Page 52 of Unsubmissive Omega
Despite the circumstances, I smiled. Arnius was maturing, and he was going to be a loyal pack member.
“Thank you for bringing this to me, Arnius. I appreciate it, but right now, my priority is finding Xander. I’ll talk to your friends later. In the meantime, don’t tell anyone about our conversation. I’ll deal with it once I’ve brought Xander home.”
“Will the Alpha Mate be okay, Alpha?” Arnius' brow was wrinkled with worry. I understood how he felt. He wasmymate, but he was the heart and soul of the pack. It was the first time in many years that the pack had an Alpha Mate, to lose him now would be devastating.
My savage growl startled Arnius again. It seemed I was making a habit of that. “He’d better be or I’ll rip the throats out of everyone responsible."
After a beat, I continued, "I have a suspicion I know who’s involved in this. And if I’m not mistaken, I know where he is. Although… keep that information to yourself for now.” I laced the last with enough command to let him know I was deadly serious, but without the compulsion I could have used. He’d shown me trust in bringing the information about Zendius to me, and I needed to return that trust. But there was no time to waste. Arnius stepped out of my way, as I strode past him on my way back to Xeres’ study.
Chapter 25
XANDER
I refused to sleep away my last hours. If I was going to die in here, I was not doing it lying down. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
Fuck it was cold, though. Shivers racked my body.
My hands trembled as I tried to work the metal ring out of the concrete wall. I pulled and pushed from so many different angles. Surely something this old would be decaying by now? But it didn’t budge and my skin stung every time it accidentally brushed against the concrete wall. I assumed it was the cold.
I tried hitting the concrete around the ring with some of the chain, thumping and cracking at the wall until my fingers were bloodied and covered in the red dust. A few tiny crumbs of concrete floated away but nowhere near what I needed to free myself.
The tremors had become whole body shakes and I was starting to lose control of my limbs, which twitched and shook in spasms.
I was nearly out of ideas. I was never getting out of this fucking place.
I huddled, squatting with my arms around my knees, not wanting to sit on the freezing concrete floor, trying to conserve body heat. I thought about the life I’d lived. The early years, almost lost to memory, they’d been ok. Then the long years with my cruel uncle and his vile family. The only decent thing from those years were the books and all the things I’d taught myself. They hadn’t been able to keep that from me with their stupid omega discrimination. I remembered my spell books – they hadn’t taught me anything truly useful, but I’d enjoyed them. I didn’t know if they were real, the spells, and I couldn’t have wielded them anyway, not being a mage, but it'd been fun to pretend I could. I’d imagined myself destroying their precious house, everything going up in a fucking amazing explosion of stone and fire. I wondered if I could even remember the spell now. I’d practiced it so many times, I could have almost recited it in my sleep back then, but I’d never had the nerve to actually invoke it. I’d have been caught right in the middle of the crumbling building had it worked, so it would only have been useful as a final catastrophic act of annihilation.
Fear had fled, leaving behind the bone-aching cold. My thoughts were growing sluggish. I was losing my mind. A warmth crept over my body and I looked towards the stairs thinking maybe the door had opened, but there was nothing but the darkness.
I’d thought I might die of dehydration, but it seemed hypothermia would get me first. It wasn’t going to be so bad then. I felt kind of warm. Warm, like the thoughts of the life Ialmostled. Mated to a man who was kind and considerate, and fucking hot as well. I thought of the days we would have worked side by side for the betterment of the pack, and the nights we would have shared, skin on skin, sometimes fucking, sometimes just holding each other. Maybe we’d have had pups one day –or not, I wasn’t sure if I wanted pups. But we would have had a great life together.
It made me so fucking mad.
My fucking prick of an uncle had made my adolescent years a fucking nightmare, and now he’d stolen my future from me too. He’d buried me here beneath his house where no-one would ever find me, if anyone bothered looking for me. Somehow, he’d set me up from the start, and now Darius would think I’d followed through on my original plan to run away from him. No-one would come searching for me.
If I was going to die, I wanted to go out with a bang, even if it was just in my imagination. I was so cold, I was hot, so I knew I didn’t have much longer. Why was it so cold in this fucking place?
I staggered to my feet, muscles and joints aching as I unfolded myself. I shuffled closer to the wall. There was sufficient slack in the chain for me to grasp one of the last links in my free hand and force it to the ground. Drawing it across the uneven surface, I scratched a dark trail of dust in the shape of a small pentagram barely big enough to stand in, then a wobbly circle around its five points. The circle was misshapen but that didn’t matter. None of this mattered. It was just the desperate delusion of a hallucinating mind. I was going out in a blaze of glory. Fuck, I was going mad, wasn’t I?
I shut my eyes. Imagined myself in my room in the house above. An image of Darius flittered unbidden into my mind, and my heart hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, right before I said the words I’d practiced so many times, only this time I fuckingmeantthem.
Chapter 26
DARIUS
It took hours to reach Xander’s uncle’s mansion. Xander and my relationship had been undermined and sabotaged from the start. When we’d realized that someone had made a deliberate attempt to undermine Xander’s confidence, and his happiness, we’d concluded it was his uncle. Now I wondered if maybe there was more to it than that.
But Xander had disappeared, and I knew he wouldn’t have gone voluntarily. A week ago, I would have thought differently, but we’d been getting along like a fucking house on fire, both in and out of the bedroom. I’d been fond of him from the start, and I was fairly certain he was starting to have feelings for me as well. So, no, there was no way he would have run off now.
I worried over our lost telepathic link, but Xander had given me a clue as to where he might be, long before this had happened.
Xander had been brought to me through Zendius’ association with Xander’s uncle. It seemed probable that Zendius was trying to destroy my position in the pack and having failed at destroying my relationship with my new mate, had taken a different tack and was now undermining it with rumors. Thathad required Xander to disappear. Either he was dead – and I could feel the existence of the link, even if I couldn’t use it – or he had been kidnapped and detained. Xander had told me about his uncle’s dungeon and his threats. It wasn’t a long shot to guess that was where he was.
The problem was I had no idea where Xander’s uncle lived. That detail had never been a part of the mating arrangements, and it hadn’t seemed necessary after the event. I hadn’t thought we’d ever need to see him again.
Fortunately, we had a mage, who, for whatever reason, was showing an unusual degree of interest in Xander. At the time, I’d thought he was passingly curious about whom the Alpha of his pack was forming a union with, but he had posed some unusual questions to my mate, and made a few comments from time to time that had me wondering. I knew better than to interrogate the mage, however.
