~ Chapter Two ~

Before I knew what was happening, I was ripped away from the alpha lying on the Hospital bed,

James was yelling something about alerting our alpha and getting me to safety, but all I could hear were my own words.

"No!" I was hollering as Harper tried to drag me out of the room. "No, let me help him!"

"You've got to get to safety, it isn't safe," Harper replied. I grabbed onto the door frame so he couldn't take me any further, lunging into the room with all the strength I had. I heard Harper grunting with the power it took him to wrench me away again.

My mate was trying equally as hard to get to me. He fought against James, his arms reaching for me whenever he had the chance. We'd yet to lose our eye contact even with everything trying to separate us, and I could feel my wolf trying to tear its way out of me for him. My wolf wanted to help; to set him free of James's annoyingly tight grasp.

But in the next moment, a needle had been put into his arm and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. I watched as his body fell limply backward onto the bed, dust I didn't even know was there puffing out either side of him. Harper stopped pulling me and James took a breath, all of us processing what had just happened.

After just a couple of seconds, James looked up at me with cold, angry eyes. "What the fuck, Keller? You should've warned us. He could have killed you."

"He wouldn't have," I snapped back, throwing Harper into the wall with a tough shove to his chest. I didn't even look at him. "That man would never hurt me."

"Don't be so delusional." James rolled his eyes and looked down at the sedated alpha. "Did you not see what I had to do to him? He wanted to kill me, maybe even you."

"Perhaps he was just trying to escape the foreign room filled with people he doesn't know," I suggested, crossing my arms over my chest.

"Why are you being so difficult on this, Keller? You're a fucking pessimist, then all of a sudden you're convinced he's a good guy?" James was staring at me suspiciously now, but I could tell he didn't expect what was really going on here. Roger and James both believed the theory of mates to be completely a myth, despite so many obvious cases in their own pack. They knew, deep down, that it wasn't bullshit. At this point, it was just their pride convincing them otherwise.

I took up a powerful stance before James, staring up into his eyes with the fierce gaze he'd come to face several times. I said, in a slow, warning tone, "That man might have hurt you, but he would never hurt me, because I'm his mate."

Everything froze for half a second before the world flipped into overdrive.

"Mate, huh?" a disgustingly familiar voice chided from the doorway. I turned around to look at Alpha Roger, who was staring at me. "You don't suppose you are just delusional?"

"Mates are real, Alpha," I replied in a slightly softer tone. "He is mine, therefore he would never hurt me. I could probably convince him to comply, too. You just have to trust that this "myth" is truth, as it actually is."

Roger shook his head. "I cannot take this risk, Doctor."

"Just let him go. He has not hurt anyone - and if he has, it is only because he felt threatened to begin with."

"He entered our land," Roger replied simply. "He must be taught that that isn't acceptable, and letting him go isn't the way to do this." Roger motioned James toward my mate. "Take him to the basement, James. I want him chained."

"No!" I exclaimed, but Harper was grabbing onto my arms again. I didn't fight back against him very hard as James worked with another pack warrior, Connor - Valerie's mate and baby daddy - to get the alpha off of the Hospital bed. But I was still putting up a fight up until the office door shut behind them. Roger nodded at Harper to let me go, so I elbowed him aggressively in the ribs. He let out a grunt as I glared at my alpha.

"Watch yourself, Keller. You do not know what's to come. Don't get too attached to a man who could be dead tomorrow."

I growled. I couldn't help it, it came from the depths of my stomach and rolled up through my chest and out my throat. The growl had been orchestrated by my wolf, who I was internally fighting to hold back, just like Harper had been trying to hold me. The poor thing was so desperate to get out and meet her wolf like most other mates got to, but I knew that wasn't going to happen - at least, not right now.

"Doc," Roger said lightly, "you are the only one with medical skills, so I still require you to pay our visitor a little bit of attention. However, if I ever catch you doing anything more with him than tending to his wounds, I will have both him and you executed the very same day. Do you understand?"

When I didn't reply, he growled, "Do you fucking understand me, Doctor?"

"I fucking get it," I growled back.

He nodded. "Good. I would like you in the basement when Connor comes for you. Our prisoner may need looking at, who knows what might have happened to him down there with no one to supervise my warriors?" I snarled at Roger's back as he left, but decided my battle would be best fought later, when I had some grasp of who I was sticking up for.

As much as I hated to admit it, Roger had a point. I couldn't bank my entire life in this pack for a man I didn't know just because he was my mate, I needed to find out who he really was and whether he was even worth my time. All I had was his physique and the dreamy eyes I could've drowned in if given enough time.

I was waiting for Connor for about an hour. There was no one coming to or from my office for the whole time, and I'd made a swift visit to Valerie to tell her what was going to happen with her son and how she needed to deal with it. She was reasonably frightened that her little boy had grown so fast, but I reassured her that it was nothing to worry about and that he'd slow down after a few years - a few dreadful years, though I didn't think she wanted to hear that.

When Connor arrived, he silently motioned me out of my office into the hallway, and I followed him through the pack house toward the stairs. His footsteps were heavier than mine, like a warning to everyone else. He'd always been one of the biggest of our pack, so Roger had put him on basement duty the few times we'd ever had someone in there. He saw it as giving the beast a beauty to take care of... and to beat up if he was having a bad day.

We drew closer and closer to the dreaded door to the basement, so I looked to the side at Connor and asked, "Have you touched him?"

He didn't look back at me. "No, you know I don't believe in prisoner abuse. It's bad enough he's fucking down there." Connor ran a large hand over his buzzed hair. "I don't know what Roger's thinking, keeping an alpha down there like that. He's asking for a war."

"Or an attack," I added. "What happens if his pack find out where he is? Then they really would be interested in attacking, wouldn't they?"

"Let's not think about that," Connor suggested. "I heard he's your mate, and I'd like to say now that I'm sorry you have to be separated from him. I can imagine how much that must hurt you."

I gave Connor a smile. "I will wait to know about him to worry about all of that mating stuff, Con. For now, I think I just need to focus on keeping him healthy."

"That's probably a good idea," Connor agreed, leading me through the big medieval door that led down to Roger's dramatically dark basement. He'd made the whole thing to intimidate prisoners he might take in, not that he allowed many of them to live very long. No one got to soak up the atmosphere.

At the bottom of the stairs, Connor stopped, gave my shoulder a squeeze, then turned around and went back up. I was left with the stranger alpha. Alone.

But I wasn't scared, because I knew, deep down, that he could never ever hurt me. And I had faith in that.

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