After My Alpha Drugged Me for Ten Years novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Cage in the Back

An enforcer crushes the phone mid-sentence and Hazel is driven to the Stonecrest lodge, where a kind woman named Ruby wraps her in a blanket. Her Alpha restarts the logs, then dials the number from the wreck and goes white at the voice that answers.

I had time for one sentence.

"Hoglund cabin, the east track above the creek," I whispered. "They're taking me south."

A boot came down on my hand.

The phone cracked, and the line went dead under the heel of an enforcer I had never seen smile.

He ground it into the dirt and picked up the pieces.

"Alpha," he called. "She had a phone."

Ramsay turned from the smoke.

He looked at the pieces in the enforcer's palm, and then at me, and for a moment he was perfectly still.

"Cage," he said.

They put me in the back of the second SUV, in the transport cage bolted behind the seats.

The bars were silver-plated, and I pulled my knees up so they wouldn't touch my back.

Through the rear window I watched the cabin burn down to a black frame.

The enforcers had got the water to it too late.

Nothing on that shelf would ever be signed again, by me or anyone.

I held on to that all the way down the mountain.

Ramsay sat in the front passenger seat and didn't speak.

Twice I saw him lift his phone and put it down again.

My wrists burned where the cuffs had been dragged, and the mark on my neck throbbed once more, faintly warm, and then went quiet.

Somewhere above the creek, a man had heard me say where I was.

I had to believe he'd heard enough.

It took two hours to reach the Stonecrest lodge.

I hadn't seen it since I was nineteen.

It was bigger than I remembered, with new stone wings on both sides and a flag with the crest hanging over the porch.

A woman was waiting on the steps with a blanket over her arm and a steel thermos in her hand.

She had auburn hair in a neat braid and a cream cardigan buttoned up to the collar, and her face fell when she saw me through the bars.

"Oh, Hazel," she said. "Oh, look at your hands."

The enforcers opened the cage.

I couldn't make my legs work, and she was the one who caught me.

Her arm was warm and steady around my back.

"I've got you," she said. "Easy. I'm Ruby."

I knew the name.

It had been on the page with the red seal.

I should have hated her at once, and what I felt instead was a stupid, shaking relief that someone had touched me gently.

Ruby pulled the blanket around my shoulders and unscrewed the thermos and held it to my mouth.

It was only warm water, and I drank all of it.

"I'm so sorry it's been like this," she said quietly, so the enforcers couldn't hear. "I told Ramsay you shouldn't be dragged out that way. It's nearly over, I promise."

A small linen pouch hung from her belt on a cord.

It gave off a bitter, green smell that I felt I should know, but I was too tired to chase it.

"Take the cuffs off her," Ruby said.

"No," said Ramsay from behind me.

He had come up the steps without a sound.

"Ramsay, she can barely stand."

"She burned a cabin down this morning." His voice was even. "The cuffs stay on."

Ruby pressed her lips together and gave me a small, helpless look.

Then she smoothed the blanket on my shoulder and stepped back.

Ramsay took my elbow, and I felt every one of his fingers.

He walked me through the lodge himself, past the great room and the long table, and down a stair I had never seen.

At the bottom was a cellar with a cot, a drain in the floor and a steel door with a slot in it.

Someone had made the cot up with clean sheets.

That was how I knew it had been ready for days.

"You'll rest," Ramsay said. "Ruby will bring your tea at seven. We start a fresh log tonight."

"There aren't any logs."

"There will be." He didn't raise his voice. "Dated today. Ten years can begin again from the morning you burned the last ones, and the Ceremony can wait a season if it has to."

So that was what the fire had bought me.

It hadn't saved me, but he could no longer sign anything either, and he knew it.

I sat on the cot and said nothing.

He pulled out his own phone, and I saw he had set the pieces of mine on the table by the door.

He picked a small gold chip out of the broken pieces and slid it into his phone.

I watched his thumb move, and I watched him raise the phone to his ear.

Someone picked up on the first ring.

"Larkin," said a voice I knew in my bones, though I had heard it for exactly one night and one minute.

Ramsay didn't say a word.

He ended the call and lowered the phone, and the color left his face.

"Rowan Larkin," he said.

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