Chapter 226

Alice’s POV

“Be a good girl and come over here,” Olivia said.

“Don’t,” Aunt Kathy said, but she winced as Olivia pressed the barrel of the gun more prominently to her temple.

“Come over here, Alice,” Olivia said, “Or I will kill your aunt.”

“Don’t listen to her, honey. I’m an old woman. I’ve lived a good life. You run and hide, okay? Don’t go anywhere with this woman.”

“Shut up!” Olivia snapped. “Do you want to get shot?”

Aunt Kathy was brave, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to see the woman who had been so kind to me these past few weeks be hurt right in front of me.

Olivia was really mean, and she’d hurt us before. I knew if she put her mind to it, she wouldn’t think twice about hurting Aunt Kathy or me.

But, if the choice came between the two of us, I knew I was more likely to survive than Aunt Kathy. A woman of her age might be seriously injured just from a fall. I bounced back a lot of the time.

So it made more sense for me to go.

“Okay,” I said and started forward. “Just don’t hurt Aunt Kathy.”

Aunt Kathy’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Alice…”

Before she could say anything more, Olivia reared back her hand and crashed the butt of her gun into the back of Aunt Kathy’s head.

Aunt Kathy dropped down onto the floor in a heap.

I gasped and rushed forward, but Olivia didn’t let me even check on her. She grabbed my arm roughly and dragged me toward the front door.

“You hurt her!” I said.

“She’ll live so long as you be quiet. Keep making noise like this and I’ll go right back in there and shoot her dead.”

I didn’t want that to happen so I closed my mouth and tried to follow Olivia obediently. She put the gun away when we went outside and then dragged me down the street to her car, where she forced me into the backseat.

“Where are we going?” I asked, when she got into the driver’s seat.

“You’ll find out,” Olivia said, telling me nothing as she put the car into drive and pulled out onto the road.

I kept my mouth shut as we drove into town, my fear starting to rise.

Mommy… Daddy…

I knew they were busy with the fight, but I hoped they would find me soon…

I was trying to be brave but I was actually very scared…

I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt, but I didn’t want to be hurt either.

I didn’t know what to do!

Amber’s POV

I couldn’t understand what I was seeing out in the ring from where I watched, the opening where Julian had left me.

Now, he was down there, fighting Julian furiously, with Julian showing more power and strength than I would have thought possible from someone like him.

So far, Julian had the upper hand, but it was a much more hard-earned fight than I would have anticipated.

Tony, who didn’t match Julian in strength or speed, was still managing to hold his own, even landing a few unexpected blows on Julian, including one to his face that left his nose bloody. Julian’s nose healed quickly, thanks to his Alpha healing, but the blood remained and would remain until he had the time to clean it.

He did not presently have that time.

Tony was fighting like a man possessed, and I swear, there were times when his eyes looked blood red. Typically that happened right before a werewolf rage shifted. Was Tony truly filled with so much malice that he saw Julian as an enemy he needed to lose himself to fight?

Or…? No.

I had seen symptoms like this before, typically when werewolves took potions that were supposed to make them stronger. The potions worked, sometimes, but the side effects were not worth the cost. Some of the wolves went feral, and there wasn’t really a fix-all cure for that.

I hoped that this wasn’t the case with Tony, but the more I witnessed, the more I evaluated – the way that I saw him pushing his body beyond his own limits. The more I knew that this man was going to push himself beyond his breaking point.

There wasn’t much I could do from where I was, but even if I were to run down to the ring, I wouldn’t be able to stop this. If Tony had taken the potions I suspected, then it was already too late.

And I knew the rules from before. Julian couldn’t call the fight, not even out of fear for Tony’s health, without it being considered a forfeit.

Julian couldn’t lose his pack…

Gods, I didn’t want to watch a man lose his mind today. Yet I braced myself, because I didn’t seem to have any other choice.

In that moment, Julian grabbed Tony and flung him down onto the ground. It was a hard hit. Tony was slow to recover, though he did still recover.

The crowd booed their displeasure.

Whether they didn’t want the fight to be over too soon, or they just hated Julian, I wasn’t sure.

But I feared for my mate, down in that ring, surrounded by so many people who wanted to see him receive and deliver hurt.

Perhaps it was my nature as a Healer, but there were just some werewolf traditions that didn’t sit right with me, even after all these years.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. At first, I thought to ignore it, but then, after a moment, I worried it might be Aunt Kathy needing something regarding Alice.

Stepping back from the fight and the crowd, I retreated into the dark, abandoned hallways of the arena and pulled my phone from my pocket.

Strange. The call was from an unknown number.

Perhaps I should have ignored it, but I suddenly had a very uncomfortable feeling deep down in my gut. My intuition was telling me to answer this phone, that something was very wrong, and it wasn’t just Tony in the ring.

Worry clawing up my chest, I answered the phone and brought it to my ear.

“Hello?”

Even in the empty hallway, the roar of the crowd was so loud that I had to place my hand over my other ear to hear the phone more clearly.

“Hello, Amber,” replied a voice.

It took me a moment to place it. When I did, my stomach sunk all the way to the floor.

“Olivia?”

“Listen to me carefully, Amber, because I am not going to repeat myself,” she said. Her voice was serious, the same tone she had used with me up on those rafters during the debate. Whatever she was about to say, I knew I wasn’t going to like.

I thought about hanging up the phone again, but that same nagging intuition told me not to.

“I am going to text you an address, and you are going to come here alone,” she said.

I held in my scoff, though I felt like laughing in her face. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because,” Olivia said. “I have Alice. And if you don’t do exactly as I say, I’m going to kill her.”