My Mate Exiled Me for Being Weak, Then Couldn't Smell Me in His Dungeon novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dragged Down
Ilsa is thrown into the Alpha King's dungeon with the captured rogues and hides that she is his mate. Ends as a guard says the king will want the scentless one first.
The truck stopped, and my body rolled into the woman beside me.
I was too weak to push off her.
My face was swollen so badly I could barely open my eyes.
Outside I heard men's voices, and I knew whose men they were.
The king's guards had brought us home to him.
The back doors banged open, and the screaming started.
Hands dragged the others out by their arms and legs.
Then hands got me too, and a guard threw me down on concrete.
I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound.
Blood filled my mouth, and I spat it onto the ground in front of me.
I couldn't see much, so I listened.
There were about fifteen of us from our truck, and I had heard more engines behind it.
"Up on your feet, rogue!"
A boot drove into my stomach.
The air went out of me, and I curled around the pain.
Through the slit of one eye I saw a man in a dark grey suit crossing the yard.
Three men walked with him.
I didn't need to see his face.
The way the guards went quiet told me.
I put my head down and breathed slowly.
My heart wanted to race, and I held it down.
Wolves can hear a heartbeat across a room, and I had to give them nothing.
His shoes stopped in front of us.
"Is this all?"
I knew that voice.
I would know it until the day I died.
My mate.
"Yes, my king," a guard said.
"Take them to the dungeons and start questioning them."
Two arms hooked under mine and hauled me toward a flight of stone stairs.
The guard didn't carry me.
My body bounced down every step, and every step knocked a whimper up my throat.
I swallowed each one.
Whatever they did to me, they would not get the sound.
The stench hit me at the bottom, blood and sickness and rot.
The guard dragged me down a passage and stopped at an open cell.
He swung me inside and let go.
I hit the floor headfirst, and something cracked.
Warm blood ran down my cheek.
I lay where I landed.
My wolf was somewhere deep inside me, asleep.
The wolfsbane in the darts had put her under, and it kept my body from healing.
Black spots floated in front of my eyes.
I let them come, because there was nothing else to do.
Before they covered everything I thought about the last time I had seen him.
I was eighteen, and I had been following a scent for an hour.
It smelled of rain on warm stone, and I couldn't have turned back if I'd wanted to.
It led me through the iron gates of a cemetery.
A man stood at a new grave with his back to me.
Farther down the path an older man in a long black coat was walking away toward the castle, his gloved hands behind his back.
A bitter green smell trailed after him, sharp even through all the wreaths.
I thought it was the flowers.
Then the man at the grave breathed in and turned around.
His eyes were amber, and they were wet.
I knew him at once from the portraits in every hall of my father's pack.
Roan Quartermaine, the Alpha King of all wolves.
His mate had been buried the day before.
Every wolf in the country had heard how she lost the pup a month into her pregnancy and didn't live through it.
"Mate," I whispered.
I hadn't meant to say it out loud.
He crossed the grass and took my chin in his fist.
Sparks ran through my face and down my arms.
"You are not my mate," he said.
"You never will be."
I tried to speak, and his voice came down on me, heavy with the full weight of an Alpha King's command.
"Get off my land."
"If you set foot on it again, I will kill you and every one of your family."
My knees gave way when he let go.
"Go," he said, and my legs obeyed before I did.
I ran, and I shifted into a wolf for the first time halfway across the field.
I never went home.
Now I lay on his dungeon floor with my face against the stone.
Nobody in this building knew who I was.
The potion our healer, the Mother, brews for us was still hiding my scent from every nose.
It would not last long.
So I made one promise to myself in the dark.
I would not say my name to anyone.
Boots stopped outside my cell, and a guard leaned in and sniffed.
"Nothing," he said.
"Not a thing on this one. No pack, no blood, no fear."
A second guard laughed.
"Then the king will want her first."
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