Page 49 of Her Tortured Beasts

There’s a wolf at the door, resting with her head on its paws, but I breeze easily past her. Beyond is the darkness of the stone chamber.

There, hanging against the wall in that X position, with their head slumped, is my Raquel. My heart squeezes in pain as I surge towards them.

“Raquel,”I hiss.“Can you hear me?”

My friend is still where they hang, and if I couldn’t see their chest expanding with breath, I would have panicked.

I call their name again.

Raquel flinches, but their eyes are squeezed tightly shut as if in pain. It would be uncomfortable to be separated from your body by force, the pieces of you straining to return to each other like two magnets held tightly by invisible hands.

“It’s okay,”I whisper.“I’m going to try to get you out somehow. I’m so fucking sorry. No one was meant to get hurt because of me.”

“Everything is a mess, Lia,” Raquel breathes. “A fucking mess.”

My insides turn cold as I register the broken words.

“Well, well, well,” comes a female sneer from behind me. “If it isn’t the Boneweaver bitch.”

I whirl around and realise I’d somehow dropped my invisibility shield in my shock at Raquel’s words. As soon as I do, though, I’m grabbed by a telekinetic fist and shoved violently backward into the wall.

Crying out, I lash back, pulling my mind away from the grip of this wolf. But a second wolf joins the forces holding me, then a third. I scream in frustration. Metal encloses around my mind, holding me fixed in place with ancient draconian forces far stronger than me.

“I’m going to kill you,” she snarls, and I can almost feel her breath on my face. “A mate for a mate.”

“I didn’t kill your mate,” I choke.

She bares her teeth, growling deep in her throat. “No, but Savage Fengari did, and you are his regina.”

I’m slammed against the wall so hard my physical body crumples where I still sit in my cage in Xander’s room. Stars break across my vision as my entire body seizes under the force.

Shit, Aurelia. Think.

But the hold on me is beyond anything I’ve experienced before.

“All they’ll find of you is your cold body,” Ruben’s regina whispers into my mind. “That’s the price of taking my mate from me.”

Honestly, I kind of understand.

Until the pain starts. I try not to scream, I really do, but having your mind prised apart via telepathic forces feels like hot scissors digging in and cutting you apart.

“That’s right,” one of the wolves rasps in sick fascination. “Scream like our mate couldn’t.”

I get to take a breath in, and in that moment, I hear a whimper that must be Raquel. The pain starts up again, a grating, cutting sensation that might very well drive me mad after my isolation.

It’s too much. Altogether, all of this is too much.

My anima rears up and roars, a thunderous sound that echoes all around us. The three wolves are thrown off me. One of them whines and I snarl against the wall, daring them to come closer.

Xander strolls into the dungeon. “Return,” he orders me. “And you don’t get to leave your cage for the next week.”

I flee, only sparing a glance at Raquel, whose head is now raised, red-rimmed eyes staring at me in desperation and horror. As I rush back to my physical body on all fours, I know the terrible truth. I can’t risk coming back down here. They would have done worse than kill me. There would have been nothing left of my mind if I’d not telekinetically thrown them off.

That would leave them to do what they wanted to my body. Just like they did to my mother.

Chapter 28

Xander

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