Page 142 of Untamed

"Mactiir!" she turns to me, those gorgeous golden eyes shimmering with tears. They're tears of frustration, I know, but it still hits me like a sucker punch.

My snarling growl reverberates through the room. The hush that follows is filled with my mate's sweet voice. "I don't like being laughed at." She buries her head in my chest.

"I know, my Bliss," I tell her, still stroking her back. "No one is laughing at you."

"Holy fuck. She's got the beast by the balls, yeah?" Orion moves back to the bars, the idiot. "I'm Orion, darling."

My mate turns her head to glare at him. "A hunter," she spits, "in the stars."

"And you're a darling, little hedgewitch, cousin," he returns with a hard curve of his lips.

This time it's my fist that crashes through the bars. Orion hits the floor, laid out flat on his back, blood gushing from his nose.

"She is Nature's she-wolf, you fucking piece of shit," I snarl at him. My monster bares his teeth, foaming for this pissant's blood.

"What is a witch?!"Qitsuksnaps, her frustration scoring my nerves as it skates along the one-sided bond.

"A female, usually, who can commune with nature," Orion chokes out around the copious amounts of blood gushing out of his nose, "and bend it to her will." Turning his head with a groan, he spits out more blood. Trying to clear his last open airway, I suppose. Too bad for him that my mate choked him not even two minutes ago.

"Oh," is the response. Her anger deflates like a popped tire. "I suppose I docommune;" she mutters under her breath, "confer, speak, converse."

Orion coughs, "you two are fucking perfect for each other. Blout won't know what hit him."

I narrow my eyes at him. "About him. You're going to tell me everything you know about BlueSnout and that fucker."

Orion laughs weakly. I ignore him, instead choosing to turn in a circle, eyeing the many doors, securely locked but hardly soundproof, ringing the corridor. We don't turn the lights up too high down here unless we want to, and every cell holds deep shadows. And hidden in those shadows are my prisoners in this war. I can smell them, hear their hitched, nervous breaths, the accelerated heartbeats. "That goes for all of you. I want to know everything, I mean everything, about Alpha Blout."

The hidden prisoners tremble in dread.

Orion moves closer to the bars, "let my wolves and me out of here, and I'll tell you everything I know."

The softest grunt comes from the shadows, a panicked "alpha!"

"I'm not an alpha," Orion says to me. His eyes flicker to Willa. "My grandfather fucked that up by having Harrigan with his breeder, first. Let us out, and we'll work with you."

I hear heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. "Let's haul them all outside," Jax claps me on the shoulder, a brow raised when he sees the damage done to Orion.

Orion just smirks smugly. Elias was right. Orion Ferax knows things that RustClaw doesn't. Things that I plan on encouraging him to tell me.

"Orion," I smile at him with canines bared, internally laughing when that smirk falls. He's tough. I'll give him that. His feet don't move backward, but he can't stop his body from swaying away from me.

"You're coming with me. Welcome to the RustClaw, you son of a bitch."

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Willa

I don't understand why Old Alpha wanted all of Mactiir's prisoners taken outside, but I'm grateful for it. Mactiir's 'cells' are a terrible place. Worse, I think, than the grey room near the Lake. Darker, with a smell of mildew and despair. As we emerge back into the sunshine, I see the pale skin under the dirt and bruises of all of the wolves who were locked inside.

It was a dungeon. A real one, with iron bars and silver chains, just like the stories Mama would tell me about princesses and heroes. I eye Mactiir and realize that my male would be the evil king of those stories. The ogre in his lair with an actual dungeon.

Then I seethatfemale,and my she-wolf curls her lip. When Mactiir runs his hand down my back soothingly and brushes the top of my head with a kiss, I step away a bit.Thatfemaledoesn't look too good, but my eyes keep seeing her looking at my Mactiir with those big, sad eyes. I can feel the hit of his arm against my chest. The phantom pain makes me wince. It feels like a weakness.

Her mate will kill her. She has no protection against a male and the games he would play with her. She don't even understand the damn game.

Whose fault is that, Thomson?

I feelinadequate; scant, meager, inferior. I don't understand the 'game,' just like Father said.

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