Mated To The Crippled Alpha

Chapter 474: SECRETS TURN DEADLY

I woke up screaming, my own voice tearing me out of the dream before I could stop it.The nightmare had been vivid and awful , dark water closing over my head, the current pulling me away from my sister no matter how hard I reached for her. Her hand slipping. The waves swallowing everything. I had been shouting for her to hold on, and then I was gone, dragged under into nothing.

But it was just a dream. I pressed both palms flat against the surface beneath me and took a shaky breath.

That was when I realized something was wrong.

The floor was cold and hard under my hands, nothing like the soft mattress I fell asleep on every night at home. The air was different too , no trace of the candles Mom always burned in the evenings, that warm vanilla smell that meant safety and dinner and everything being okay. Instead, there was a damp, strange heaviness to it, something I couldn’t name, something that made the hair on my arms prick up. My clothes were wet and sticking to my skin, and the darkness around me was so complete I couldn’t see my own hands until I held them up close to my face.

I sneezed. Then sneezed again.

I was not yet six years old. I understood enough to know that something had gone very wrong, even if I couldn’t have explained exactly what. I didn’t know how I’d gotten here. I didn’t know where here even was. I pushed myself slowly up from the floor and stood on shaky legs, reaching out until my fingers found a wall. I followed it until I felt a door, then a handle. I had to stretch to reach it, but I turned it and pushed, and the door swung open into a long corridor.

The hallway stretched in both directions, lined with rooms, lit by pale wall lamps that gave off a cold, sickly kind of light. Nothing like the warm, bright rooms at home. The walls were bare cement, rough and grey, and the whole place felt heavy with something I couldn’t name , like it had soaked up years of bad things happening inside it and never let them go. My stomach turned. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to take another step.

But I heard a sound from one of the rooms down the hall, and I thought: someone is there. Someone can help.

I pushed the door open.

I wish I hadn’t.

The room was large, much larger than I expected, with stone surfaces lining the walls like beds, and men in white coats moving between them. They wore masks over their faces. They held tools I half-recognized , needles, sharp blades, and thick metal instruments that didn’t look like anything that should be near a person. The people lying on those surfaces were very still. Some of them weren’t moving at all. Some of them were open in ways that made my mind go blank with a kind of horror I had no words for yet.

I had seen something like this once, on a family trip. I had wandered away from the main path and ended up at a farmhouse where a man was slaughtering a pig. The ground had turned dark red, and the smell had hit me like something physical , sharp and iron-thick, the kind of smell that lives in the back of your throat. My mother had pulled me away quickly, but I never forgot it.

This was worse. Because these were people.

My legs gave out and I dropped to the floor. A few of the masked figures glanced over at me with a complete lack of interest, the way you might look at a piece of furniture that had fallen over, and then turned back to what they were doing. The indifference terrified me more than anger would have. I scrambled to my feet and ran.

I ran back into the corridor and didn’t stop. My chest was burning and my feet were making too much noise but I didn’t care. I just ran, my mind looping the same thoughts over and over , this isn’t real, this isn’t real , but the cold floor under my feet and the smell in the air were both very real, and some part of me that was older than six knew it.

I didn’t understand yet why no one followed me. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, that I hadn’t actually escaped anything. I was still inside whatever this place was. I was already caught.

I pressed myself into a corner of the corridor and tried to make myself small. I knew that what I had seen in that room was killing. I had cried for a week once when a stray cat died near our house. The thought of a person , I couldn’t even finish the thought. I pressed my fists against my mouth and tried very hard not to make any sound.

These people were the kind Ethan had warned me about. He was older, fourteen, and he’d told me once about people who took children away from their families and sent them somewhere far and cold where they’d never be able to come home. He’d called them traffickers. He’d explained what happened to the girls , chained up, kept somewhere dark, forced into lives they hadn’t chosen. I hadn’t understood all of it back then. I understood enough of it now.

Mom. Dad. Ethan. Elena. Where are you?

I mouthed the words because I was too scared to say them out loud.

"Are you okay?"

The voice came from right beside me, and I flinched so hard I nearly fell over. I looked up, eyes wide and wet.

It was a boy. He was older than me , maybe eight or nine , and he was looking down at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Something in me settled just slightly, the way it does when you’re lost and you finally see another person, even a stranger. I grabbed his hand without thinking.

"Were you kidnapped too?" I whispered.

He looked down at our joined hands for a moment before his eyes came back to my face. I’d been crying , I could feel it in the puffiness around my eyes, the sting on my cheeks. He didn’t say anything right away, just studied me with this calm, quiet attention that felt out of place in a scared child.

I squeezed his hand. "We have to find a way out. My brother said these people sell kids. We can’t stay here." I was already pulling him forward, moving before I’d made any real plan, because standing still felt like giving up. "There’s always a way. Come on."

He let me drag him a few steps. I could feel him not resisting, but not really helping either, just watching me with something flickering in his dark eyes , interest, maybe, or something close to it.

I was already out of breath. My lungs weren’t built for this. I stopped when I heard footsteps coming from around the corner, and without thinking I stepped in front of the boy, putting myself between him and whoever was coming.

"Run," I told him. My voice was shaking.

He didn’t move.

The footsteps slowed, then stopped. I was trembling. The boy beside me was completely still, no fear anywhere in his face or his body, and when the person who had been approaching came into view and looked at us, he didn’t look at me at all.

He looked at the boy.

"Young Master," the man said, and bowed his head.

The cold went all the way through me.

I looked up at the boy beside me , the one I’d grabbed, the one I’d been trying to save , and something shifted in the air between us, something I felt in my chest before I understood it in my head. He wasn’t trapped here. He had never been trapped here.

A slow smile touched the corner of his mouth.

"You can’t escape," he said.

I stared at him. "Why?"

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.