Mari’s POV
I gasp awake, my hands shooting to my throat.
It was a dream, just a dream, I chant in my mind as I try to bring my breathing under control.
There is no wolf mauling at my neck. It was a dream.
Shifting to a sitting position, I reach towards the bedside cabin and turn on the lamp. What’s the—
I gasp and scramble back on my bed at the sight of the two women standing by my bed.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, looking from one to the other.
I recognise one of them. Naya, from earlier tonight. This time, she’s wearing black leather pants and a matching leather jacket. So is the other one. They look like a pair of assassins…
“You have the worst timing, don’t you?” Naya asks, her lips turning up in a small mocking smile. Then, turning to her companion, she says, “Get her!”
Before I can move any further from then, the other woman gets onto the bed and grabs my hands.
“What do you think you’re doing? Let me go!”
“Told you you shouldn’t have snubbed Martha,” Naya says, her voice infuriatingly calm as she leans over. She holds her hand out, and that’s when I see the syringe. “Too bad Andreas isn’t here to save you this time.”
My brain tells me to scream, and that’s what I do.
Soon after, I feel a sting in my neck as she drives the needle home.
When I wake up again, I’m in a room with bright lights. I can tell because the moment I try to open my eyes, I shut them right back due to the sudden onslaught of light.
“She’s awake,” I hear someone’s voice. It’s a woman’s.
“Sure?” Another one. It’s familiar. Naya.
I open my eyes slowly, this time taking time to adjust to the bright light. Naya’s face appears in my field of view.
She disappears. Then her voice comes again. “See, I told you it won’t be long. I’ll go get Martha.”
I lift my head to take in the room. It’s a living room, with fine furniture and artsy wall hangings.
I turn my head and see a woman, the one who appeared in my room earlier with Naya. “Where am I? What do you want from me?”
“We wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if you hadn’t been so rude when Naya came to get you earlier,” she replies, sneering down at me.
I try to get to my feet, but they are too weak. I’m sitting in a plush armchair.
“You might have come around, but you’re still too weak to do anything,” she informs me. “So don’t get any ideas. You should be grateful we didn’t tie you up.”
I scoff. “If Stefan finds out about this—”
“What? You think my son would go against me because of some human wench?”
I swing my head around towards the new voice. It’s a middle-aged woman, accompanied by Naya. Is this the Martha she keeps mentioning?
I glare at her. “Look, I have no interest in your son or whatever cult this is you guys got going on here. So if you came here to warn me off him, don’t waste your breath.”
Her eyes clash with mine.
Suddenly, she rears back, her palm rising to grasp her chest. Naya reaches quickly for her, holding her arm. “Ma’am, are you alright?”
Martha’s hand shoots out, a finger pointing at me. “You… You!”
Me?
“Ma’am?” Naya questions, her gaze shifting between the two of us. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re supposed to be dead!” Martha screeches.
What?
She pulls away from Naya and marches forward, approaching me. Reaching out, she grabs me by the fabric of my nightdress and pulls me to my feet. She holds me up by her sheer strength since my legs are still rubbery from whatever it is her minions injected in my neck earlier.
Her angry grey eyes search my face. “It’s you, it’s really you!”
“No, it’s not! I’m not whoever you think I am!”
“All those years ago, I made sure you’d never get close to my son ever again. So why are you here? How did you… Why are you…” she trails off, her nostrils flaring as she inhales deeply. She lets go of me and I drop back into the armchair. She beckons Naya, her hateful glare on me. “Bring her down to the basement.”
Naya steps forward. “Are you sure?”
“Right now!” she screams.
Naya nods and comes to grab my hands. Her companion joins in, and they lift me together.
“Look, you have me confused for my—”
She slaps me across the face, sending my head spinning. My ear rings while my cheek howls.
“Just shut up,” Naya advises as she and her friend begin dragging me across the room.
From behind us, I hear Martha shouting, “Tell Thomas to come to me, right now!”
I’m too weak to fight against the women, so they easily get me through a door and down a flight of stairs into a basement. They drag me to a metal chair and go ahead to tie up my legs and hands together.
“You’ve gone and pissed Martha off,” Naya mutters as she finishes tying my legs together. “If you play your cards right, maybe you’ll get out of here alive.” Coming to her feet, she slaps her hands together as if getting rid of dirt. “That would be a first, though.”
I grit my teeth and try to pull my hands free, but it’s all in vain. They’ve tied me up so tightly I can barely move them. “You are crazy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Naya mutters.
The door at the top of the stairs opens and there’s the sound of steps. “Girls, leave,” Martha orders as she comes into view. There’s a man dressed in a dark suit with her.
Naya and her companion bow and go back up the stairs.
“Ensure nobody disturbs us,” Martha orders them before they disappear through the door. Then she turns to me and holds a hand out to me. “Do you want to explain to me why this girl is alive, Thomas?”
The man steps forward and studies my face. “There’s no way she could be here…”
“Because you were supposed to get rid of her, remember?”
The man looks at her uneasily, then turns back to me. “Where did you come from?”
“Why don’t you ask your precious Alpha Stefan? He abducted me and brought me here! I have no idea who you guys are, and I want nothing to do with you.”
Martha comes forward, her eyes narrowed. “I knew there was something familiar about that name of yours. I didn’t connect the dots until I saw your pathetic face!”
I take a deep breath. I have no idea what my twin sister got into when she was living with them, but I have to clear this misunderstanding before I lose my life on behalf of a sibling I haven’t seen since I was five!
“My twin sister, that’s the girl who used to live at your house, not me. We are identical.”
Martha cackles. “Nice try. Do you share a name too?”
“Look, it’s complicated…”
“Shut up,” she orders, her teeth clenched together. She turns to Thomas. “Thomas, I want you to tell me right now why this girl is alive in the next five seconds or I’m going to tear your head off and feed it to my dogs!”
My eyes shift to the man. He looks uneasy. Cornered. Did he murder my twin sister? Is she really dead?
When my mother came back, she was alone, and she never spoke a word of her. The only thing she did related to her was force me to take up her identity. I never knew why back then, and now, after thirteen years of living under her name, I still have no idea why she behaved like that.
She took me from my father’s house and brought me with her, the daughter she had abandoned with a cruel stepmother. She forced me to change my name and hit me whenever I tried to correct her. I had no choice but to accept my new identity and stick to it.
I had no idea it would get me into so much trouble.
I watch as the man folds his hand into fists. “It’s true, I didn’t kill her,” he confesses. Then he falls to his knees and puts his hands together, looking up at Martha will pleading eyes. “But I swear, I made sure she would never come near your family again. If she came back, I would know, and…”
Martha kicks him, sending him sprawling to the floor. “What did you say?”
“I’m sorry, Ma’am!”
“Sorry? You’re the reason my son’s filthy human mate is still alive, and you’re saying sorry? Do you know what will happen to our family if he mates with her?”
“I’m not Mari!” I scream. “I’m her sister. My true name is Gwen! I swear I don’t know anything about you people! I have never met Stefan before in my life!”
Martha ignores me and presses the heel of her shoe to Thomas’s throat. “What did you do with her?”
“I sold her.”
“What?”
“I sold her to another pack. Before I could get rid of her, I found out she was a shifter. I knew she would fetch a good price. I needed the money for my family. The Alpha I sold her to promised she would never come near your family again. I swear, she can never escape from them. Maybe this girl is telling the truth…”
“A shifter?” Martha demands.
Thomas nods. “Yes, yes. I swear I’m not lying. That’s why they bought her.”
Martha scoffs. “You’re telling me that girl was a shifter?”
He nods. “Yes!”
“What about her mother?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ma’am.”
Martha pulls her leg back and sneers. “Do I look like someone you can fool with your silly lies, Thomas?”
He gets to his knees again. “Please, Ma’am, I’m not lying. I truly sold her. She can never escape them. I can call them right now and see if she’s still with them.”
“Do it!”
Thomas reaches for his jacket’s interior pocket and retrieves a phone. His shaky fingers fumble on the screen, and soon, he is pressing the phone to his ear.
While we wait, I process everything they just said. Shifter? My sister was a shifter? I might not know a lot about this crazy world of theirs, but I’m familiar with that term. Shifters are people who can change into animals, right?
Thomas tries to make the call about three times, but it’s all futile.
“Let’s do a test!” he suggests, sounding desperate. “If she’s a shifter, we’ll know it’s her.”
A test?
“I don’t even trust your story yet, and you want to do a test? That girl was human! My son would never, ever, be destined to a shifter. No werewolf ever gets a shifter mate, do you understand?”
“Ma’am, I swear…”
“It doesn’t matter. Human or not, she doesn’t deserve my son. I’ll deal with you later. Right now, I want you to finish the job you neglected back then.”
Is she serious? She wants me dead?
“I swear I’m not the one you’re looking for!” I claim, “How about we get my mother? She can tell you clearly that I’m Mari’s twin sister.”
“Why would Stefan bring you here, then? He obviously felt the pull when he found you, and that’s why he brought you here. You cannot mistake the pull of your mate,” Martha explains. Then she tosses her head back as if getting impatient. “Stefan is on his way to becoming the werewolf king. I cannot allow him to blindly lose everything he has worked so hard for because of a human piece of trash. You have to get out of his way. I’ll find him another Luna, one who’s fit for an Alpha of his stature.”
She looks around the room as if searching for something. By now, my pulse has escalated, my blood roaring in my ears.
This cannot be happening.
How did I go from running from an abusive boyfriend to getting on the kill list of supernaturals within twenty-four hours?
Martha’s gaze latches onto something on the far side of the room. She marches there. In the dim light on that side, I see something gleam. When she steps back into full light, I see the sword in her hands clearly.
“I would love to tear you to pieces, but I’m not in the mood for dirtying my hands with your filthy blood. This will be quick and cleaner.”
Thomas scrambles to his feet and eyes the sword. “Ma’am, are you sure? If you do this and Stefan—”
“Stefan can do nothing!” she yells. “I’m doing him a favour. If it weren’t for me, he would be nothing today. I won’t stand by and watch him lose all the power he has gained because of an unfit Luna.”
Then she steps up to me and grips the sword in her hands. My entire body trembles as I eye the sharp metal.
“Please,” I beg, my voice shaky, “don’t do this. I’ll do anything for you. Anything. I’ll go away from here and make sure he never finds me. Please don’t hurt me.”
She scoffs again. “Hurt? I’m going to behead you, wench. That way, nothing in this world can bring you back to my son’s side.”
Tears stream down my cheeks and I resume my struggle with my hand restraints. Turning to Thomas, I plead with him, “I’m really not Mari. Please make that call again.”
He bows his head and steps back as if he dare not get in her way.
She lifts the sword ready to swing, and I scream.
The door on top of the stairs bursts open. There are loud footsteps, and then Stefan appears.
As if knowing she has run out of time, Martha swings the sword.
I scream again, anticipating the pain.
But it never comes.
A large shape shoots between me and Martha, and there’s a loud thud. I hear someone shouting. Andreas?
The sound of footsteps running.
A howl.
A scream, “Stefan, NOOOOO!”
The chair I’m tied to topples over as someone jumps over me. Only at the last moment do I realise it’s not someone.
It’s something.
A wolf.
A big, black wolf, with its fangs bared.
I’m too shocked to scream.
That’s until it growls one more time and then sinks its sharp teeth into my shoulder.
I scream in pain before everything goes black.