Chapter 49
**ELENA**
I don't know how I fell asleep or for how long, but when I woke up, there was a glass of orange juice and oatmeal at the foot of the bed. There was also a bucket close enough to the bed that I could reach it even with my hand still attached. I had to relieve myself in the bucket and put up with the smell for who knows how long before I fell asleep again. The most frustrating thing about this situation is not knowing how long I've been here. I have no indication of how much time has passed.
**THEO**
It's now 48 hours since Elena disappeared and we're going deeper and deeper into the forest. Cal, Finn and I are handling the situation differently, with our wolves putting pressure on us to find our mate. Cal has been out alone in his wolf form for 12 hours trying to find her. He couldn't bear to stand back and guide the information. Finn is with the teams in the field, trying to be everywhere at once and aware of any clues that may be found. While I'm at the pack house supervising all the teams.
Fergus enters the operations room with a young man hot on his heels.
"Alpha Theo, meet Tatum. He was kind enough to lend us his drone." He says to me before the young man puts down a kind of tablet laptop. "Get all plugged in kid and pilot that drone to go that way." He points to a map on the table.
Tatum complies without batting an eyelid and makes his connections so that we can see the drone's images on the big screen. Once everything is ready, we watch live as the drone takes off. We can see ground crews combing the area and, further away, a lone black wolf.
"Caleb," I say aloud.
He can't see it, but he's approaching a ruined shack.
"If you get any closer and there's someone inside, will he hear you?"
"Yes, the drone isn't exactly silent," Tatum replies.
"Stop, I don't want to take any chances. I've got to warn the others."
**ELENA**
When I open my eyes again, Eric is sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, watching me, and I'm immediately uncomfortable.
"How long have I been asleep?"
"Four hours. You need to eat." He tells me, nodding in the direction of the plate and bottle of water he's set down beside the bed.
"And how long have I been here?"
"Two days."
I sigh. "You know they're going to find me. They won't stop until they find us, and they most certainly know it's you behind this."
"I don't give a fuck. You'll leave with me if they come. We're just here to buy time. When this settles down we'll leave."
"But for what? For what purpose?" I ask him in frustration.
"So I can get what I deserve." He answers in frustration.
What the fuck does that mean?
He must see the confusion on my face because he grunts before adding.
"A mate who's up to the task."
"A what now?" I shake my head. I must be in the middle of a nightmare. I can't see any other explanation than that the father of my true mate is being taken away from me and is insinuating what he is insinuating. "You can't... No... I already have mates and... no out of the question..." I begin to panic at this situation and the lack of my mates by my side.
"You'll forget them eventually." He says calmly.
Please, guys, find me! He's lost his mind... that's the only explanation, but what the hell happened? I feel so helpless and vulnerable, but I have to try to do something at least for my baby. I've been wearing the same clothes since I arrived, I haven't even washed, I relieve myself in a bucket, which he empties when I sleep at night. I don't know how much longer I can go on like this.
"Eric... I need to wash and change and..." I sigh. I don't feel like it but I have to tell him, maybe this information will make him more forgiving. "I'm pregnant. I can't stay in a shack in the middle of nowhere indefinitely."
He stands up suddenly and paces back and forth, running his hands through his hair. "They've ruined everything. They've ruined everything. It took... they're disgusting... they've defiled you... They've ruined everything...." They repeat his words over and over, and at that very moment, he reminds me of the only person I've ever seen in this state.
"Your mate rejected you," I say softly, so softly that I'm not sure he heard me except that he stops dead in his tracks.
"She wouldn't have deserved me anyway. That woman was no match for Moira." He snorts." No one could hold a candle to her. No one... except you."
He turns determined and locks me in the bedroom alone once more.
**FINN**
Standing naked in front of Elena's bathroom mirror, I do my best to remove the dirt from under my fingernails. But it just won't go away, no matter how hard I scrub. Five days, five fucking days looking for her in the woods, and every night I go home hoping she'll come through the door. All three of us are losing it but in three different ways. For my part, I try to attach myself to her by sleeping in her bed, which still smells a little of her, and sniffing her shower gel and shampoo. Theo, on the other hand, is working with the men to rake it all in, thinking more about a real search strategy with Fergus. Caleb's situation is different: we haven't seen him for two days, and we can't reach him by mind link. Just what we needed, besides having lost track of Elena, we've lost track of him too. He feels guilty about the situation, he doesn't need to say it for us to know. The more time goes by, the more we're convinced that his parents, or at least one of them, are behind our mate's abduction. So he went into lone-wolf mode to look for her.