Page 53 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

I’m flat on my back again, in a position so vulnerable it’s not even funny. One I should get up and do something about.

And I will.

Soon.

I couldn’t even eat the sandwich or drink the water that materialized beside me before. Both are still on the other side of the open cage doors. My stomach is hollow and my mouth is dry, but nothing could tempt me to drink or eat.

I can’t seem to want to move.

“What do you want?” Is it just in my head that my words are slurred?

His face is a mask but lines bracket penetrating amber eyes. “To show you civility.”

It’s hilarious that he’s the one talking about civility when he’s barely stopped snarling and growling at me.

One time, shortly after he left my cage, a furious howl rang out, and even though I’d never heard him howl before, I knew it was him.

Civilized people don’t howl.

I’d been alarmed, as any normal person would be, but I’d shaken off my unease—and my fear—the way I have most of the things that scared me in the past.

If my head wasn’t pounding and I could shove aside this desire to close my eyes and sleep forever, I might remind him that his men abducted me from one of the best colleges in the country, where I was graduating top of my class.

He peers over his shoulder. “Finan.”

When he rises, there’s absolutely nothing between me and the open cage door.

Now would be an excellent time to leap to my feet and bolt to freedom.

But when even blinking requires effort, all I can do is watch Finan’s approach.

Finan bends, presumably to pick me up.

Just before he touches me, a vibrating, hair-raising growl fills my cage.

There’s no question who’s responsible for it.

Finan freezes. “Aren?”

“Get out of the way, you’re moving too slow,” the Wolf King growls.

Finan raises an eyebrow, but he moves aside, and I suck in a breath when the Wolf King scoops me up from the floor and carries me out of the cage.

I’m not heavy. Not sure I’m light either, but I feel utterly weightless in his arms, and I’m sure it’s just in my head, but I am almost positive he sniffs my hair.

I brace myself for him to complain about me smelling when he’s the one who stuck me in a cage without a shower.

The Wolf King doesn’t complain. I must be more out of it than I thought because I swear his arms tighten around me, like he’s trying to draw me even closer to his chest. But that can’t be right. He wants me dead.

Then he takes a step out of the cage, and I stop thinking about how strange it feels to be in his arms and how his wild forest scent is so distracting.

My wolf fills my head with the sound of her unhappy growls. They’re faint, barely audible at all, and she isnothappy that I haven’t been speaking to her, but I couldn’t. Not when I was in the cage where, minute by minute, it felt like she was the one fading.

Or dying.

Swallowing hard, I try not to cry.

Foster care was the worst. The absolute worst. But I always had her. To have her back again makes me want to cry with happiness and punch the Wolf King in the face for taking her away from me.

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