After My Alpha Drugged Me for Ten Years novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Logs
Ten years caged and drugged, Hazel kneels in a clearing as her Alpha arrives with the papers to take her grandmother's land. She burns the logs that prove his lie and calls the one number she memorized; a man answers and says her name.
They dragged me out of the cabin at dawn and left me on my knees in the clearing.
Silver cuffs locked my wrists together in front of me.
The burns under them were ten years old and had never closed all the way.
By the time the SUVs came up the track, I couldn't feel my legs.
Ramsay got out of the second one, and I looked at his boots, which were clean, though the track was mud.
I stared down so I wouldn't have to look at his face.
His boots stopped right in front of me.
"Stand up, Hazel."
It was the voice that made other wolves obey before they had decided to.
Once I would have followed it anywhere.
I stayed on the ground.
"Stand."
The Alpha tone landed in my spine, and my body got up without me.
The world tipped.
This morning's tea sat in my stomach, thick and bitter, and I locked my knees until the clearing held still.
Ramsay hadn't changed at all.
He had the same dark hair, the same clean jaw, the same Stonecrest crest pinned to his collar.
I was twenty-nine and weighed less than I had at nineteen.
He looked over my wrists and my collarbones and didn't blink, though he had put every one of those marks there.
"I'll have someone see to your diet," he said.
He had an enforcer carry the kitchen table out of the cabin and set it in the grass between us.
Then he laid a folder on it and opened it to a page with a red wax seal.
It was a transfer of my grandmother's land, Hoglund Basin, into the hands of Ruby Kjellberg.
Under the Luna Accord, an Alpha who kept a wolf in signed daily care for ten years could take her land with her signature.
Today was the last day of the ten years.
"You'll sign it at the Pack Alliance Ceremony," Ramsay said. "Two days from now, in front of every Alpha. It will be clean and dignified."
He tapped the page.
"After that I'll release you from the bond."
He said release, though I had never once been the one holding on.
Something moved in me then, far down under the wolfsbane.
It was Sorrel, my wolf, who had not made a sound since I was nineteen, and she turned over once in the dark.
The mark on my neck pulsed and went cold again.
I had never remembered him biting me.
I remembered a tent, a cup of wine, and waking up with the mark already there.
I had stopped asking about it years ago, because asking got me a longer dose.
Behind Ramsay, his enforcers were unloading chains and a transport cage from the SUVs.
They had done this before.
I looked at the folder, and then I looked at the cabin.
The logs were inside.
Every morning for ten years they had made me sign a line saying I took my tea willingly and understood it was for my own safety.
Those pages were Ramsay's whole case.
Only the originals counted under the Accord, and without them his ten years of guardianship were ten years of a kidnapping.
So I burned them.
I walked toward the cabin before I let myself think about it.
My legs shook, but they carried me.
I shoved through the door, took the stack from the shelf where they were kept, and found the matches by the wood stove.
The cuffs made my hands clumsy, but I got the box open and one match out.
It caught on the second strike.
I held the flame to the corner of the top page and watched the paper curl and go black.
"Hazel."
Ramsay was in the doorway, and his voice had gone sharp.
"What are you doing?"
I dropped the burning stack on the dirt floor beside the kindling and stepped back.
Ten years of dry paper went up fast.
"Stop."
The tone hit, and my whole body locked.
For one breath I couldn't move or breathe.
But the fire was already going.
I turned my head and looked at him.
His jaw was tight, his fists were shut, and under the fury he looked afraid.
"You needed those," I said.
My voice came out in pieces, because I hadn't used it much in ten years.
He didn't answer.
His enforcers ran past him for the creek, and one of them seized my arm and hauled me out into the light.
He shoved me against the side of the nearest SUV and went to help with the water.
No one was watching me.
Ramsay was shouting orders, and the whole clearing was looking at the smoke.
I turned my back to the vehicle and pulled at the hem of my sleeve, where I had sewn a cheap burner phone months ago with thread I stole from a sock.
It had one number saved.
I had memorized it ten years ago, the night before Ramsay locked me in that cabin.
A boy at a border moot had written it on a bus ticket and pressed it into my hand.
He had said: call if anything ever feels wrong.
I dialed with both thumbs and held the phone against my ear.
The mark on my neck pulsed, warm this time, and I blamed the wolfsbane.
The line rang once.
Someone picked up, and for a moment all I heard was breathing.
I hadn't said a word yet.
"Hazel," a man said, very low. "Don't hang up. Tell me where you are."
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