Chapter 145 Get Out Of Here
ADRIANA
The figure who untied me moved through the dark room without making a sound, which was the first thing I noticed. The second was built, broad through the shoulders, movement deliberately. They seemed familiar in a way but I couldn’t immediately place where.
The candle that had been keeping the room lit had gone out at some point and the darkness was complete. I was working entirely with my other senses and they were still dampened by whatever was in the ropes.
The ropes themselves were the main problem. All the things that had been woven into them had been sitting against my skin for long enough to do real damage. My limbs felt distant from me, like signals being sent through poor connection, my wolf completely inaccessible.
Yara has reduced to an occasional flicker at the very edge of my consciousness. My legs barely held me when the figure helped me off the platform.
He guided me across a hallway and into another room, one hand steadying me, and I had still not managed to get a clear look at his face. The cloak and the hood made it impossible in the dark, and my head wouldn’t lift the way I needed it to.
The room has light. Dim light. But after being in the dark for a long time, it was a welcome difference. Around a circular table sat the Grandmaster’s brotherhood, all of them looking at me with varying degrees of calculation.
I found a chair and held myself in it.
“You’ve been wondering why you’re still alive,” the Grandmaster said. He said it the way he said most things, as a statement rather than a question, because he had decided he already knew the answers to anything he could ask. “You’ve been wondering what we’re planning.”
“I’ve actually been thinking about what I’m going to do to you when I get my strength back,” I said, my voice steadier than I was feeling. “But sure. Enlighten me.”
One of the brothers made a sound of irritation.
“She is arrogant and she should be corrected for it immediately—”
“When do we get our share of her powers? You promised—”
“She’s been here long enough. Kill her and be done with it—”
The Grandmaster raised one hand and the table went quiet. The authority in that single gesture was total and immediate, which told me everything I needed to know about the internal dynamics of this brotherhood.
“What makes you so certain you’re going to survive this?” he asked me. Genuinely curious.
“Because I know what I am,” I said. “And I know what you’re not.”
I said it with more confidence than I felt, which was the point. The brothers were watching me and the Grandmaster was watching me and what I needed all of them to believe, right now, was that I was not afraid. Afraid wolves were predictable. Confident wolves made people cautious.
He studied me for a moment longer and then looked away, and his expression shifted into something heavier.
“There is a problem,” he said. He addressed the brotherhood rather than me now, which made the back of my neck prickle. “Something we did not account for and must address immediately.”
The room was silent.
“The special wolf is pregnant.”
The bottom dropped out of my chest.
I sat very still. The word moved through me in a strange slow wave that had nothing to do with the room around me and everything to do with a sudden, complete rearrangement of every calculation I had been running.
Pregnant.
I was pregnant?
I hadn’t known. I genuinely, completely did not know. I had no framework for recognizing it, no experience with what it felt like in the early stages, nothing to have flagged as different except the bone-deep exhaustion that I had attributed entirely to everything else that had been happening. And now I was sitting in a room full of men who wanted to kill me and finding out that there was another life involved that I had not known to protect.
Elijah. The thought of him landed in me like an anchor. He was going to be a father again, and he didn’t know, and I was sitting here in this room unable to reach him, and the thing I felt most strongly in that moment was a fierce, absolute refusal to let anything happen to this child.
“How dare you.” The voice came from behind me, low and close, and I turned.
The hooded figure. Now that there was more light I could see what I had been trying to identify in the dark.
Luke.
Of course it was Luke. The way he had moved, the way he had been familiar. I had encountered him enough times before he disappeared that my body had recognized something my mind couldn’t place in the dark.
“You defiled yourself,” he said. His voice had a quality to it that I had not heard from him before. Something cracked open and running. “You were supposed to be—” He stopped. Started again. “He shouldn’t be the one. That child should not exist. You need to kill it.”
I looked at him.
“He is my mate, Luke. What the fuck are you on about?”
“I should have been first. I should have been the one. You were—” He made a sound that was neither word nor breath. “Kill that child. Get rid of it or I’ll do it myself.”
I needed to get out of this room. Heck, I needed to get out of this building! I needed to get to Elijah and I should get there before any of these people decided to stop being strategic about me and simply act.
“Where is Lisa?” I asked. The question came from instinct more than anything. I needed information and I had to keep him talking.
Something shifted across his face.
“Your sister.” He laughed, short and ugly. “She decided the Grandmaster’s authority wasn’t worth respecting. He didn’t tolerate it. She’s been gone for a while now.”
She was dead?
Something heavy settled in my chest. She had hated me for years, had tried to kill me more times than I could count, and had been the source of some of the worst pain of my life. And now she was gone, killed by the people she had aligned herself with, and I felt something about that which I did not have time to examine.
I would think about Lisa later.
Right now I need to find a way out. I have to get out of here.