Fated To The Cursed And Tainted Alpha

~LEILANI RAVENWOOD~

I had lost track of time.

The days bled into one another until they became indistinguishable. The only constants were the pain, the hunger, and the dark.

My arms had been stretched above my head for so long that I could no longer tell where the ache ended and my body began. The chains held me suspended just enough that my toes barely grazed the cold stone floor, forcing my weight upward into my shoulders in a slow, relentless torment that never fully peaked and never fully stopped. It was the kind of pain designed not to break you quickly but to dismantle you gradually. Piece by piece. Hour by hour.

I had stopped fighting the chains on the third day.

Or the fourth. I wasn't sure anymore.

Sebastian Kol had kept his word. He had come for me exactly as he promised, and when his hand made contact with my skin at the end of the chase, the force of it had detonated through me like something divine and terrible at once. The darkness that followed was immediate and absolute.

When I woke, there was a priest.

An old man with silver etched into his skin and eyes that held too much knowledge for any living thing to carry comfortably. He had circled me, chanting in a language that made my wolf thrash in blind panic behind my ribs. Then he drove a dagger into my back, directly into the mark, and drew blood from it with a deliberateness that told me he had done this before.

The pain had been extraordinary.

When I woke the second time, I was still here.

Hanging. Chained. Alone.

I had tried to reach my wolf every hour since. Desperate, clawing attempts to find the part of me that could shift, that could fight, that could do something other than hang here and wait.

Every time, nothing.

The chains were enchanted. I understood that eventually. It had runes etched into the steel that shimmered faintly when I strained against them. Suppressing not just my strength but my wolf herself, muffling her until she was nothing but a distant and helpless echo somewhere behind my ribs.

I was entirely, completely, devastatingly alone in my own body.

The lock rattled.

My head snapped up, and I heard two sets of footsteps. One female. One male.

The male's scent reached me before his face did and my stomach turned immediately. I had grown up reading scent the way others read expressions. Alpha, beta, omega, the particular signature of each rank as distinct as a fingerprint. But his was wrong. His was twisted. Like power layered over something rotten underneath, like fruit that had been injected with poison and left to ripen.

I had overhead my father's council talking about such creatures which Sebastian had corrupted with his blood. No doubt these two were part of them.

"It's been days." The female said as they came into my view, her voice without warmth. "And you reek like a corpse. Time for your wash."

I didn't have time to respond.

Her fist closed in the fabric at my shoulder and pulled. The dress tore away in one brutal motion, the sound of it obscenely loud in the silence, and cold air hit every inch of me at once. I gasped. Tried to twist away. The chains stopped me immediately, yanking my arms taut above my head and holding me exactly where I was.

Embarrassment clouded me as I stood before them naked. Naked. Chained, shaking and weK. Unable to cover a single inch of myself.

The cold water came next without warning. A full bucket, soapy and ice cold, slamming into my body with enough force to steal every breath from my lungs. I cried out involuntarily, muscles seizing, the shock of it cutting through even the numbness that days of captivity had built.

She scrubbed without mercy or acknowledgment of my sounds.

When she finished I hung there. Soaked. Shaking. Stripped of the last thing that had stood between me and complete exposure.

That was when I felt the male's eyes.

I lifted my head slowly.

He was staring.

His pupils had blown wide, the dark bleeding outward until almost no iris remained, and beneath the skin of his neck and forearms dark veins were spreading like cracks appearing in dry earth. His lips had parted slightly. His breathing had also changed.

"Your scent." The word came out hoarse. Reverent almost. Hungry in a way that had nothing resembling admiration in it. He took one step closer. Then another. "It's different. It's-"

His hand reached for me.

His fingers had barely grazed my skin before my knee found his stomach.

The impact drove the air from him in a sharp grunt. He staggered backward, snarling, and the woman swung the iron bowl at my head. I twisted as far as the chains allowed, felt it graze my temple, and kicked out at hard, using every bit of strength that remained. She met the ground and when she looked back at me, all I could see was death staring at me through the anger in her eyes. They were definitely going to kill me at that point.

But an applause silenced everything.