Bought By The Beast

CHAPTER 19: The Border

We moved through the forest for what felt like hours but was probably closer to forty minutes.

David's weight grew heavier against my shoulder with every step, his breathing turning shallow and ragged despite his insistence that he was fine. Caspian carried most of him now, one arm wrapped around David's waist, guiding him over roots and rocks with a patience that seemed impossible for a man who'd just killed twelve people with his bare hands.

The fog began to thin as we climbed higher, and the trees started to spread apart, giving way to rocky terrain that reflected the first pale hints of dawn creeping over the mountains.

"Almost there," Ezra said from ahead of us, and I could hear something different in his voice now. Relief, maybe. Or anticipation.

I didn't see the checkpoint until we were nearly on top of it.

One moment we were pushing through sparse treeline, and the next we stepped out onto a paved road where two black vehicles sat waiting with their headlights off. Armed figures stood beside them, six or seven at least, and every single one of them tensed when we emerged from the forest.

Then they saw Caspian.

The change was immediate. Weapons lowered. Postures shifted. One of them, a tall woman with close-cropped hair and a scar running down the side of her neck, stepped forward and dropped to one knee.

"My King," she said, and her voice carried the weight of someone who meant it. "We received word of the ambush. Reinforcements are en route."

"The border?" Caspian asked.

"Secure. No one followed you past the ridge."

"Good." Caspian handed David off to two of the waiting Lycans, who took him carefully and guided him toward one of the vehicles. "Get him to medical. He's lost blood and the wound needs proper treatment."

"I'm fine," David muttered, but nobody was listening to him anymore.

I stood there at the edge of the road, breathing hard, my clothes torn and splattered with blood that belonged to at least three different people. The gun in my hand felt heavier than it had an hour ago, and my fingers didn't want to unclench from the grip.

Caspian appeared beside me, still naked, still covered in drying blood, completely unbothered by either of those facts.

"You're shaking," he said quietly.

"Adrenaline crash."

"That's not what I meant."

I looked at him then, really looked, and I realized he was studying me with an expression I couldn't quite read. Not concern exactly, something deeper than that. Like he was waiting to see if I would break now that the danger had passed.

"I killed someone out there," I said. "Back there in the fog. I shot him and he fell and I didn't feel anything about it until just now."

"That's normal."

"Is it?"

"For people like us, yes." He reached out and carefully uncurled my fingers from the gun, taking it from me and handing it to one of the nearby Lycans without looking away from my face. "The feeling comes later. Sometimes much later. And when it does, you deal with it. But you don't apologize for surviving, remember?"

I wanted to argue with him, wanted to say that I wasn't people like us because I was just a werewolf who'd been sold at an auction six weeks ago and none of this was supposed to be my life. But the words wouldn't come because some part of me knew they weren't true anymore.

Maybe they'd never been true.

"We should go," Ezra said, appearing beside us with a coat that he handed to Caspian. "Rielle needs rest, David needs a doctor, and you need to not be standing naked at a checkpoint when the reinforcements arrive."

Caspian pulled on the coat without buttoning it. "Where's the transport?"

"Waiting. Two minutes down the road." Ezra's gaze shifted to me, assessing and cool. "Can she make it?"

"I can make it," I said before Caspian could answer for me. "I can also speak for myself."

Something flickered in Ezra's expression that might have been approval. "Good to know."

We walked the two minutes to where another convoy waited, this one larger and more heavily armed than the first. I climbed into the back of the lead vehicle and Caspian slid in beside me, his thigh pressing warm against mine in the confined space.

The engine started and we began to move, climbing higher into the mountains on roads that were smooth and well-maintained despite being in the middle of nowhere.

I watched through the window as the landscape changed.

First it was just forest and rock, the kind of wilderness that existed everywhere in mountain country. But then we passed a gate, massive and iron and manned by guards who waved us through without hesitation, and everything shifted.

Roads became wider, cleaner, lined with lights that made the pre-dawn darkness feel less oppressive. I saw buildings through the trees, not cabins or outposts but actual structures, modern and solid and clearly inhabited.

Then the trees fell away entirely and I saw it.

Thorncross Keep spread out below us like a secret the world had never learned.

It wasn't a village or a compound or even a city in any sense I understood. It was everything at once... a valley filled with light and movement and life, all of it hidden in the mountains where no human would ever think to look. I could see towers of glass and steel rising against the lightening sky, clusters of buildings that might have been neighborhoods, roads threading between them like arteries carrying blood to a massive heart.

And at the center of it all, perched on a rise that overlooked everything else, was the mansion.

It was enormous, sprawling across the hilltop in a way that said power and money and centuries of dominance. Not a castle, nothing medieval or ancient about it, but something sleek and modern and utterly intimidating. Glass walls caught the first rays of dawn and threw them back like a challenge.

"That's yours?" I asked, and my voice came out smaller than I intended.

"That's ours," Caspian corrected. "Everything you see. The Keep, the territory, all forty thousand people who live within these borders... it's ours now."

I stared at the valley below, at the hidden Kingdom that had existed this whole time while I was being sold at an auction and running through warehouses and killing strangers in foggy forests.

"You could have mentioned this was a bit more than a family estate," I said.

"Would it have changed anything?"

I thought about it honestly. About the auction, about the claiming, about every moment since then that had led us here.

"No," I admitted. "But I still would have liked to know."

The convoy descended into Thorncross Keep as the sun finally broke over the mountains.

And somewhere below, I could already see people gathering, watching the vehicles approach, waiting to see what their King had brought home.