Sweet Cover by @Bethany21Thornton

The door to the room opens again, and a man I do not recognize comes to collect me. That man—Victor—said that we were waiting for our last guest, and all I can do now is believe that my love has arrived. He had toyed with my heart by telling me my mother and father are in the building, and after he left my room about three hours ago—a panicky guess—they were all I could think about. Somewhere in here, somewhere trapped in these same walls, my parents sit, alive. Once the first year had passed at grandmothers, I had given up waiting for them to come knocking on her door. Part of me always thought they had died somewhere and somehow and I would never discover why or how they did. It would be a mystery embedded in my mind for the rest of my life, one whose importance would die over time, but one that would always be there.

Again, my future has been flipped. It all started to change once I hopped over that stream and once I crossed onto his land. He was the key to a different path, and I took it obliviously, not thinking about where this would leave me. Even if I did think about it, I would have never imagined myself here.

The bulky man holds me tightly as we walk down a dim hallway, one that is plain and concerning. My legs have begun to work again while I waited for the last guest, and I assumed the mixture had worn off. Victors words about too much of a dose had frightened me, but my mind reminded itself that he was not gathering my parents and my love for kicks. There is something he is pulling together, and I need to be alive for it.

The hallway is silent besides the maddening thud of our footsteps running over and over again in my mind, and when we come to a halt, I still hear them. My head lifts up to see a door in front of us, and the man behind me leans forward, keeping his grip on my arm, and turns the knob, dragging the door open. It is brighter inside the room as artificial lights in every corner flare up against the walls. Then some small, sad, real sound comes to me from one of the corners, and I see my mother there, crouched down, hidden away like a ghost of herself. Her eyes peer up at me, and she breaks down even more.

I do not know what to say if I am allowed to say anything.

"Evangeline," a masculine voice calls to me from the other side of the empty room, and in the opposite corner of my mother, I see my father. He too is jammed in the corner like dust kicked to the side. "My baby," he whispers to himself, but there is nothing to block his voice from making it to me. He looks different, like a stranger, but familiar in odd ways.

Just before I scratch up a word, the guard who walked me here pushes me down into my corner and takes a pair of heavy cuffs from the loop in his pants. He roughly fastens them around my wrist, brings my hand behind my back, and locks the other cuff to a metal half-circle in the ground, one that; I down. The entire act seems quite bizarre, and my clearing mind cannot help but focus on the fact that this maniac bolted such things to the floor all to hold people down. This must be some sort of prison room.

My head recklessly hits the wall as I realize the cuffs have been dashed with silver, painfully burning my skin and returning me to such times in a cell back at the Tate Pack. With a winced expression, I gaze over at my two parents, and they do not seem affected by it anymore, and I wonder how long they have been chained down. My father watches me like a man observing something extinct while my mother cannot bear to look at me. In that strange moment, I hear more footsteps from the hall—this time being on the inside—and the louder they get, the more my body starts to wake up. It is like small electric shocks to my heart.

The door opens into the white room and through it comes two large men holding my mate. It only takes me one good look to come to terms with the fact that I love him. My mind lingers back to our times in his bed, innocent and bothered, to times of truth and acceptance, and to moments where I knew that my future would be alive with him.

I know now that no matter what happens in this room, no matter who makes it out—if any of us do—that the only future I need is with him.

Sebastian's eyes find mine, and I know they have injected whatever mixture was inside me, into him. He too is brought to the floor and cuffed down. "Evangeline," he calls out dimly as if he is saying my name into the vast trees, still trying to find me.

Everything feels like a dream, a hazy dizziness still clinging to my head. Even surrounded by people I love, I feel alone, bare. The Moon Goddess has disappeared, and my wolf has been shoved into the darkest corner of my mind by the poison and silver. Part of me is expecting the monstrous beast from my nightmares to come bursting through the door, its knotted coat and wretched stench contaminating the room before it tears us all to pieces. But instead of this beast comes the Alpha, Victor, the stalker, the stranger, and I realize it is all the same. He enters with pride and strides to the center of the blank chamber, scanning over all he has collected in the past few days. "Perfect," he says to himself.

He pulls a sleek, silver knife from his waistband and runs the blade between his thumb and pointer finger. "I wanted this to be personal," he says. "Intimate."

We all watch him, but Sebastian's eyes stray to me and mine to him. I wish I could tell him that I am sorry. I wish I never agreed to go through with Alpha Kenn's and my test. I should have been with him laying in his bed, wrapped in his arms as he stole kisses from me like happy people. It should have ended with me like that. Now I know it is going to end with me like this. I wish I could have stayed sweet for him, like a summer peach. Ripe and innocent. Full of color. I must look as if I am dying because from the expression on his face it seems that I am. He mouths something to me, but my brain cannot decipher it. I grow desperate to hear his voice.

"I killed your grandmother just as she killed my father, the same way. The same struggle."

My mother's eyes squeeze shut, and my teeth grind against each other. My wrist yanks against the cuff, the metal searing me. "Liar," I call out, regaining myself.

Victor turns to me, pressing the tip of the blade into his finger. "Lair? You don't believe that I killed your grandmother with this very blade?" He holds it up for me to see.

I swallow. "I can see it on your face."

My grandmother is too smart to be killed by such a man. I know that she is alive, I know that she made it and this brings me some hope. She was not scared when she killed his father; she was wild.

This seems to touch him in the wrong way, and he orders one of his men from the door to free my mother from her cuff, and this makes me nervous. I observe as he unlocks her and as he lifts her up and steadies her like a glass figurine. The man walks her to the center of the room and Victor takes hold of her, grabbing her arm. She shakes beside him, her eyes staring at the knife in his other hand.

My father inches forward but is inevitably held by his own cuff. "Please," he says, trying to get Victor's attention but he gives him none.

"Shall I reenact it for you?" Victor says carefully, looking intensely at me with beady eyes.

My mother lets out a healthy sob, letting us know that we have all crossed over into dangerous territory. "Stop," I say firmly, "that's enough. Now, what are you doing here? What are you doing with them?" He lets go of my mother, but she knows better than to return to her corner. My questions threw him off a tad, and I know to stick with it. "Don't you know? I'm the only one that can speak to her."

I hear Sebastian struggle against his cuffs.

"Clearly, my mate and my father have nothing to do with this," my voice clears, "either does my mother. Didn't you know that she can't speak to her?"

Victor smiles then chuckles. "Is that right?"

Before anyone can breathe, Victor grips his knife and in one swift motion plunges the blade into my mother's gut. A loud shriek erupts from deep within me, and my father shouts as if the knife had gone into him instead. My mother hands flail around the growing splotch of red as she tumbles to the floor and struggles to breathe. Her wheezing clouds my ears as I frantically yank against my cuff, letting the metal slowly burn into my skin. "No. No. No. No," I murmur, restlessly as I yank harder and harder. My father's cries take the place of her struggling and I being to panic. I shoot back to see Victor nearing my mother's limp body.

A sudden noise grabs the rooms attention as Sebastian breaks the cuff around his wrist and pounces on Victor, in one blur turning from man to wolf. My stomach rises, and I feel as if I am going to faint. My father, still attached to the floor, reaches out to my mother's body and drags her closer to him. It is all one hallucination, or that is at least what my mind is telling me. Just wake up. Just wake up.

The man who let my mother free of her chains rushes to defend his Alpha, and I fear for my mate. Victor is trapped under Sebastian's wolf. If that man hurts my mate, I do not know what I will do. I may just. . . I may just. . . Well, I would lose it.

I can feel the heat building up within me like a forest fire spreading. My eyes glare down at the cuff and then to Victors guards' torn up clothes as he shifts and joins the fight, tackling Sebastian off of his Alpha. Knowing that the keys are somewhere in the mess, I lay down on my side and reach my leg out, my foot dragging the clothes towards me. I take the tattered fabric in my hands, shaking the pieces until the little metal ring falls to the floor. Quickly, I snatch it up and set myself free. I watch for a moment as the guard bites down on Sebastian's shoulder, and I nearly bite the side of my tongue off. He's drugged! This can't happen!

Sebastian snaps back harshly, and in two more fast movements, the guard's throat is shredded through his teeth. Although the guard is dead, Sebastian struggles to walk. I catch Victor nearing him with the silver knife, and suddenly everything turns red.

It only takes two seconds for me to lash out. One to shift and dive, and the other to bring Victor down and tear off his face like a bedsheet. The knife hits the floor, but I cannot stop. The metallic taste of another man's blood soaks in my mouth as I dig into his neck. It is some dark high. At this moment I am a prisoner to my addiction. The animal inside of me has been set free, and I cannot control her urges. Once the man beneath me looks nothing as the such, I shift back and look down on him, remembering the time I saw my first dead body and how it was so terribly mutilated, realizing how I have created something worse. The knife beside me shimmers, and I swipe it up, stabbing into the man's flesh, no skin to puncture. "How dare you!" I cry with each stab. "How dare you! My mother! My mother!"

Ignoring my nakedness, I drop the knife and look up as if to the heavens. Maybe to the Moon. "Look what you've made me do! Look what I've done!"

Sebastian's hands grab me off of the mess and pull me back. He presses my face into his chest, blocking me from what I had done. My hands, dripping with blood, fall against his warm skin. "He was coming at you," I mumble. "He had the knife." Sebastian covers my body with his while I struggle to come down from the high.

I know after this I will never be the same person. There are two sides to me, and today I had met the second. I fear myself; I fear this unknown person inside of me because I know that Victor was right. There is more to my ability than speaking to the Goddess. There has always been more. She is dark, she is unforgiving, and she is ruthless.

And I am scared of her.

THE END