Page 26 of The Wolf's Kidnapped Mate

But we weren’t close. He’d never even looked at me before the other day, during that meeting. And the look he’d given me then was one of those attractive, soul-stopping kind of looks. It drew me to him like a thirsty animal to water. Until he’d turned to our alpha and said he couldn’t do it.

A shadow passed over the window. I blinked a couple of times while my instincts took over. Moving slowly and deliberately, I shut off the kitchen light. I stood in front of the sink and focused on the old house, hearing the muted sound of Faye’s pop music playing in her upstairs bathroom—which was up and to the right from my current position.

Another shadow flitted over the windowpane. I felt a sparkling paranoia that tickled my upper back and made the hair on my neck stand at attention. I was trying to steady my breathing, to keep my heart from kicking into high gear, but it had been so long since I sensed anything like this. It had been a whole year.

What was going on?

My hands rested calmly on the sink, yet the rest of me stiffened. After a few seconds, my muscles slacked a bit, allowing me to turn my neck. I heard a shuffling sound from the living room—like someone was inside my apartment.

Sometimes, Faye came over and just lounged on the couch. It could be her. But she usually announced herself when she came inside. Besides, the door was locked. She would have had to use her spare key. Which was a sound that was tuned in to my body whether I wanted it there or not.

It had been quiet the whole time I was thinking. Yet my thoughts had been loud enough for me to drop my guard.

What’s going on?

Paranoia slammed into me as I flipped around to face the shadows in the kitchen. Nothing but the doorway spilled light into the room, enhancing the shadowy corners and making me feel like I was being swallowed by the void. No one was here. But I could feelsomething.

I took a tentative step forward, and then another, carefully tuning out my fear so I could focus on the cabinet to my left. Taped inside the door was my hunting knife. I could grab it to defend myself and then—

Andthen, I got drowsy. The room spun. Everything went dark.

I was deep in sleep, and I couldn’t get back to the surface.

***

Disorienting light welcomed me back to the world of the conscious. Since I couldn’t see, I used my remaining senses to figure out what the hell had happened to me—maybe there would be a clue about why I had passed out in the kitchen lingering nearby.

Had I not eaten enough after I got home? Sheesh, that was a question for the ages. Because I never skipped meals. I was a scheduler and an organizer—so everything was planned right down to the millisecond. Usually. Typically.

Evidently, not today.

A shuffling sound echoed from my right. It moved to the front of my awareness, revealing a scent that felt eerily familiar.

Evergreen.

That was the scent of the greenhouse. That was the smell that had gotten my attention on the beach even when I’d thought I was alone. Evergreen dragged me the rest of the way up the metaphorical tunnel to the surface of everything, right on top of a wooden chair in the middle of a sparsely decorated room. Something pungent tinted the air.

I was most certainly not in my apartment anymore. Some kind of glittery trails swirled around my head. My shoulders stiffened. My body froze up. I was stuck. I couldn’t move—yet there wasn’t a speck of rope in sight from what I could see. No duct tape. No handcuffs.

Just the swirls.

“You’re awake,” said a gravelly voice. The evergreen scent intensified at the sound. Because that was a sound I knew all too well. And the way his voice shifted made my heart skip a beat. “Sorry I had to do this to you, but you wouldn’t let me in.”

My eyes flickered north. There stood Fred, the guy who had taken me into town hours ago—or how long had I been here at this point? Rage started at the base of my spine and worked its way up through my body. Even though I couldn’t move, I could say everything I needed to say right now while he was standing there.

But no matter how much my nerves tingled, my tongue flicked forward, or my nostrils flared to draw and exhale air, I couldn’t speak. My lips felt like they were glued together. More of the glittery swirls gathered at the front of my mouth. As they drifted south and out of view, I felt them lace around my throat.

Oh, that was just cheap. If he was using magic to retain me, then he was breaking about a dozen supernatural laws. Not to mention the human world and their legal jargon. Any higher-up official in the supernatural world was going to have a field day unraveling the conventions getting broken here.

Aside from it being totally immoral, and the fact that it was a practice that had been banned from the black ops since the seventies, it was just plaincheap.

And that made my rage boil to a breaking point.

Through my eyes alone, I expressed my disdain, pupils expanding as wide as possible so I could get every detail of his stance and demeanor. The cold stone mask he frequently wore was traded for one of unfortunate regret—and that was just too much. I couldn’t handle seeing that.

Because if he regretted this, then that meant I couldn’t predict his actions.

I was screwed.

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