Shouts fill the castle and torchlight flickers as I’m carried through a labyrinth of stone corridors.
I struggle against my captor, but his thick arm only tightens around my waist.
I do not know where I’d run to even if I did escape him. Sebastian? My father? Would that be any better? Would it be worse?
Trapped as I am, something wild seems to have knocked loose inside me. It rattles around in my chest and I do not feel the hopelessness I should be feeling. The anger I have caged since my mother died surges hot and free through my veins.
I am not stone. I am not a statue.
I am fire.
And somehow it has taken this man, this beast, to make me see it.
I pound against the alpha’s back. “Get off me, you bloody horrible brute.” My hair catches in my mouth. I kick my bare feet and hit nothi
