Sold to Fate

TWO

You want my attention. Well, now you have my undivided attention.

If anyone could hear him, he would have said it out loud but alas, his audience was a possibly dead girl and a Feral.

Ferals were known as wolves that had transformed to the point that they act like animals, whether in human form or wolf form. Becoming a Feral was a horrible thing to happen to a wolf and in fact, it rarely happened until recently. Rogues have been losing themselves and turning into Ferals without any reasonable explanation. Unless someone was manipulating them.

The Guardian’s face darkened at that thought. It was his job as Guardian of the Lunar Gateway to ensure that wolves, Ferals, and rogues were kept under control especially those wolves that chose to lead a normal life in the human world. The reason is to keep their realm a secret to avoid attacks and to ensure that they don’t go about feasting on humans and transforming them into wolves.

“Bang”

He struck the Feral on the head with his staff and he fell on the floor. He picked up the wolf and was about to open the gate when he realized that the girl on the ground had claw marks on her skin.

The i***t Feral had attacked her after all and now he had to clean up two messes.

The first one was to take the Feral back to their world to be imprisoned and retrained and the second was to ensure that the girl’s injury was not deep enough to transform her into a werewolf. To simply put it, he had to take both of them through the portal.

He pointed his staff to an open space and a portal opened. He carried them through it into the realm of the Lycans.

As the guardian of the Lunar Gateway, he was a very powerful man. Some would say he was one of the most powerful Alphas. He led the greatest pack and protected and guarded the portal that connected the werewolves to the human man world.

For centuries, the portal had been kept safe and hidden away from other creatures that may try to attack them. He ensured that those who needed to stay in their world stayed in and those who needed to be thrown out or kept away were kept away.

It was his job as Guardian to protect the humans from getting transformed into wolves without their permission by capturing rogue wolves and Ferals. Also tending to human injuries like the one. He had to give her an antidote that would prevent her body from accepting the Feral’s poison.

The guardian was a bridge between the human world and the other side. A well respected man, powerful in both realms but also a very lonely man. He lost his chance to have a mate a long time ago. There comes a time in a man’s life when he has to choose. Power or love?

It seems that in the guardian’s case, he chose power and he paid the price. He has been alive for six centuries protecting his kind but he looked like he was only twenty-nine years old. The young CEO of a multimillionaire company.

Choosing power was never that easy, he had been hurt before. His mate had died and instead of the chance to love again, he chose to be a guardian and guardians don’t have mates. Instead, they live very long lives and wield the utmost power as they grow and progress.

Once through the portal, he landed outside the heavy wooden doors of a giant building on the mountain. It looked like a castle and a giant cave at the same time. The wooden doors opened and he carried them through it.

He dropped the Feral on the floor and proceeded to an inner room with the girl.

“Welcome Fangor,”

Jeon, the housekeeper was smiling at him. He looked down at the body on the floor and frowned.

“Who is that?”

“Cain”

“I finally found him but he turned feral right in front of me”

Eyes widen

“Oh my goodness”

“What of the girl, is she dead?”

“Not yet”

The guardian walked straight into the inner room while still carrying the girl.

Jeon was smiling as he called two people to carry the wolf that the guardian had dropped on the floor and lock him up in a cage till his senses came back.

“Jakes, you are here”

A lady in a white lab jacket ran towards the guardian who was still holding the injured girl.

“Is she okay?”

“That is for you to find out”

“Cain attacked her while I was hunting him”

“Okay, put her down and let me do my job”

Jakes placed the girl on a white slab while the lady in a lab coat examined her body.

“She is lucky”

“The wounds are not too deep and the poison hasn’t gotten far”

“She would be fine”

She looked up to him and he nodded back to her.

“Alright take care of her, Selina”

“I’ll be back in an hour”

Jakes left the lab and went up to the uttermost part of the building which was his inner chambers.

In his house, there were a lot of people carrying out various activities and training. There were cooks, soldiers, guards, magicians, caretakers, doctors, and scientists and all of them were werewolves.

Jeon was in charge of running the house and Selina was a scientist who had been with him since she was a baby. Her mother had worked in the house and had given birth to her while serving in the house. He had been watching over her for two centuries and now they were like siblings.

The house was designed to train inhabitants with various skills that they needed to survive and stand out. Selina was a genius scientist who had developed an antidote to stop newly bitten humans from becoming infected and transforming into werewolves.

She was a beautiful blond woman with a round face and an elegant body. She always wore round spectacles and buried herself in books. She was currently researching a cure for Ferals.

Jake went into his room to freshen up and do some work before he went back downstairs. He came out of the shower and was about to do some work when his mind drifted back to this morning. He had planned to check the newly transformed wolves at Seth’s and then head to the office for his interview.

Seth was one of the Lycans' most respected commanders and he held a rehabilitation center for humans transformed into wolves and a prison for rogues and wolves gone Feral but when they get out of control, they are transferred to the other realm where the training is more intense.

He remembered how he ended up with a Feral in the first place. He had gone to inspect the prisoners at Seth’s that morning.

“I found him”

“Who?”

“Cain”

“I saw him three nights ago and brought him here”

“He never went rogue, he just got into a lot of trouble with some gang”

“Where is he?”

“Fangor”

Jake turned back to find Cain standing there. He looked very ragged although Seth had provided new clothes and people to take care of his body. It was still obvious that he had been suffering. Cain looked a lot better than he expected though. Jakes expected him to be almost paralyzed by the time he found him. He had a bandage on his head and it was obvious that he had taken multiple beating wherever he was coming from.

Maybe that is enough punishment for him.

Cain was one of Jakes’s subordinates working for him in the human world. He was helping him in his business affairs and also looking out for strange activities of the wolves living in the human world. Cain was not the only one that was doing this for Jakes. He had eyes everywhere to help in keeping the balance of both worlds.

“Fangor, I am sorry”

“I know that I shouldn’t have disappeared like that but I did not have a choice”

“You had a choice to make me aware of the situation”

Jake felt bad because Cain didn’t feel safe enough to tell him that an underground gang was after his life. He always felt that his subordinates trusted him and he was always so close to Cain especially.

“I have no excuse”

Cain bowed his head and then looked at Jakes’s face as if looking for some form of assurance that he had been forgiven him but Jakes’s face was indifferent and he could not read him in the slightest bit. That was the way the guardian had always been. It was so hard to read his expression or know what he was thinking about at any point in time.

He didn’t have a choice. That was no ordinary gang he was dealing with. They knew who he was and they threatened to kill him unless he gave them information on the guardian. They were rogues and rogues were not particularly fans of the Guardian.

The Guardian had been rounding up rogues and sending them back through the portal to be locked away and retrained. Most of them became rogues because they felt that their pack was tying them down. They wanted to be free and do whatever they pleased but even as rogues, they still had to follow certain rules and regulations that did not sit well with them. That is why most of them, after getting into the human world, form underground cliques and run shady businesses so that they can do all manner of unethical things. They also scheme for evil things which include taking down the Guardian which is impossible. They have tried all sorts of things and now they resorted to threatening anybody that they believe is working for the Guardian and threatening to kill them unless they agree to become a mole for them. The plan is ridiculous because most times, it is either they get the wrong person or they cannot capture the person they end up exposing themselves.

Cain was the kind of person who was fearless and careless at the same time. He kept many rogues as friends only to snitch on them but he always covered his tracks. None of the rogues had ever suspected him and that was where the problem was. He trusted them to be gullible enough to keep falling for his trick he did not realize when they pulled a trick of their own. They captured him, tortured him, and kept beating him up for days till he almost saw death but then suddenly, they released him to the streets where Seth found him. And up until now, he did not understand why they did not kill him. Maybe they realized that Fangor would destroy them completely if they did. He explained.

“Follow me, there is somewhere we need to be”

Cain was quite confused because the guardian just acted like nothing happened but that was his way. He gave out orders and you did not need to understand it, just obey.

They went to the company together to get some work done and he told Cain that he would be staying at this place for a while since he had a new project coming up and he was suspecting foul play among the rogue. There was always foul play but this one was more than usual.

Cain was very dear to him and he was loyal so he trusted him. He was worried when he went missing without even telling him and had told Seth to search for him. Even though he trusted Cain, he sensed that something was wrong with him and it seemed that Cain was oblivious to it.

And why did the rogues suddenly let him go like that? Was someone trailing him?

He had to be wary and keep him close enough to watch him. The day had gone smoothly for him. Well, not smoothly as in wor-related. There were too many people fan-girling him and the entire interview process was stressful but with Cain, everything went smoothly and he was sure that he didn’t have to worry about anything.

They stayed back in the office to work on some things. Jake never really had a day and night. Everything was just time to work for him and he barely got any rest. Cain had learned years ago to not complain about it. He had trained his body to get used to it by now so he was surprised when he started feeling restless and uneasy. The air-conditioned spacious office started to feel hot and uncomfortable and his mind was entering into blank episodes of two seconds each.

“Take a break”

The Guardian had been watching him and realized that he was not feeling himself.

“I am fine”

“You should go home”

“Come back tomorrow”

It might be from the beating and torture, maybe he was not stable enough.

Besides, the work was a lot for someone who was just easing back into it. Aside from that, he had something tense about him.

Cain left the building but he was beginning to lose himself, his consciousness, his thinking, and his strength. His mind was blacking out forcefully. What is happening to me?

Jakes went after him just to make sure that he was okay but all he met was a Feral wolf who was still half in a transformation state. Cain?

Why would Cain go Feral?

Unless…

He was distracted by a blood-curdling scream from the direction that the Feral headed. He ran over to find the girl that Cain, not a Feral attacked.

Once a wolf became Feral, it was hard to bring them back especially if it happened naturally but Cain had no reason to become a Feral unless those rogues had something to do with it.

The door busted open and Jeon entered almost immediately. He was panting

“The girl”

“What?”

The housekeeper was still panting like was scared to say it.

“The antidote was too late”

“She wolfed out already”

That didn’t make any sense. It took at least an hour for a wolf’s venom to spread throughout the body and transform a person but it hadn’t even been up to 20 minutes that he brought the girl in for treatment. No way could have happened.

Jake and Jeon went downstairs to find that Selina locked the girl in the cage. Her body was covered in patches of fur and her eyes had turned red. Her body was forming a dislocation of bones all around and she looked like a mutilation than transformed.

“I think the antidote helped to stop the process but only enough to make this look like an abomination”

“I was able to inject her, she should be calm in a minute”

The sharp crimson eyes turned doll almost immediately and she blacked out again. This time, she transformed in her sleep back to her original shape. Selina entered that lab and got her on a bed. Jake follows behind her. She examined her body and injected some tubes into her.

“This is weird”

“She is not completely turned”

“You think it can happen like that”

“Well, in this case, that is definitely what is going on because I have no other explanation”

“This should help her become stabilized but in the long run, there is not much I can do to help her out”

“I examined her body. She is marked”

“What do you mean?”

“She is a human”

“Maybe, but she has the mark of a wolf”

Jake took a look at the mark that was resting on her neck right beside her collarbone and it looked familiar to him yet he was sure that it was not there before. His face became dark.

“Get her ready, she goes back with me in the morning”

“Shouldn’t we keep for a while for observations? She still needs…”

“No”

“She has to come with me”

The guardian went back to do his research on the girl to know where she came from. He almost laughed when he realized that she was an orphan who worked in his company. Those rogues planned this one well.

They planted an actual wolf disguised as an innocent ignorant girl and staged the whole attack. He had lots of enemies who wanted his downfall so he was not sure of who exactly.

He thought about the girl again and how helpless she looked.

I am going to torture the truth out of her.