Fated to the Alpha by Jasmine White

CHAPTER TEN

 

I was pretty sure it was a few hours later, judging by the window showing night outside, when I was roused from a state of semi-consciousness by the sound of muffled voices yelling above me. It was hard to make out words through the walls surrounding me, but I could recognize the voices as belonging to my parents.

I got up and climbed the stairs, pressing my ear to the locked door. “Rene, the only thing you’re accomplishing is making her hate you!”

“Maybe that’s true,” Dad said. “Maybe she’ll hate me now, but she’ll thank us later, when she learns her lesson.”

“What lesson is that?  That you’re always right? That Leon is always right?”

“That she owes this pack her loyalty, and that running off with Morgandorfs is betraying us!”

“Rene, this is cruel!”

“Any crueler than what she did to us? Disappearing for weeks and then turning up with one of them?”

“Yes! It is crueler than that! She’s been down there four days; she’s probably losing her mind by now!”

Four days? Was that all it had been? It felt like I’d been in that basement for a lot longer than that. It felt like I’d been down there for weeks.

“Don’t you remember how you were losing your mind while she was gone?” Dad said. “We thought she was dead somewhere, most likely mounted up as some sick trophy for the Morgandorfs to spit on! And then she comes back, and we find out she was alive all this time, and living with them by choice! If that’s not enough to make you go out of your mind, I don’t know what is!”

“Rene, she’s young! She’s following her heart! Is this really an appropriate punishment for that?”

“That sounds romantic to you, doesn’t it? ‘She’s just following her heart.’ Well she has to learn there are consequences to that!”

“But locking her in the basement? Never even letting her see daylight? Like she’s some kind of criminal?”

“She is a criminal!” Dad suddenly blurted out. “Don’t you get that? She abandoned us to consort with the Morgandorfs! Can you think of a worse crime a Caldour can commit?”

“You don’t think for one second you might have pushed her away?”

“Oh, Brenda! I can’t believe you’re defending this!”

“I’m not condoning what she did, Rene. But you’re taking this way too far!”

“Well, it doesn’t matter what you think now,” Dad sighed. “Leon wants her to stay down there until she comes to her senses.”

“She’s going to lose her senses down there!” Mom insisted.

“Maybe that’s what it’ll take!”

“Oh, my god, Rene, listen to yourself! What are you expecting her to say that’ll get you to let her out of there! You think locking her up will make her stop loving that boy, and want to marry Leon? All she’s going to want is to get as far away from this place as she can, if this is how we’re treating her!”

“If you want to take it up with Leon, be my guest. Otherwise, she’s not going anywhere.”

I heard a door open, and footsteps walking through them. Then I heard Mom calling, “Rene! Rene, come back here!” And then I heard the door shut, and Mom sighed in defeat, pulled out a chair and sat down hard.

I did similarly, sinking to my knees on the step and setting my head against the door. At least Mom seemed to be more-or-less on my side, but she was outvoted. She couldn’t help me even if she wanted to—and I got the sense she really did want to.

I didn’t even notice at first when I started crying. It wasn’t until a teardrop fell on my thigh that I realized it. I spent a few more minutes kneeling there on the step, letting all my tears out—

—before I heard my mother’s footsteps approaching the door.

Just as I lifted my head, I heard the latch start to unlock and the door swung open, spilling a flood of light into the gloomy basement. I blinked at the sudden brightness, looking up to see Mom looking down at me. “Evelyn… did you hear that?”

I didn’t answer her. At the moment, I was much more preoccupied with the fact that I could see the inside of the house beyond her. The clean, well-lit, comfortable house, and the outside world beyond it that had been shielded from me all this time. Something primal in me took over, as I suddenly shifted to my four-legged form and lunged forward, desperately trying to take this opportunity for freedom that had presented itself to me.

But Mom was a little quicker, swooping down and catching me in her arms, and holding on tight as I desperately struggled to get away. My claws scrabbled at the floor, and I kept whimpering like a puppy, as Mom kept grabbing me again each time I managed to slip through her grasp a little further. She repeatedly shouted my name, and told me again and again to calm down and be still.

After a minute or two I finally did, mellowing out there on the floor, and slowly returning to my two-legged shape in her arms, where I hung limply like a ragdoll, emotionally drained. Mom lifted me up to place my head on her shoulder and softly shushed me, stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry about this, baby. I wish I could do something.”

“You could let me go,” I sobbed. “I’ll go out that door, disappear into the forest, and never look back.”

“But your father would know,” she said. “And Leon would know. They’d track you down, drag you back here and do even worse than what they’re doing now. Not to mention what they’d do to me.”

“I don’t care what they’ll try to do!” I protested. “I can’t stay down there anymore! I have to do something!”

“I know. This whole thing, it’s just horrible! Your father has really gone too far!”

“So we shouldn’t have to stand for it, Mom! That’s what I’ve been trying to say; we should be trying to change things! We shouldn’t be fighting the Morgandorfs! And I shouldn’t have to be locked up for trying to make that happen!”

“Evelyn…”

“What is going on here?” I heard Leon’s voice demand. We looked up to the open back door to see Dad and Leon standing there, looking at us with angry eyes.

“Rene, what are you…?” Mom said. “I thought you…”

“We could hear the racket the two of you made clear across the village!” Dad said. “Why is she out of the basement?”

“Rene, please! Can’t you see this has gone far enough?”

Leon scowled, and marched toward us, roughly shoving Mom away from me and grabbing me by the wrist. “Deal with your wife, Rene,” he ordered.

“Nooooo!” I screeched as Leon dragged me bumping along back down the stairs into the basement. When we reached the bottom the flung me sliding across the floor to slam into the wall.

When I lifted my head again, he knelt down in front of me, getting right up in my face, all fire, brimstone, and spittle. “You think this treatment is bad?” he thundered. “My father would have had the pack rip you to pieces for consorting with that dreg-of-the-earth Morgandorf scum! Be thankful that I still care enough about you to give you a chance for redemption! Once you say to me that you recognize how you betrayed us, and that you are ready to rejoin us, and are prepared to kill the next Morgandorf you see—and make me believe it—then you may leave this basement. Not before. And if you try to get out before that again, I will personally lock you in a much smaller space, with not even the amount of sunlight you get in here, and the only food you will get is a tiny bowl of gruel once a day, and I will leave you in there, day, after day, after day, until you are so desperate for a breath of fresh air that you are willing to lick the mud from my shoes if I tell you to! Am I perfectly clear?”

I looked Leon straight in the eye—and then I gave him my answer.

I spat in his eye.

Leon recoiled, his eyes wide with shock. The alpha was always supposed to be respected and obeyed; for someone to defy him this bluntly was completely unprecedented. He blinked repeatedly as he wiped his eye, staring at me as if I had just spat fire. It was like he had no idea how to respond to this.

Except to backhand me across the face, I mean.

“One way or another, you’ll learn respect again,” he growled as he stood up. “If I have to beat it into you, starve you or hang you up by your toenails, I will. Remember that.”

With that he started marching back up the stairs, where I now heard the indistinct sounds of my parents yelling at each other above me. I couldn’t make out any words this time, and honestly, I didn’t want to.

Largely because whatever they were arguing about, it sounded like Dad was winning.

Then Leon shut and locked the basement door behind him, muffling the sounds of my parents’ voices, throwing me back into my terrible isolation.

 

*

I couldn’t begin to guess how many more days I was down there. Dad’s was the only face I saw for a long while; he would come down periodically, bring me some food and water, and ask if I was ready to “see reason” yet. Which of course meant he wanted me to say all the hateful propaganda Leon had told me I should say. Well, I was lonely and miserable down there, but I wasn’t to that point yet. So I would take the provisions he brought me, and either keep silent, give him a nasty look, or find some way or other of generally telling him to fuck off.

I started to wonder why Mom hadn’t come down to see me again. I kept hoping she would come back down and tell me she’d come up with some way to help me that she hadn’t thought of before. But I never saw her. In fact, I didn’t even hear her above me. That realization worried me. Had Leon done something to her? Had Dad? Had she paid the price for daring to try to help me?

“Deal with your wife,” Leon had told Dad. What exactly had he meant by that?

As days ticked by and the question continued to haunt me, I started imagining the possibilities of what might have happened. And each thought that crossed my mind only made me feel worse. Maybe Mom had been locked up in another basement like this. Or maybe she’d been locked up in a worse place, like the shed or something, with less floor space and less sunlight like Leon had warned me about. Maybe she was being lashed or tortured. Or maybe…

Maybe I was becoming a paranoid mess.

I finally broke down and had to find out. One day after Dad brought me a simple bowl of soup, and as usual asked me if I was ready to cooperate—to which of course I still remained silent—I spoke up as he turned his back to leave. “Where’s Mom? Why hasn’t she come down to see me?”

Dad gave me an unhappy look. “Leon decided to punish your mother for letting you out by making her spend a week chained to a stake outside by her neck. I hope you’re happy.”

I wasn’t sure what appalled me more: what he’d just told me, or the suggestion that I should be happy. “Can you think of a single reason I have to be happy?”

“I don’t know what makes you happy anymore,” Dad said. “After the way you’ve shamed this pack, for all I know you may think dragging your mother down with you and seeing her humiliated for it is a big hoot.”

Oh, no he didn’t just say that!

As he ascended the stairs I grabbed the bowl of soup in front of me and flung it at him, forcing him to duck as the soup went flying all over the place and the bowl shattered against the far wall. Dad looked over the mess I’d made, and said, “You’re not getting another one.”

“Wouldn’t eat it anyway,” I snarled.

He frowned, and continued marching out.

He started feeding me less after that. I think I was getting only one meal a day at that point. As much as I wanted to continue spiting him by pushing his food away, the malnutrition was starting to take its toll on me. The longer I stayed down there, the weaker I felt. I started to feel an ache inside my gut constantly, and it gradually got harder and harder even to just get myself up off the floor.

Even worse, after all that time with nothing to do and nowhere to go, it was getting steadily harder to maintain my grip on reality. Some days I would swear that rats were eating through the walls and creeping in to surround me, slowly growing in numbers until there were rats everywhere I could see, before I tried to scurry away in panic and disgust and landed with a thud on bare, rat-free floor. Other days I would feel the room starting to shake, until the house started cracking, and the ceiling collapsed and came crashing down on me—and then when I lifted my head after ducking and covering it, I would look up and see the ceiling still there, intact and with no cracks in the walls or anywhere.

Then came a day when I heard the sound of my mother’s footsteps coming down the stairs. I looked up and smiled at her, relieved to finally see her returning to me. She bent down, gazing at me with a tender smile. “My poor pup,” she whispered.

I reached up to touch her face—and found only empty air under my hand.

I cried especially hard that time.

I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. At this rate, I was going to go completely insane if I didn’t starve to death first.

And yet, I never gave Dad what he was looking for. I kept hoping he would realize that it wasn’t going to happen; I would waste away in that basement before I turned on Jeremy. But apparently Dad was still clinging to the notion that I could be persuaded to change.

So long as neither of us was willing to budge, I was going to stay down there.

As I started to realize that, I began to wonder if maybe I should just say out loud what Dad wanted to hear. There was no way I could actually mean it, but maybe if he heard me say it, it might be enough to get me out of there. I could pull off a convincing lie, couldn’t I? I had done it with the Morgandorf pack; they had spent weeks with me living among them, thinking I was someone I wasn’t.

But Dad had a lot more reason to doubt my word than the Morgandorfs had. Hell, he’d be expecting me to suck up to him, to go through the motions of singing his song without really meaning it. So if I said it, I had to make him buy it.

I was in the process of thinking how I was going to do that one night, crouched on the floor of that basement, when I suddenly heard a distant howl come from somewhere outside.

It was an alert to the pack; something big was going down. With a surge of new strength that seemed to come from nowhere, I got up and peered out through that little window, seeing everyone running about, trying to get somewhere in a hurry. A lot of them were shifting to their four-legged shapes in the process, too. And while my view out of that window wasn’t great, I could swear I saw more lupine shapes emerging from the trees.

The Morgandorfs were attacking.

All at once they were everywhere. It was like they had just appeared like a force of nature, swarming across the village. All at once, the village outside me had become engulfed in a sea of teeth, flying fur and bloodshed.

Ironically, it was my own confinement that was keeping me safe from the chaos outside.

Except that might not last for long, I soon realized, as I started hearing more chaos ensuing in the house above me. I could make out voices shouting, and lupine growls, and the sound of fighting and snapping. I couldn’t follow any details; it was all such a blur. I kept trying to listen for some specific sounds that could allow me to discern what was actually going on up there.

And then it stopped. Everything went quiet. I strained my ears harder, searching for something… anything…

And then I did hear something.

I heard the door opening.

And then somebody was rushing down them.  And as he stopped and stood before me, I blinked, convinced I had to be losing my mind again.

“Jeremy?” I choked.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

“What’s going on?”

“I followed my pack here when they decided to launch an attack. I was afraid for you. But we’d better leave before anyone else finds you!”

He started tugging at my arm. “But wait,” I protested. “My family… what about them?”

“Your family locked you down here, for loving me,” he pointed out. “They’re not going to help you now.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

When he started running up the steps, this time I didn’t resist him pulling me along. We reached the house above, finding it empty of anyone else, but tables and furniture had been overturned and broken, and every door was standing open. Jeremy and I promptly shifted to our four-legged shapes and went running out the front door, into the scene of chaos outside.

It was just like that night when my pack had attacked theirs. It was like I was seeing a mirror image of the same fight—but I had no intention of staying to admire it. If someone from my own pack found me, they would most likely try to throw me back into that basement. And if someone from Jeremy’s pack found me… I didn’t want to find out what they’d do.

So we ran. We ran like hell for the trees as fast as our four paws could carry us. We put the chaos in the village as far behind us as we could. The open night sky of the village disappeared, giving way to the deeper, darker cover of the forest. We continued running, following the trail by feel, by scent, and by sound more than sight as we dashed through the gloom, weaving past trees and jumping hills and roots.

I could swear we only ran for a short while, but when we finally stopped I knew the village was already miles behind us. And at that moment, all I could think was: Good riddance. My pack, which claimed to love me, which claimed I had betrayed them, had in essence betrayed me. If who I wanted to love was such a crime to them, then I decided they would no longer have my love.

Fuck them all. Let them and the Morgandorfs kill each other for all I care. I was tired of being punished for wanting my own life, or trying to make a difference.

Besides, with Jeremy here, I had everything I needed. As we settled down in that little quarry by the stream, which I realized was in that place where we first met, I made sure to let him know that. It was ironic that I waited until we had shifted back to our two-legged forms before I pounced on him. “I was beginning to think I’d never see you again,” I breathed as I repeatedly kissed him. “I thought I was gonna shrivel up and die down there!”

“Don’t you have more faith in me than that?” he said, in between kissing me back. “Nothing on this Earth could keep me away from you.”

We rolled about in the dirt, our hands roving all over each other and our feet kicking everywhere. I felt up the muscles of his back and the firmness of his butt, while he palmed my breasts and suckled on my neck. I ground my crotch against him as he kissed along my collarbone, taking my tits into his mouth, making me quiver and moan.

Yes… yes… after so long… finally!

“Evie?”

I stared up into Jeremy’s face. “I missed you so much,” I breathed. “I almost went crazy without you.”

“I’m here now,” he said, his erection rubbing against the top of my thigh, making my pussy drip with anticipation.

“Don’t make me wait any longer!” I gasped.

“Evie?”

Jeremy mounted himself above me, lining himself up with my opening. My breath came in short gasps as he slowly pushed down into me.

Yes… yes… YES!

“Evie!”

Something touched my shoulder. Something that felt like a hand. And it didn’t feel like Jeremy’s. In fact…

I didn’t feel Jeremy at all anymore.

I suddenly sat up. Jeremy was supposed to be on top of me, giving me the long overdue fucking I had been craving. He wasn’t. And the ground beneath me felt wrong. It wasn’t soft dirt I felt beneath me, but hard basement floor. There was no open night sky above me; there was a ceiling. I was surrounded not by trees but instead by four bare walls.

“No… NO!” I screamed, suddenly jumping up and running to the wall, unable to accept that it was there. But it was there, perfectly solid under my hands, which began frantically clawing at it.

“I WAS OUT! I WAS OUT!”

“Evie! Hey!”

A hand fell on my shoulder again, and I turned to its source. I blinked at the sight of another face I felt like I had not seen in eons. “Charlene?”

“Your dad finally agreed to let me come down to visit you. I thought you’d want some company… unless you’ve got some already, so to speak?”

In spite of the things she’d said to me the last few times I’d seen her, I really was happy she was here…

Or was she?

After what I had just experienced, I couldn’t be sure of anything now. I couldn’t trust what I saw.

My brief smile vanished, and I scurried away from the apparition of Charlene, ducking into the corner. “No!” I whimpered, my hands grabbing my head. “You’re not here! You’re not real! You’re in my head!”

“Evie! Come on, it’s all right! I’m here!”

Breathing hard, I started to chant, “I’m losing my mind! I’m losing my mind! I’m losing my mind! I’m losing my mind!”

“Hey! Calm down! I’m really here!” Charlene exclaimed, dropping to her knees and pulling me into her arms, hugging my head to her chest and stroking my hair. “You’re okay! You’re okay! I’m here!”

As she held me I started to calm down, slowly beginning to consider the idea that she was really there. The fact that she was touching me lent some credence to her presence… but then, I had imagined Jeremy touching me too.

But something about this felt more genuine than any fantasy. The way her hands were tenderly stroking my head… there was nothing imagined about that.

I slowly lifted my head to her face. “Charlene?” I cautiously whispered.

She chuckled softly. “Yeah. Still me.”

I finally let go. I threw my arms around her midsection and broke down crying against her belly.