learn to think before you open your big mouth?
I peeked at his face through my lashes, because I like to torture myself by seeing exactly how much shit I’m in. I needn’t have wasted the effort – Draeven’s face was utterly unreadable. As always.
“I gather you have a choice to make,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes at him, then remembered myself and dropped my gaze back to the floor. The deference to authority that all shifters were taught from birth didn’t come naturally to me – but I did have a healthy respect for the fact he could kill me as soon as blink.
He rumbled a low chuckle. One day my unintentional disrespect would stop amusing him, and then I’d be in a world of shit. But not today, apparently.
“I didn’t realise you were taking such an interest,” I said, taking care to keep my tone neutral. I knew exactly which choice he was talking about, and I really didn’t want to discuss it with him. Bit of a one-sided conversation, what with the constant threat of death hanging over me, and all.
“There’s a lot you don’t realise. As usual. Like the consequences of your actions. You harboured a wanted criminal. Wolves have been executed for less.”
I swallowed. I didn’t like all this casual talk of execution, not when it was mine, and not when he was the most powerful wolf in the country, and I was a lowly cur locked in a dungeon.
“I mean, technically I didn’t harbour him…”
“Don’t play games with me.” He curled his lip. “You impress me, but I won’t tolerate your insolence.”
I dropped my chin onto my chest. I impressed him? That was new. But this probably wasn’t the time to contemplate it. I made my voice contrite, before we could get back onto the subject of my execution.
“Sorry, Alpha Draeven.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He dragged the single seat in front of the bars of m
y cell and sank into it with a sigh.
“What am I going to do with you, Jade?”
“I suppose putting all this down to a lapse in judgement and letting the whole thing slide is too much to hope for?”
“If I thought a lapse in judgement was all this was, I might be inclined to do just that. But this is the second time you’ve chosen the Bitten pack over your Alpha of Alphas. A more cynical wolf might start to question where your loyalties lie.”
With myself was the honest reply to that question. With Cam, and with my friends – all of them. But whoever said honesty was the best policy was either an idiot, or he’d never found himself in front of a mercurial alpha werewolf.
“I’ve had more than one opportunity to join up with the other Bittens,” I said. “But I’ve always chosen the academy over them.”
“Yes. I wonder why that is.”
“Probably because I’m not a homicidal maniac!” My raised voice echoed around the empty cell. How could he sit there and question my loyalty, when not two years ago I risked my life to save his? After everything I’d been through, I’d still defended the academy last year. How could he think I was like them? Rage curse or no rage curse, I would never set out to hurt an innocent person. Never. I glared at him. How dare he?
He sighed again.
“Lower your eyes, Jade, before I’m forced to do something neither of us will enjoy.”
The fact that he asked me when he could have compelled me was the only reason I meekly obeyed. I slumped back against the wall behind me, and slid to the floor, keeping my eyes on the space in front of his feet. What the hell was I even doing here? He was right, I did have a choice to make, and it seemed to me like the answer was pretty obvious. One little potion, and I could leave this world behind – along with the shitstorms I kept finding myself in the middle of.
“Tell me about when Ryan came to you this summer.”
He interrogated me for hours, until long after I started to suspect he’d eaten my breakfast on his way here. He interrogated me until I was glad I’d told the truth, because there was no way I could have kept my story straight with the dozens of questions he fired off at me. How often had I spoken to Ryan? What did we speak about? Had I seen the others? Had I spoken to the others? What did the Bitten look like? Had I seen any others? Why did Ryan reach out to me? What did he want? Had I considered his offer? The questions just went on and on, the same questions repeated a dozen different ways, Draeven talking to me about one thing and then throwing something completely different at me, in the hopes of wrong footing me into revealing a lie. If he hadn’t been busy cowing four countries of shifters into loyalty, he’d have made a damned good lawyer.
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