Page 3 of Wolf Bound

“Get your head out of the clouds and get back to your room,” the cruel nurse says, her eyes cold and hard as she pulls off her bloody gloves. “You may bleed for a little while, but you’ll be fine. I’ll tell the guards to throw some extra blankets in your room.”

Room?Scoff.Give me a break.

Prison cell is apparently too hard for her to say after she just violated me, causing me to bleed outside of my heat cycles. It’s funny the things humans will avoid to make themselves morecomfortable after they commit heinous acts against someone else. They always seem to skirt some invisible line past the truth that doesn’t make any sense to me.

As I attempt to get up off the exam table, I flinch at the sudden flare of pain between my legs. Before anyone in the room can notice, I shut down my reaction to the pain. I turn away from the nurse and slip on my thread-worn clothes, internally squirming at the thought of blood getting on them. Like always, I have two unbearable choices; get blood on the only clothes I’ll have for a long time, or walk with a guard bare from the bottom down. Seems I will be living in my own dried blood because the alternative is too much for me.

Without a word from anyone, the door opens, revealing one of the guards ready to escort me to my cell. He’s one of the better guards to have escort me. His gaze is always unfocused and uninterested, his attitude showing his complete disinterest in me.

With quick movements, he attaches my chains, ones made of pure silver, to stop me from using my magic. As if silver even works on shifters, especially shifters whose magic is born of ancient times. It’s a myth neither myself, nor any of my ancestors before me, have felt the need to lie to rest. If silver is what they use because they think it works, then that just gives me the opportunity to use it against them if the situation ever arises.

The guard walks the halls at his normal speed, making me walk faster to keep up with him. Falling behind is not an option, even if silver itself isn’t harmful to me, the cuffs cutting into my skin still are. The beatings for slowing down the guard are also something to fear.

It’s best to shut up and keep up. The words were drilled into me from the time I could walk and over time started repeating in my head like a mantra.

The walls blur by me, my mind cataloguing every door and hallway like it always does, hoping for a glimpse inside of them to see if they lead out. The need to be out there, in nature,free, drives me so hard some days that I feel like I'm going to shatter into a million pieces right where I stand if I don't get out there. I never shatter though. I simply keep moving, going through the motions and the tests, waiting for my one opportunity to be free. The funny thing is, that's where the dream ends. There's nothing past being free, because I don't know what it means to be free. I know what I've read or watched, but freedom is a luxury I have yet to be able to experience.

The guard stops at the doorway that leads to the cells. The gothic, iron door adorned with crosses stays locked at all times, so it always takes a moment to get it open. Clicking and tinkling sounds from the keys always set me on edge because I know that nothing good ever follows it. It's instinct at this point to tense at the sound, waiting to be thrown back into my cell or dragged back out for more tests.

As the guard pushes the creaking, heavy door open, he roughly tugs on the chains to force me to follow him through. His rough pulling mixed with the loud clang of the door swinging shut behind us makes me stumble forward. I involuntarily flinch away from the guard and the door, shrinking into the wall. Not that the guard seems to even notice as he just pulls harder, ready to be done with me and this part of his job.

"Blankets and rags will be brought by within the hour," he grumbles, scratching his short blonde beard uncomfortably. "Hands still."

He undoes the cuffs while I stand in my cell, my eyes trained to the ground once he starts. Spooking a guard while he removes the chains leads to unbearable, immediate pain for me. I've learned it's best to stand as still as possible and keep my eyes trained on the ground.

There's less chance one of them will think I'm hostile this way. Once he has them off, he closes the door to my cell, the lock quickly clicking into place. After that, he's gone faster than it takes me to look up, the door to this block already banging shut behind him as I look at the clock on the wall across from me.

Moving around my small cell, I gather one of the rags they gave me for my last heat and wince as I get it into place. There's already blood in my pants, but at least this will stop any more of it leaking until it's over. There's one part of me that wants to know what they did to me down there to make me bleed outside of my cycle, but a larger part of me, coupled with my peryton, says it's probably better not to know. There was a saying in a book I read that saidignorance is bliss. Now, I don't know about going so far as to say bliss, but ignorance keeps me going, that's for sure. If I thought about even half the tests and experiments they've run on me in the past, I probably would have given up on surviving. Sometimes, it's better to be alive and sane, than have all the information.

My body crumbles beneath me, sliding down the rough, stone wall until I hit the ground, directly on my nest of blankets that I call a bed. Within moments of closing my eyes, I'm whisked away to the meadow I visit my peryton in.

She greets me, nudging her head against my stomach and spreading her deep teal wings out beside her. Like I do every time I visit, I burrow my face into her neck and breathe in the familiarity of our scent. She's me, and I'm her, but we're two parts that coexist together, instead of one being with the gift to shapeshift.

It's one of the biggest secrets kept from the Croisés, aside from the true depth of my magic and my connection to the past. It's the reason why they can never get what they want from the shifters. There's no way to pull her from me, but there's also no physical way to bring forth our connection because it's a magicall of its own. It's older than any of us. It dates back to the days of creation, though none of us know who created it to begin with. If the Crosiés are right with their God, then it was their own God that created this connection and hid it from them. They either talk of a false God they worship or they've skewed the teachings of the God they think so highly of. Either way, they aren't doing this for anybody but themselves and their own selfish desires.

Sitting on the ground in the meadow, I rub my peryton behind her ears, stroking the soft, short fur as I stare off into the golden distance. It's been nagging at me for a few years now, how humans seem to run on so much selfishness and care very little for each other. The way these humans act with me and each other, it's a cruel kind of madness that I can't wrap my mind around. There has to be more than I can see, a world that's kinder and full of light. I can't lose hope that past these walls, there's more. If I lose hope that there's better, I lose the last tether keeping me together.

The movies I've seen, the few they actually let me view, all ended with a happy ending. Same with the books I could get my hands on, happy endings everywhere. The question I've always had, but never found an answer to, is, do they all have happy endings because that's reality, or is it because they're so lacking in real life that people create them to make themselves feel better?

My peryton looks up at me, her jade eyes reflecting the confusion and uneasiness in my own gaze.

Yeah, I fear it's the latter as well.

Chapter Two

Talia

These same grey, drab cement walls stare at me mockingly as the clock on the wall ticks by. Twenty-four years in this nightmare, every second counted down right in front of my face. It’s enough to make you go insane. That’s before you add in the medical experiments and the upcoming breeding they’ve decided I’m ready for.

They want the clock to taunt me, and while it does, I try to never outwardly show it. Instead of covering my ears like I desperately want to, I twirl a piece of my matted, wavy teal hair in between my fingers, over and over again, watching the seconds tick by.

Twirling my hair is all I have left to keep me from screaming every moment of the day. It’s the one nervous tick that apparently the doctor deemed harmless enough to let me keep. Unlike the fingernail chewing, lip biting, or any other tick that would show physical signs it was happening. Those ones were dealt with in ways that still make me wince at the phantom pain whenever I almost do one of those ticks.

Perfection is not simply something to strive for in this prison, it’s what I need to be to survive. The medical staff here don’t like any kind of viewed weakness. They squash any show of it immediately. If I show fragility in any way, then everything they’re working towards, the rise in power of these special humans, is in jeopardy. Everything comes down to me, one of the last of the Peryton line.

They need to see me be strong and powerful, so that I can make them stronger or create offspring to do the same. My children will be like me, used in more experiments and more torture until these monsters get what they want. It’s apparently what my family lineage has come down to since I was also born in captivity. That’s why I would rather die than give in to their breeding attempts.

It’s been weeks of silence, and that has me completely on edge. My ears still pick up their voices around the facility, taunting me as they leave me to rot in this small cell. It has a barely working toilet, a cot with one thread-worn blanket, and room for me to sit on the ground and watch the fucking clock through the bars of my cage. They’re keeping me in here, building the suspense and driving me to insanity so that I’m easier to manipulate into breeding with whatever shifter they find to help them.

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