Page 29 of Chased By My Grumpy Alpha
Wait...Did I even climb the tree last night? My fevered mind struggles to piece together fragments of memory. Everything feels foggy and disjointed.
That’s when I see them. Two dead rabbits, freshly killed, lying next to the bed of leaves and moss I’m on. Luna is delicately eating the meat off of one of them.
“Luna?” My voice is slightly slurred. I try to sit up too quickly, making my head spin violently. Black spots dance in my field of vision, and I have to steady myself with shaking hands. “Did you catch these?”
She looks up at me with bloody whiskers, then goes back to eating.
I stare at the rabbits through my fever haze. They’re perfectly killed, with no unnecessary damage, like they were taken down by an expert hunter, but my mind can’t quite process this.
My stomach growls so loudly that it echoes through the forest. I don’t care how Luna managed it; I need that meat if I want my leg to heal properly.
“Thank you, girl,” I say, reaching for my knife. “I don’t know how you did it, but you just saved our lives.”
My hands shake violently as I skin the remaining rabbit, the fever still raging through my system. My movements are clumsy and uncoordinated, but the desperate need for protein drives me forward.
“We’re going to be okay,” I mumble to Luna through chattering teeth as I struggle to build a small fire. “Just need to get some food in me, get my strength back, and then we’ll keep moving.”
Luna purrs and rubs against my arm, and despite my weakened state, I feel a flicker of hope.
Yet, I can’t shake the feeling that someone picked me up during the night. The memory feels too real to be just a dream, but my thoughts are too muddled to make sense of it. There’s noone here except Luna and me, and the forest sounds distant and muffled through my illness.
“Must have been the fever,” I whisper hoarsely, turning the rabbit meat over the flames with unsteady hands. “Just my imagination.”
But as I eat the meat in small, careful bites—my stomach too unsettled for more—I keep glancing around the clearing through blurry eyes, feeling confused.
The next morning, I wake up on a branch to see three dead rabbits arranged neatly at the foot of the tree below me.
“Luna?” I call down weakly, my voice still rough. She has already descended and is delicately eating from one of them. “Three this time? You’re really outdoing yourself.”
My head pounds as I carefully climb down, each movement sending waves of dizziness through me. The fever has lessened slightly, but my skin still burns hot, and my hands shake as I grip the branches.
“How are you even catching these?” I ask, slumping heavily to the ground. “They’re almost as big as you are.”
Luna ignores me, focused on her breakfast. I don’t have the energy to question this further; my body needs the protein too desperately. I skin one of the rabbits with trembling fingers and build a small fire.
This pattern continues for four days. Each morning, after climbing down from whatever tree I’ve managed to haul myself up into, I find impeccably killed game waiting—rabbits, birds, once a fat squirrel. My fever slowly breaks, the infection in my leg finally responding to the steady nutrition. The nightly climbs get slightly easier as my strength returns, though I still have to rest frequently during each ascent.
“You’re amazing,” I tell Luna on the fourth morning, holding her close as she purrs against my chest. We’re sitting at the baseof an old oak where I spent another uncomfortable night wedged between branches. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
On the fifth morning, I wake in my tree to find a massive wild boar lying dead directly below me.
I nearly fall from my perch in shock. “Luna?”
She is curled up in my lap, fast asleep. There’s no way—absolutely no way—my cat killed a boar that outweighs her by at least a hundred pounds.
“Luna, wake up.” I shake her gently, my mind racing. “Did you see who left this?”
She stretches, yawns, and looks down at the boar with the same mild interest she showed the rabbits.
Ice water floods my veins despite the lingering fever. Someone’s been hunting for me. Someone’s been watching me sleep in these trees, leaving food every day, and I’ve been too delirious to figure it out.
Despite my fear, my stomach growls loudly at the sight of all that meat. I’m still weak, still fighting the infection, and my body still desperately needs protein. Whoever—or whatever—is stalking me hasn’t hurt me yet. Maybe it never will.
“We need to be careful,” I whisper to Luna as I carefully climb down. “But we can’t waste this.”
I skin and prepare portions of the boar, constantly glancing around the forest. Every shadow could hide a predator, and every sound could signal danger, but the meat smells too good to abandon.
“Just enough to get stronger,” I mutter, building a larger fire than usual. “Then, we move fast.”
