Chapter 11: The Alpha’s Interrogation
1200 Words
N Y X A R A
Freedom looked like one unchained wrist and a blade I was not supposed to reach.
That was how I knew it was a trap.
I woke without moving, breath shallow, lashes barely parted, the way the Guild taught us to return to consciousness when enemies wanted proof we were harmless.
My left wrist was still bound to the carved arm of a chair with a strip of dark leather threaded through silver rings. My right wrist lay free in my lap.
Free.
The word crawled under my skin like a knife-tip. This—one restraint removed, one left waiting—had intention.
The room was not a dungeon. Stone walls. Narrow windows ribbed with moonlight. A hearth gone cold. Two guards beyond the door, judging by breath and boot-shift. Moonstone sigils carved into the threshold, pale as old bone.
And on the table across from me, just beyond easy reach, rested a knife.
Not my knife. Too broad through the spine. Ashmoore steel, wolf-made, honest enough to look cruel.
Memory returned in fragments: steam curling from Elaren’s bowl, Kaelor’s hand vanishing from my skin the instant she ordered it, pain blooming white behind my eyes.
A cage, Elaren had whispered.
My free hand curled slowly.
For a Luna who was not supposed to wake.
The door opened before I chose whether to take the knife.
Kaelor Voss filled the threshold. No crown. No armor. Just dark trousers, rolled sleeves, and a stillness that made violence feel less like a possibility and more like a sleeping animal.
The guards behind him straightened.
“Leave us,” he said.
One of them shifted. “Alpha, she—”
Kaelor turned his head. No raised voice. Just gold catching at the edge of his eyes, sudden and inhuman.
The guard swallowed the rest of his warning. The silence they left behind had teeth. I let my gaze drift to the knife, then back to him.
“That was foolish.”
“If you wanted me dead,” he said, stepping inside, “you already tried.”
“And failed?”
His mouth did not smile, but something almost did.
“Spectacularly.”
I hated the small spark of irritation that steadied me. Fear was slippery. Anger had handles.
Kaelor stopped several paces away, close enough to speak, far enough that I could not accuse him of crowding me. His gaze flicked once to my free wrist, then to my bound one.
“You left me a weapon,” I said.
“I left you a choice.”
“No.” My fingers flexed in my lap. “You left me bait.”
His eyes returned to mine.
“Then show me what you do with it.”
I could have gone for the knife then. I knew he knew it. The weapon sat between us like a third participant in the conversation, patient and gleaming and very interested in my bad decisions.
Kaelor did not move toward it.
“Who sent you?” he asked.
“The Guild.”
Truth tasted like copper. A bone thrown to a wolf to see if he would choke on it. His jaw tightened, but his voice stayed level.
“Why would the Guild send a human assassin into Ashmoore with a Luna lock under her skin?”
I laughed once. It came out sharp enough to cut my throat.
“Is that what we’re calling it now? A lock?”
“What would you call it?”
“A leash with prettier manners.”
Something flickered in his face— understanding. I leaned back as much as the bound wrist allowed.
“Careful, Alpha. Pity makes men stupid.”
“Pity is not what I feel.”
The air changed, heavier, as if the bond beneath my skin had lifted its head.
I hated that my body noticed him three paces away. Hated the heat under my mark. Hated the pull behind my ribs.
Kaelor’s nostrils flared.
He felt it too. Good. Let him choke on it.
His gaze sharpened.
“What does reset mean?”
My pulse stopped doing anything useful.
The room narrowed: moonstone at the door, knife on the table, leather at my wrist, his golden eyes waiting for the part of me the Guild had buried too deep to reach.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Pain struck before the lie finished.
It snapped through my mark, down my arm, into my chest—then leapt the space between us. Kaelor’s hand clenched. His breath caught.
The bond punished us both.
Interesting.
Horrifying.
Kaelor went very still. “Try again.”
I showed my teeth.
“Command me and find out.”
His eyes flashed. For one breath, the wolf looked through him.
Then Kaelor stepped back from whatever instinct had risen in his blood and said, coldly,
“No.”
That refusal hit harder than command.
I understood orders. Pain. Punishment. Force meeting force. I did not understand men who stopped themselves. But Kaelor looked at me like there was a door inside him he had locked from the outside, and whatever waited behind it had claws.
So I chose the knife.
My free hand snapped out. The chair scraped stone. Leather bit my bound wrist. I caught the hilt, rose, and slashed for his throat.
Kaelor moved.
His hand caught my wrist inches from his throat. His other arm turned my momentum instead of breaking it. The knife hit the floor. My back struck his chest for one brutal heartbeat, heat and pine-dark scent swallowing me.
My body went still for the wrong reasons.
The bond surged, gold-white and violent, lighting every nerve. His breath brushed my ear. Mine vanished between rage and need.
Kaelor released me first. He stepped back like distance cost blood. I turned, shaking, furious that my wrist did not hurt.
Not broken.
Not even bruised.
Then something under my skin woke. Older than pain. Colder than fear.
A phrase slid through my blood in a language my mouth remembered first. My fingers twitched. My spine locked. The room tilted, and suddenly I was moving.
My hand dove for the fallen knife. Kaelor lunged, but I already had it, my arm turning inward with Guild precision.
Toward my ribs.
No.
The word screamed through me and found no way out.
My body did not care.
Kaelor caught both my wrists before the blade could sink home. This time he used real strength.
The kind that made stone and blood and every instinct in the room remember what he was. He forced the knife from my hand and pinned my wrists against the floor.
The command thrashed inside me, furious and silent. I bucked beneath him, breath tearing.
“Get off me.”
He released me immediately. I shoved myself upright, shaking so hard my teeth clicked. Kaelor knelt a pace away, gold still burning in his eyes, voice low enough to break something softer than bone.
“No.”
My heart lurched. Then he said,
“No one commands your body in my den. Not even me.”
Beneath my skin, the Guild’s command went still.
Not dead.
Listening.
- Writer
