"Hunt that runt down, guards. Get that pathetic slave back to the cage where she belongs!"
A sharp, harsh masculine roar pierced the midnight fog behind her. Reina's heart rammed hard against her ribs like a frantic, trapped bird. Just some hours ago, she had been fleeing Terrivan's quarters in shame, clutching her torn dress, her body betraying her with the sudden arrival of her moon-cycle.
Vera's hand closed around her wrist, pulling her through the dark forest, "We've got to keep running, my Lady. If they catch us now, there will be no mercy."
Reina nodded, wiping the salt and old tears from her eyes. She was barefoot, the forest floor was a gauntlet of thorns and sharp stone, pricking her feet but she couldn't stop running. Not now.
"The border is just a few feet away," Vera urged, her breath hitching. Reina pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the frantic pulse of Ember beneath her skin.
Behind them, the men were pursuing them like they were some sacrifice that had been let loose.Before them was the border, the only hope. The plan was to pretend to be lost just so they could be granted access. It was a thin hope, but it was all they had.
"Ah!"
Reina cried out when her foot connected with a gnarled root. She fell face-flat against the cold ground, the impact knocking the remaining air from her lungs.
The voices were closer now. Her feet were screaming; she had been running barefooted for miles, and her whole body felt like it was being pressed under a heavy boulder.
Thick roars and shouts swelled through the trees, the sounds of direwolves barking in the distant. The guards of Ironfire were gaining in on them. As Vera hauled her up, the agony in Reina's feet sparked a memory, a different kind of pain.
The kind her father, Chase Hunter, had perfected. He called her his curse; the girl who had traded her mother's life for her own first breath.It was a life of misery that had prepared her for this moment—long before she was Terrivan's slave, she had been her father's prisoner.
From the day she was born, she had been the cursed twin — the one who had killed her mother at birth — while her sister Leila and her brother basked in their father's warmth.
Years of beatings and starvation had done what they were designed to do, yet she hoped that when she got her wolf she could find her mate.
But at nineteen, to her crushing disappointment, she had realized she could not shift. She could feel Ember inside her, the wolf who has endured every maltreatment at her father's hands and yet never died, only making slight movements inside her.
She just wanted to be free. But today was just another unlucky day. A sharp, silver-tipped arrow arched through the moonlight, burying itself deep into Reina's shoulder.
The world turned white, as a choked sob tore from her throat. Blood gushed out, forming a dark, hot patch on her white tattered sleeve. A choked sob escaped her lips, and a fresh wave of tears ran down her face.
"Oh my goddess. It's wolfsbane." Vera whispered, her face draining of color as she helped Reina sit on a massive rock. Her hands trembled as she gripped the shaft of the arrow, fingers slick with Reina's blood.
"No... leave it," Reina wheezed, her skin already turning a sickly, bruised purple where the poison touched her veins. "They're... they're here."
The fire started at her shoulder and licked through her veins like something alive and malicious, eating through her muscle. Her fingers went numb and deep inside her chest, Ember whimpered, suppressed by the silver-laced toxin.
The sound of hooves signaled the end. Reina looked up in horror as the Ironfire men circled them like wolves around a kill.
Gamma Theon dismounted and before Reina could even blink, his palm cracked across her face in a loud, sharp smack. The force snapped her head sideways, the metallic tang of blood instantly flooding her mouth.
"You bitch! How dare you run away?" Gamma Theon snarled, his dark eyes gleaming with the thrill of the catch.
He snapped his fingers, and two heavy iron cuffs slid over her wrists, the cold metal biting into her poisoned skin. Reina's vision blurred.
She licked the blood from her lip, holding back the tears.
She wouldn't cry. Not in front of them.
She was a princess of Winterfell, even if only in name, and she would not give them the satisfaction. But the poison was eating her bones like molten iron. She fell to the dirt, breathing in the dry, crusty leaves.
"Please," Vera begged, dropping to her knees, her hands outstretched. "She's weak. Give her the antidote."
Theon looked at Vera like something scraped from a boot. "She can die for all I care. That should teach her. Who shot the arrow?"
"I did, Gamma," a guard named Vaughn stepped forward, his chest puffed out with pride.He was one of the guards who had spent the last moon sharpening his archery skills ever since they had returned from the enemy's Pack.
"Then you've won the Alpha's bounty."
The guards let out a primal roar, celebrating the recapture of their enemy's daughter as they began the long, cruel drag back to the Packhouse, their victory echoing through the dark trees.
"Here they are, Alpha." Vaughn shoved Reina and Vera to their knees on the cold stone. Reina's gown was a rag, her skin a map of blisters and dirt. Her throat felt like it had been lined with shards of broken glass.
The packhouse courtyard was filled with loud noises. Maids lined the walls with their arms folded, their faces twisted in indignation and everything their mouths did not bother to say.
Guards stood at their posts, whispering to each other. Not one of them looked at Reina with pity. They looked at her the way her father had taught them to — like she was an object.
An object at their mercy.
At the centre of the courtyard stood Alpha Terrivan, the Alpha of Ironfire Pack.
Reina's throat tightened when she saw the hard lines on his sculpted, scarred face. A cold shiver crawled through her body as she struggled to stay on her knees. The guards had dragged her all the way back without mercy.
"150 pieces of silver for you, Vaughn." Terrivan growled, a tinge of anger coating his words.
"Thank you, Alpha," Vaughn's chest swelled with pride.
Reina's knees cracked against the stone. Her wrists were still cuffed and her arm throbbed where the arrow had been ripped free on the road back.
He had placed a bounty on her head like livestock. He must have done that when he heard that she was on the run. But how did he know and where was Hera? She wondered.
Terrivan crossed the floor. Before she could flinch, his scarred hand yanked her hair, wrenching her head back, before she could flinch. His eyes were cold, empty, and far from the conflicted look she had seen when he realized she was bleeding.
"You ran from me," he said. "After I showed you mercy and sent you from my room, this is how you repay me?"
Every emotion in his cold, empty eyes was far from mercy. Reina's lips parted, trembling at the corners, her breath coming out in a thin puffs. This night would be long.
The courtyard had gone so quiet she could hear her own heartbeat stuttering. Reina's throat opened around a sound she couldn't stop, something small and broken that scraped out of her before she could swallow it back down.
She hated that she was shaking. She hated that he could feel it.
Please. The word rose to her lips first. It always did, it had been the first word beaten into her by her father— but she pressed her mouth shut around it. Her fingers curled against the stone beneath her. Her eyes burned.
Please was all she had ever said her whole life.
Please stop. Please don't. Please, I'm sorry.
She was so tired of please but fate seemed to put her at the mercy of other people's choices.
"I am—" Her voice cracked on the first word.
She swallowed hard. "You said every child of Hunter gets what they are owed... I owe you nothing but my life, and you have already taken that. I am a human, I deserve freedom,too,"
"Human?" Rage flashed in Terrivan's eyes.
"You are exactly what I say you are. And right now, what you are is a debt your dead father left me. Until it is paid, you are a slave."
Every offspring of Chase Hunter were monsters to him.
A tear slipped down her temple. She couldn't stop it.
He tilted his head, just slightly. "Do you know how many years he stole from me? How many of my people's lives he snuffed out for sport? For his sickly twisted fantasies?"
Her lips trembled. She wanted to look away. but she couldn't because the grip in her hair wouldn't allow it. She was locked into his gaze whether she wanted to be or not and what she found there made her stomach hollow out.
"Whatever he did to you," Reina whispered, shaking "I was not... the one who did it."
For a moment he said nothing.
"No," he said at last. "But you are the one who is here,"
He released her hair with a shove.
Her head dropped forward and a whimper escaped her before she could catch it as the burning in her scalp rushed back all at once.
She caught herself on her cuffed wrists, shaking, breathing through her teeth, staring at the ground and willing herself not to make another sound.
"You must really be your father's daughter," he said. "Stabbing the people who help you in the back is no strange thing to the Hunters."
Reina was confused as she clenched her trembling hands.
"Bring the maid in," Terrivan ordered with the snap of a finger.
The door opened and Reina turned. Every bone in her body stilled and it felt like her breath was fizzled out of her body.
Hera stood in the entrance, her hands clasped, and eyes fixed on the floor. Her face was battered and swollen.
Reina pushed to her feet, struggling against the cuffs. "Did they beat her? What did you do to her?"
"Hera." she added, "Hera, look at me. What happened?"
Had they found out about the escape?
Hera didn't look at her.
"What hap—"
"Please don't hurt me. Please, I'm sorry." Hera whimpered, her face contorting in a mask of staged terror as she crossed the stone floor. But she didn't go to Reina, her mistress. Instead, she knelt before the King's Mistress.
Why was Hera afraid of her?
"Tell the Alpha and everyone here what happened."Oleander commanded the maid kneeling before her as she took a step closer to her Terrivan.
Reina froze, her lips parting in horror when she caught on it. It felt like a bucket of ice had been dumped on her.
The unlocked door. The guards who knew exactly where they were in the dark forest. The fact that Hera never showed up at the border. Someone had told them of the path they'd take.
Her lips parted but, no sound came out, not because she had nothing to say, but because the only person left to say it to was standing face to scarred face with her. The person who had held her hand through every dark night of the last moon was the one who had led the wolves to her door.
"Why?" Reina's voice was hollow as she mouthed to herself in defeat, "Why, Hera? Why betray me?"
She had felt betrayal from her family, but this was a knife to the gut and Hera, her soul sister, the one who was closer to her even more than Leila, her twin was the one holding the knife.