Kier brushing his lips across my forehead wakes me. As I stir, he smooths hair back from my face. "Go back to sleep, it's still early."
"Where are you going?" I murmur as I burrow deeper under the covers. After our battle to make each other scream, neither of us ended up getting much sleep. I don't understand how he can be awake when I'm struggling to keep my eyes open.
"To see a friend about a charger. I have a very demanding woman in my life who I want to please."
A smile stretches across my face. "She sounds like hard work. Are you sure you can be happy with someone that demanding?"
His lips find mine for a soft kiss that has me sighing into his mouth. "Well, I won't say she's easy," he murmurs once he's lifted his head. "But she does the most amazing things with her mouth that…"
Without opening my eyes, I poke him in the belly. "I'd stop right there because that mouth of yours is going to get you into a world of trouble."
"Probably," he concedes.
I fight back a yawn and lose.
Kier kisses me. "Sleep. I won't be long. I'll bring back some breakfast for us as well." He tugs the covers over me as tiredness once again spreads through me.
"Okay, love you," I mumble.
I don't hear his response nor do I hear him leave because, in the next second, I'm asleep.
When I next open my eyes, I'm not even the slightest bit tired. I reach for my phone to check the time, which is when I remember the battery is dead.
Although I'm almost positive that Kier said he'd not only return with a charger, but breakfast as well, I wonder if I might have misheard him. I was more asleep than awake when he woke me, so he might've meant lunch.
But, as I continue to lie in bed, my frown deepens.
It has to have been breakfast because there's no way he'd leave me alone this long, and it feels like a long time has passed. A couple of hours, at least.
Whatever he meant, I'm not about to lie here waiting. I get up and head for the bathroom so I can have a quick shower before I go looking for him.
Not twenty minutes later and I'm out of the bathroom, freshly showered, my hair still wet, and my teeth brushed.
Even though there's pretty much nothing in this cabin, at least someone-probably one of the hidden women in this pack-thought to stock the bathroom with more than enough toiletries for our stay.
I've pulled my jeans on and am reaching for my crop top, which is little more than a tank top with a knot holding the ripped part together, when someone kicks the door open.
I spin around.
The sight of Frankie and his heavies in the doorway, their eyes filled with dark and predatory anticipation, tells me they're not here to borrow sugar.
"Uh, I'm guessing this isn't a social call," I say.
They charge me.
I fight, I scream, I kick-in short, I do everything I can to break free-but one against seven aren't great odds, especially when six of the seven are built like tanks.
In an embarrassingly short amount of time, they have me pinned against the cabin floor. All I have to be thankful for is that at least they waited until I was mostly dressed before kicking the door down, and that no one was here to witness how easily they subdued me.
And that's about all I have time to be grateful for because I'm given no warning at all when a solid weight hits me at the back of my head and my world goes black.
I wake to darkness.
Not complete darkness. Nothing like being underground or in a fully sealed room, but wherever I am is musty and old. Cold too. I'm also not alone.
It takes far more effort than it should to roll from my belly and onto my back. That my head is pounding doesn't help, not one bit.
"You here for entertainment, or did your TV stop working?"
"TV works just fine," Erin, Jaxon's mom, murmurs from the other side of the iron bars a few feet away from me. Bars which reveal Frankie and his heavies have found a musty cabin with a large cage to stick me in for safekeeping.
That this cage is large enough to take up one half of the cabin tells me that this pack is even more messed up than I believed. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Jaxon uses it as a prison for those who don't immediately fall in line, well, the ones he doesn't kill straight away, that is.
It can't be normal for a pack to have a cage like this.
Most alphas would just kill you for causing trouble rather than bother with playing prison guard. But Kier said this pack was messed up, and this is just another sign he was right.
"I'm guessing you must care a little about that lovely son of yours after all," I say, as I try to ignore the pounding in my temples, wondering how they can hurt when it was a blow to the back of my head which knocked me out. Unless I cracked my head on the floor right after.
Although I can only see the outline of her figure on the other side of the cage, I catch her shrug. "An order is an order. I'm just the next one in line to watch you."
I take a moment to consider that.
The next one in line… Which means there was someone else. Or there might've even been more than that.
It's not a pleasant thought because it suggests I've been unconscious for a while, which isn't good for me or Kier. But then again, how long is watch rotation? An hour? Two?
"Where are we?" I ask, figuring the length of time I've been out isn't as important as how I'm going to get out, which should be my priority. That and finding Kier, who was probably only ambushed because of my need for a stupid charger.
"Too far for your boy to hear you scream."
Nice, Erin. Real nice.
"I'm guessing Jaxon has realized he doesn't have a hope in hell of winning in a challenge so he's trying to distract Kier by kidnapping me."
Erin doesn't respond.
"Or is Jaxon hoping to blackmail Kier into losing? You know, lose the fight or you lose your girl?"
"You be better off saving your energy for when Jaxon comes here after the fight. You're lucky he still wants to mate with you at all."
I fall silent because this is bad. This is all so much worse than I realized.
I should prepare myself for a world of suffering if he somehow manages the impossible and kills Kier.
"That isn't happening," I murmur, as I take the time to examine just where Jaxon is keeping me.
I'm in a cabin, an old one, that much I know. Escaping a cabin would be easy if I wasn't sitting in a sturdy iron cage in the middle of it. I'm strong, but iron-thick iron-bars aren't going to be easy, or probably even possible, to break myself out of.
So I'm going to need someone to let me out.
Not Erin, because she's proven herself to be colder than cold. I doubt I'm convincing her of anything.
But if not her, then who? And how?
"You'll learn it's easier not to fight against what Jaxon wants. Better you choose the easy way rather than the hard."
If the guy has a cage and takes pleasure in killing off his pack on a quiet Sunday, I have no doubt the hard way is going to be the painful way. But it doesn't matter to me how painful it is. I have to escape and I have to find Kier.
If I can kill Frank along the way for trapping me here, all the better, but I'm not about to give up without fighting with everything I am.
I sit up, and immediately everything spins, making me close my eyes and raise my hand to my temple.
What the hell did they hit me with?
When lights start flickering at the edge of my vision, I lie back down because I'm nowhere near ready to be sitting up, much less standing. I doubt I'd get two steps before the ground was rising to meet me.
"As I said," I hear Erin murmur in a voice that slowly fades, "best just take the easy path. Nothing good will come from…"
Her voice trails off. Not, I think, because she's stopped speaking, but because I've stopped listening.
So, for the second time in one day, I think, my eyes flutter shut and I sink into blackness.