Chapter 211

Chris

The harsh clang of metal against metal jolted me awake. I blinked, disoriented, as one of those godforsaken guards who looked like they were hewn out of the very rock that made up these castle walls roughly yanked me to my feet. The cold of the stone floor seeped through my thin shoes, a stark reminder of where we were. A loveless place, cold and empty and so much unlike Moonstone.

Dammit. Why did we have to come here?

“Get up,” the guard growled harshly. “Alpha Winston wants to see you.”

Across the hall, I saw Ava being pulled from her cell as well. Our eyes met briefly, and I felt a bit of relief wash over me. She was fine—and being handled with a bit more care than I was. Still, I couldn’t help but continue to be a little pissed at her. Maybe, if we had gotten enough information out of Patrick to find and stop Olivia, we wouldn’t have to be here at all—

“Move.” The guard’s voice ripped me out of my reverie, his sharp spear prodding us forward. We were marched back to the throne room like prisoners, the echoing of our footsteps in the empty corridors only serving as a stark reminder of how cavernous this place was.

The room looked different in the morning light that streamed through high windows, but no less imposing. Winston sat on his throne, looking as cold and unyielding as the stone around him.

What caught my attention, though, were the three massive wolves flanking him. Their fur was as gray as the mountain stone, their eyes glowing amber and green and blue. They hadn’t been there last night, or maybe they had—maybe I just hadn’t seen them lurking in the shadows.

I knew what Winston was doing, though; intimidating me. Well, I wouldn’t let him.

I squared my shoulders, refusing to lower my eyes. We were pushed to our knees once again in front of the throne, but I kept my chin held high, meeting Winston’s icy gaze. The cold floor bit into my knees, but I ignored the discomfort.

“Alpha Winston,” I began, keeping my voice steady, “I know you’re a reasonable man. If you’ll just hear me out—”

“Silence,” Winston cut me off, his voice echoing in the vast chamber even though he hadn’t raised his tone. “I have no interest in your problems, Alpha Chris. You came here against my explicit wishes. Such disrespect cannot go unpunished.”

I clenched my jaw. “With all due respect—”

“I have decided to sentence you both to a month of servitude,” he interrupted.

Fury exploded in my chest, hot and sharp. I jumped to my feet, ignoring the sharp jab of the spear at my back. “A month? What, scrubbing your damn floors?”

“Precisely,” Winston replied, checking his nails.

“You can’t be serious,” I scoffed. “How can you sentence a fellow Alpha to servitude? Our pack needs us. We can’t be gone for a whole month! This is the fucking twenty-first century, Winston!”

Winston merely shrugged, his face impassive. “This is my pack, and I make the rules. You should have considered that before trespassing into my territory when you were given a strict order not to come.” His eyes flashed as he said those last three words.

I opened my mouth to argue further, but before I could, Ava, who had been quiet last night and this morning, suddenly cleared her throat.

“If I may, Alpha Winston.”

Winston’s cold eyes snapped to her, regarding her for a long moment. The room fell into a tense silence, the only sound the soft growling of the wolf guards flanking him.

“What is it?” he finally said.

Ava was calm, controlled. I watched in Awe as she placed her palms in front of herself and bent her elbows, bowing so low her forehead almost touched the floor—a gesture that hadn’t been used by our kind in over a century. This wasn’t the dark ages anymore, dammit. Why was she playing into his game of medieval lords?

“I deeply apologize for coming here against your wishes,” she said, her voice muffled by the floor. “But Moonstone really does need us. We came because Moonstone, and potentially all five packs, are under threat of a blight that is destroying the land. We desperately need help finding the woman that stole our sacred moonstone. Without it, the blight will only continue to ravage our home.”

I stared at Ava, shocked that she would so easily give up our information to a man who clearly had no sense of kindness in his heart. But before I could say anything, she continued, still dipped in that ridiculous bow.

“Let my Alpha return home. I will stay as your servant for two months and serve out both of our sentences.”

My eyes widened. “Ava, you don’t—” I hissed, but Winston held up a hand, silencing me. My words died in my throat, my frustration building at being so easily silenced by a man who I had never even met. This would never fly in the human world, I thought bitterly. Never.

He rose from his throne, descending the steps with measured grace. The wolves at his side tensed, their eyes tracking his movement. Stopping in front of Ava, he crouched and placed one long finger under her chin, tilting her face up.

“So you are the older woman that stole Alpha Chris’s heart,” he said, turning her face this way and that to look at her.

I felt a growl rumble in my chest at the way that he was handling her, but Ava’s eyes never wavered. “He stole my heart.”

I felt something in me soften at her words, despite everything. The love and loyalty in her voice was unmistakable, and for a moment, I forgot about our argument, about Patrick’s escape. All I wanted was to protect her, to get her out of this mess.

Winston studied her for a long moment before speaking. “Very well. I will reduce your sentence to one week of servitude.”

I let out a breath of relief, but he wasn’t finished.

“But I will not help you with your blight. I doubt it will be able to make it all the way here and survive on this cold mountain. Besides, if you lost your sacred artifact,” he added with a sneer, rising to his feet, “then that is your own fault. Perhaps if you had been tougher and wiser, it wouldn’t have been lost in the first place.”

With one last pointed look at me, he turned and strode away, ignoring my calls after him. The wolves’ eyes flicked to me and their lips curled back to reveal their teeth before they turned and followed.

Later, I found myself dressed in servant’s attire, tasked with manual labor around the castle. It could have been worse, I supposed.

As I worked, scrubbing the stone floors with a scrub brush and cursing Winston for being too dense to know about the invention of the vacuum, I still couldn’t help but feel a grudging gratitude toward Ava for lessening our sentence. A week was a lot better than a month.

Still, frustration simmered just beneath the surface of my skin. She had let Patrick go, and now we were stuck here with no more solid information on Olivia’s whereabouts than we had before.

If only we had gotten the right information, we could have turned around and gone home. But no; we were still stuck playing nice, trying to win over an Alpha who seemed to think that he was five centuries behind the rest of us. Insanity. Surely living up here on this mountain had addled his brain.

As I scrubbed the stone floors, my wolf stirred. “Why are you so angry with her?” he asked.

I gritted my teeth. “Olivia is always one step ahead. I’m tired of feeling weak, of always being on the back foot. We shouldn’t have shown Patrick mercy. We should have gotten that information out of him, no matter what it took, for the sake of Moonstone.”

“But you know Ava is right,” my wolf countered. “You cannot stoop to your sister’s level. That is not who we are.”

I fell silent.

Suddenly, the sound of approaching footsteps pulled me from my thoughts. I looked up to see Winston striding down the hall, his boots leaving muddy tracks on the floor I had just cleaned. He paused, looking down at me with a smirk that made my blood boil.

“Clean that up,” he ordered, gesturing to the mud. His voice dripped with disdain, clearly relishing in my humiliation.

I bit back a retort, feeling thoroughly emasculated. This was not how an Alpha should be treated. The urge to stand up, to assert my dominance, was almost overwhelming. But I had no choice.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, Ava had said.

Swallowing my pride, I nodded and moved to clean the new mess.

Winston watched for a moment, satisfaction clear in his cold eyes, before turning and walking away. I resisted the urge to chuck my scrub brush at his retreating back, imagining how it might look to see the mud splatter against his expensive cloak.