Beyond the Grasslands (Mirage Islands Mates #2)

1. The Cells

Chapter 1

The Cells

NIKA

Pain speared through my brain from the back of my head to just behind my eyes. The painful throbbing sensation was my first welcome back to the waking world. It wasn’t the only one, though. My throat was dry and raw in a way that I had never experienced before while my eyes felt like they were held together with thousand grit sandpaper. Trying to peel them open was a necessary process, despite the discomfort.

The one thing I had going in my favor was that I knew who attacked me. One of Thorin’s pack members helped my former Alpha. That was all I knew. What the hell Aiden had been thinking was another thing.

There was no way in hell that I would ever agree to be his mate after the whole Alpha’s Harem and forcing my imprisonment on Mirage Island. Add to that the attack, kidnapping, and my worry over Janella. She was supposed to meet me and I wasn’t certain if she had been attacked as well, or if she had simply been running late and hopefully wasn’t harmed. Either way, there was no way in hell that I would ever dignify a conversation with Aiden, let alone agree to mate with him.

I also understood why the Goddess Selene gave me the warning about both of my potential mates being an issue. The woman who helped Aiden, Thorin’s pack mate, had been the one to attack me.

My mind wandered back to the days leading up to what should have been my mating ceremony. Some of the pack, the ones closest to Miriam, treated me poorly. The disrespect they tossed my way so casually had gone unchecked, even though I let Thorin know about the issues.

He thought it was something they would get over when they saw that he was serious about taking me as a mate, but that should have already been a given from the moment he introduced me to his pack. They had not let up, and in fact, had pointed out exactly why they treated me the way they did.

Miriam’s daughter was supposed to mate with Thorin before she died. I couldn’t wrap my head around pack mates wishing for the failure of their pack based on their loyalty to a dead person, one who wasn’t his moon-blessed mate to begin with. Even if the woman had lived, she could have never helped Thorin to hold the pack. He would have had to give up his Alpha position to be with her. I couldn’t fathom members of his pack being so willing to sabotage Thorin’s and the pack’s success by driving me away, but there was no doubt about their agenda.

When I managed to get my eyelids opened, it took a minute to adjust and gain my bearings. “What in the hell?”

I was in the cells, a small prison that my old pack had beneath the pack leader’s house. They were made to house traitors and built to withstand shifters far more powerful than I was. The thing I didn’t understand was how I came to be there. It was at least a two to three day drive to get from the Grasslands pack to Aiden’s. There was no way that I had been knocked out that long. My body healed slower in human form than in my wolf, but it still held the power of accelerated healing. Unless I was close to death, there wasn’t a natural, feasible reason why I had missed the entire travel time.

The dryness in my mouth was a firm reminder that I had indeed gone without a drink in a good amount of time. “Drugged.” The word was rough on my cracked, dried lips. It was the only explanation, though. The bastard had drugged me to get me back to my birth pack.

I quietly laid there on a ratty mattress on the filthy cell floor and contemplated what this might mean for me. Maybe I was never going to become a Luna after all. Selene might have been right about my choice of mates, but everything else seemed unlikely.

How in the world could I help lead either pack when both had abused me? Granted, the abuse from Thorin’s pack wasn’t his doing directly, but he didn’t take the situation seriously enough to do something about the looming threat. Then again, I couldn’t even blame him for that because I didn’t tell him about the one real threat Miriam made against me. I left that part out, determined to handle whatever came on my own.

I was in the thick of the consequences from that particular decision and had no one to blame but myself. Slowly, I sat up and fought off the dizzy sensation that creeped up on me, even with the slower movements. My body felt as though it wanted to retch whatever poison had been used to keep me knocked out, from my system. The unfortunate reality was that there was nothing in my system to help vomit something up, even if it had been ingested.

What had Aiden given me?

Why had he done this?

It sounded a lot like the abusive relationships I’d heard tales of from some of the women who attended my university. One of my roommate’s friends had been with a guy who had a hard time accepting their breakup. When she tried to date someone else, he attacked her and her date. The parting line as the police dragged him away was that if he couldn’t have her then no one else could.

I had been thankful that I was a shifter and that wasn’t a reality in our world. It had been an arrogant, ill-informed miscalculation on my part. Not only had Aiden shown me how wrong I was, but the rogues who raided Mirage Island had proved me wrong as well. Shifters were just as prone to violence against the women in their lives as humans were. I had apparently just been sheltered from it my whole life before I finished school.

While I wouldn’t have been as shocked about the behavior of rogues, the part that surprised me was Aiden. It made me wonder if he had lost his mind and succumbed to the madness early. If that was true, it might explain his actions. It also left me worried about what he might do to me. If he wasn’t right in the head, then he might just harm me more than I already had been or kill me for that matter. I bet the Goddess hadn’t seen this turn of events coming.

I curled back into the corner as far from the cell door as possible. The uncertainty made me more cautious than I would have otherwise been. Anger brewed just under the surface, but survival had to take precedence. I hadn’t taken my own safety seriously enough before and the result was me sitting in a cell that was impossible to escape.

A loud clunk and then the solid thump of footsteps that followed raised my hackles. Someone was headed in my direction, and while my appearance may have screamed meek and broken since I was in a ball in the corner, my limbs were tensed and coiled to go on the attack if necessary.

All I needed was a window of opportunity. If the unknown person opened my cell door, I’d get the hell out or die trying. I stared up through my stringy, filthy hair as I let it fall in a chunky curtain in front of my face. My reaction to whomever came around that corner would be mine and mine alone. They wouldn’t see me rattled nor would I give them the chance to notice I was ready to spring into action.

Black boots stopped just in front of the cell door. Cage door. That seemed a more apt description, since I had done nothing to warrant being shoved into a cell. I refused to glance up much further. Black boots, blue jeans, and a tip-tap of his foot to highlight the impatience he couldn’t keep from bleeding out.

“I’ll send someone down with supplies, so you can clean up.” I knew the voice. Aiden. I slowly raised my head until our eyes met. “It shouldn’t have been like this, Nika.”

“No, it shouldn’t have. Unfortunately, you chose to anger the gods with your selfishness and now I’m paying the price again.”

He huffed out a frustrated breath before he crouched down. “You were supposed to be on the island when I came looking for you.”

I jumped up and stalked over within a foot of the cage door. “I was NEVER supposed to be on that island. You put me there. You set all of this in motion, so everything that has happened to me since the day I came home from college is on you and no one else.”

He stood again and stared me down, but there was no malice in the gesture. It was more like he cataloged every inch of me. If I didn’t know he was a careless bastard, I’d think he was checking for wounds. My dark chuckle preceded me turning on my heels, so he could get a good look at the blood congealed in my hair where the head wound still seeped because it had yet to heal properly.

The cage I was held in had silver and steel bars and three of the four walls were also infused with silver and most likely wolf’s bane. It kept me from shifting. That in turn kept me from being able to heal properly.

“Nika!” He hissed. “I’ll send the pack doctor down, too.”

“Why bother?”

“Because you need to be healthy.”

“I can’t be healthy because I’m unable to shift inside this fucking cage you threw me in. That was after you worked with a woman who tried to kill me, and this is the first time you noticed my head wound?”

“I thought it would have healed by now.” He offered his explanation on a wince. “She wasn’t supposed to hit you that hard.”

“The fact that you thought it was okay to have someone hit me at all tells me everything I need to know about you. Then again, coming home to discover your fucking harem told me exactly who you are.”

“Nika, I made a mistake.”

“Oh, you’ve made many mistakes, Aiden. Not the least of which was kidnapping me before my real mate could seal the deal with me.”

“I am your real mate!” He shouted at the bars as he leaned too close. The smell of burnt flesh greeted us both before he even realized his hands were wrapped around the bars. He peeled them away and then stared at me as if it was my fault.

“You gave up the right to be my mate when you exiled me to a prison island in favor of keeping you harem.”

“I never touched them again after you were taken away.”

I rolled my eyes. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? I was on that island for six months, Aiden! Six fucking months I dodged attacks by rogues and tried to keep all the other castoff women safe while you did what? You nursed your wounded pride and ignored your harem?”

“It’s not like that.”

“It was exactly like that! If you think for a minute that I would ever agree to be with you, then you have well and truly gone mad already. You are nothing to me. You are less than the dirt beneath my feet. I would rather die in this cage than be mated to you. Keep that in mind.”

“You’ll change your mind.”

I shook my head adamantly.

“You will.” He stated those two words as if they were the truth and I could taste his belief in them on the air. “The thing you don’t know about your supposed other mate is that he had another.” Aiden’s smirk meant that he thought he had an ace up his sleeve. “He tossed aside the idea of his moon-blessed mate, so that he could mate with his childhood friend instead.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “That isn’t news to me.”

Aiden’s shoulders drooped and the smug look on his face transferred into one of puzzlement. “You knew?”

“How could I not know? The woman you convinced to attack me was the mother of that woman.”

“You were still going to mate with him?”

I laughed then. “Thorin had good reason to assume that he didn’t have a moon-blessed mate, he waited, searched, and did all the right things before he realized there was no one out there. Only then did he compromise his potential fated pairing by agreeing to be with another. I can’t fault him for that. There’s a bit of an age gap between us. It’s almost unheard of for your mate to not be close in age. I understand why he made the choice he did.”

“Yet you condemned me.”

“You made a selfish choice that hurt your future Luna, those women in the harem, and your pack’s health. You did it knowing that your potential mate was out there waiting for you. You did it with the idea in your mind that I was your mate and you were only waiting for me to come of age. You weren’t out there looking for a mate, in case I wasn’t the one for you. You were too busy stealing other people’s mates. How did that work out for the women in your harem, Aiden?”

I could tell by the way he flinched that it had caused consequences for other mated pairings. “You caused other moon-blessed pairs to be rejected, didn’t you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. Not only did you make a mockery of our potential bond, but you destroyed others’ bonds as well. Selene must be so angry with you.”

“Where is Selene now?” He yelled at me. “Where are the gods you hold so dear? They’re not here to protect you, are they? Where were they for all the women who were thrown on that island with you? The gods don’t care about us. Why should we care about them and what they have to say?”

“If that’s the truth, then why am I here? If you don’t care what they think, then take someone else as your mate. I’m sure one of your harem harlots would jump at the chance to be your mate.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that.” Aiden’s temper flared and he turned his back on me. If only he had been a little closer to the bars, I could have reached through and choked him out. If he had the keys on him, it might have meant my freedom. Instead, he paced back and forth in the dark, dank space beyond my cell door.