Fallen Prey

Cold air whipped past my ears before the sheer recklessness of my decision finally caught up with me. Halfway down that drop, reality hit hard: leaping from a high cell without a real plan was suicide.

High above, Nadia was shrieking my name, raw terror carved across her face. Beside her, Gemma had her head craned out too; despite barely staying awake during all the hours I had spent in there, clear panic marked her features now.

Maybe I should have listened to Nadia. Maybe waiting longer would have given me an actual plan instead of this freefall. A thousand frantic regrets flashed through my head right before impact.

Midair, I twisted so my face stayed turned toward the sky, locking both arms tightly over my belly. Shielding my stomach wouldn't soften a drop from that height, yet instinct took over anyway. If things went fatally wrong, I wanted to die first before any harm reached the baby inside me.

The back of my skull slammed into the hard earth first before the rest of me crashed down. Blinding agony exploded through my head, hurting far too much to even force a scream past my throat.

Pinned flat on the dirt and staring upward, I finally saw just how high that drop really was. Gemma and Nadia still had their heads shoved through the grimy, pathetic excuse for a window I had jumped out of.

They were screaming down at me, though their voices vanished beneath the racket from the other cells. Dozens of prisoners had turned my fall into a spectacle, hollering loudly enough that I couldn't tell whether they were yelling or cheering.

My sight blurred around the edges while the noise overhead grew muffled. I had to run, yet I couldn't even twitch a single finger.

I survived! I actually made it out alive! Why the hell wouldn't my limbs obey me? Alarms blared inside my skull, warning me to get up and flee right now to save both my life and my baby's, yet my battered body stayed pinned to the dirt, overwhelmed by the brutal shock of the landing.

Get up, Maeve! Get on your feet and run! That frantic voice in my head kept screaming, though even my own thoughts grew muffled as my brain began shutting down on its own. Right before my eyelids slammed shut, one final shout cut through the chaos: "Run for your fucking life, bitch!"

That vicious shout was still ringing in my ears when I gasped and jolted awake. Pitch darkness covered the sky now, with the moon just beginning to peek through. My heart hammered wildly, the way it does when you bolt upright from a terrifying dream, except my actual waking life was the nightmare.

Driven by panic, I sprang onto my feet, ready to bolt for my life, only for the universe to turn against me as my forehead slammed straight into an unyielding, solid barrier directly ahead.

"Fuck!" I muttered, rubbing my palm over my throbbing forehead. It hurt like hell as I squinted upward to see what had blocked me, only to find the night far too dark to make out anything. Reaching out to feel my way past the obstacle standing between me and freedom, I froze when my hand pressed against something warm.

That hard barrier was warm! Worse yet, it rose and fell beneath my fingers. It was fucking breathing. Hot air brushed across my hand in the dark, sending my heart racing out of control.

Everything was finally over! My life was fucking finished!

A low growl vibrated from that massive chest as it stepped closer, and suddenly there wasn't just one solid figure ahead of me anymore, but several.

As they closed in out of the gloom, I recognized the familiar scents of every man there except one. I didn't need to know the last man's scent to realize an Alpha stood right in front of me. Only one Alpha ruled the territory I had crossed into, and he was going to rip my head clean off for sure.

He was going to fucking slaughter me. My life was done!

"Fuck!" slipped out before I could stop myself. He reached forward and casually nudged my shoulder with a single finger, and that effortless tap alone sent me crashing straight to the dirt. Maybe going without food, running for hours, and falling out of a high window had drained me dry, or maybe he really was just monstrously strong enough to end me in a split second!

"Care to tell me what the hell is going on here?" His low growl rattled the very ground beneath us, cutting through the dark air with lethal weight and forcing me to cower in terror.

Still, I wasn't the only one terrified out there, and strangely enough, knowing the others were scared too eased my tension slightly.

"Forgive us," the head guard stammered, bowing his head low with a heavy sigh. "Nobody has ever tried so desperately to throw themselves out of that cell before."

"Your excuse is seriously that nobody else tried hard enough?" The Alpha let out a disgusted scoff, sending the guard scrambling onto both knees in front of him. "You couldn't scrape together anything better than that? Nothing at all?"

"I'm sorry, sir, it won't happen a second time!" the man begged. Watching from the dirt, I didn't know what to do. Could this be my shot to bolt? Maybe I could actually slip away into the dark while they argued.

"And who the hell is she even supposed to be?" the Alpha demanded. Even blind in the shadows, I didn't need to see his face to know he was staring down at me like pure filth; the revulsion dripped from every word.

The guards quickly told him who I was, and a loud, dark chortle rumbled from his chest, raising every hair along the back of my neck. Genuine pleasure echoed in that laugh, and that didn't sit well with me at all.

"Well, who would've guessed tonight could get this much better?" He laughed again, and the suffocating tension rolling off the guards eased noticeably compared to seconds earlier. "What better way to wrap up the day than with a little entertainment?"

"Please, don't kill me," I begged, only for my plea to make them all laugh even harder. How could they stand there laughing at me right now? How the hell could they?

I understood that Cade was his sworn enemy, and having me delivered straight into his grasp was cause for celebration. Frankly, in his place I would have been glad too, yet now wasn't the moment for ruthlessness.

"Show a little mercy alongside your justice!" I pleaded desperately, yet their relentless laughter refused to die down, terrifying me to my core. Never had I pictured myself dying like this. Not this way at all, not broken in the dark woods right behind a prison cell I had barely managed to escape!

"Killing you isn't in my plans." His cold words sliced straight through my spiraling panic as if he could read my mind, instantly lifting most of the crushing tension from my chest.

"You aren't going to kill me?" I asked breathlessly, needing to make sure my own terror wasn't playing tricks on me.

"You won't die by my hand, Maeve." Every word vibrated low and dark between us, and despite hovering right between life and death, my stupid, traitorous head somehow still paused to admire how smoothly my name rolled off his tongue, spoken like he had been the one to give it to me.

"After all, where's the entertainment in ending you quickly when there is so much more I could put you through?" he added, freezing every thought in my head for a second. Slowly, my mind drifted toward dark, terrifying places I hadn't even known existed until right now. What was this massive wall of a man with that dark, thrilling voice going to do to me?

The heavy contempt lacing his tone made me seriously wonder whether a swift death wouldn't actually be a far kinder option than whatever twisted torment he had waiting for me. Still, thinking like that was a luxury reserved for someone who was alone, and I wasn't alone in this body anymore. I had to think of the baby growing inside me, of my unborn child and how to get him out of this nightmare safely, which I could only do if I stayed alive.

"You really should have stayed on your own side of the territory, Maeve! Truly," he murmured, reminding me as if the catastrophic scale of it hadn't already sunk in. "Out of everywhere to run, you picked the absolute wrong land to set foot on, Maeve."

God knew I was already painfully aware of what a massive, irreversible mistake I had made! Everyone steered clear of these borders for a terrifying reason: the man standing over me and promising to make my existence a living nightmare was notorious across the lands for ruling actual hell. He was the devil in the flesh, taking heads off shoulders like slaughtering animals, wiping entire families off the map like they meant nothing, and showing zero leniency toward intruders above all else.

No stranger or trespasser had ever crossed onto his soil and walked back out alive. His territory was infamous for swallowing people whole, and here I was, face to face with the monster himself!

"I'm going to drag you through so much hell that by the time I'm done with you, even death itself will turn you away," he snarled.