My Mate Exiled Me for Being Weak, Then Couldn't Smell Me in His Dungeon novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Hammer

In the torture room Ilsa kicks the man questioning her, and the king arrives and cannot smell her at all. Ends with Roan ordering her kept alive overnight.

Cold water hit my face and I came up choking.

Every muscle I owned was screaming.

I could move my fingers and nothing else.

"Up, rogue whore!"

A boot caught me under the ribs, and I gasped for air that wouldn't come.

"Stop kicking her and carry her," another man said.

"The captain wants her in the chair."

A guard slung me over his shoulder, and the blood ran into my head until my ears pounded.

If he held me upside down any longer, I would pass out.

He dropped me into a wooden chair.

Rope went around my wrists and tightened until it cut.

He started on my legs, tied one ankle, and then a deep voice said, "Leave the other. She's half dead. She isn't going anywhere."

I kept my head down and my eyes shut.

Metal clinked on a table behind me.

"Bring the hammer," the voice said.

"We'll start with her fingers."

I knew the man's name by then, because the guards said it every time they spoke to him.

Brock Shackleton, captain of the dungeon guard.

His hand clamped my jaw and wrenched my head back.

"Where is your leader?"

My tongue was so swollen from the bite and the beating that I couldn't have answered if I'd wanted to.

His grip got harder.

"Nothing? Then understand me. I'll have it out of you one way or the other."

He let go.

The hammer came down on my smallest finger.

I felt the bone give.

A sound tore out of my throat before I could stop it, and tears pushed against my shut eyelids.

My stomach rolled over, and I threw up what little I had down my legs and across his boot.

His fist cracked into my cheek and snapped my head to the side.

"That's for my shoe," Brock said.

Black crept in at the edges of everything.

I had no wolf to hold me together, and I didn't know how much more I could take.

Then I heard the door open, and several men walked in.

The scent reached me a heartbeat later.

Rain on warm stone.

My whole body went still.

He was in the room.

The Mother's potion had kept my scent hidden for two days, but I had been beaten for hours since then.

I didn't know how long a hidden scent could hold with this much blood on it.

"Anything from her?"

The voice came from just inside the door, level and tired.

It had ordered me off his land three years ago.

"No, Your Majesty," Brock said.

"She's barely breathing. I doubt she's worth the effort. I can finish her."

"Let me look at her."

Fear climbed my spine.

If he touched me, if he breathed in close, he would know.

I would sooner die in this chair than let him know it was me.

I cracked one eye open.

Brock had stepped away.

Roan Quartermaine walked up to me and stopped with a boot on either side of my tied foot.

He was close enough that I could have touched him.

I had one working leg.

It was a bad plan and I knew it, and it was the only one I had.

I gathered everything I had left, and I drove my free foot up into his groin.

He let out a furious growl and doubled over.

Somebody swore.

Before I could draw my leg back, his open hand came across my face.

The chair went over with me in it, and my head cracked against the floor a second time.

This time I couldn't make a sound.

I lay on my side with my cheek on the cold stone and felt myself slipping away.

I heard a man squat down beside me.

Close up, the smell of him was almost more than I could bear.

He didn't speak.

He breathed in, slowly, and held it.

"Roan?" a second man asked from near the door.

"What's wrong?"

That was Edric, the king's beta.

I knew his voice from the years I'd spent in my father's pack.

"I don't know," the king said.

His voice had changed.

It was lower, and it was puzzled, and it frightened me more than the hammer.

"Something is wrong with her. There's nothing to smell, and there should be."

He stood up.

"Take her to the cell. I want to see if she lives through the night."

Boots moved toward the door.

I held on as long as I could, and I listened to where they were going.

Then the dark took me.

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