The interior was wrong, warped, bigger than it should be. The walls stretched up into darkness, and doors lined the hallway like mouths. I knew this place. My body knew it before my mind caught up, muscles tensing with remembered pain.
They threw me to the floor. My knees hit hardwood with a crack that sent lightning up my thighs, and I scrambled to get up, to run, but rough hands pushed me back down. I looked up and saw them all—my old pack, their faces twisted with cruel satisfaction, circling me like wolves around wounded prey.
“Did you miss us?” one of them asked, and the others laughed.
Bane stepped through the circle, and my heart tried to climb out through my throat. He looked exactly as I remembered—tall and broad-shouldered, with cold, icy eyes that held no love even when he smiled. Pine scent rolled off him in waves, making my Omega biology respond with nausea instead of attraction.
“I gave you everything,” he said, his voice soft and reasonable. The way he always spoke before he beat me. “A home. A purpose. A place in my pack. And you threw it away.”
“You hurt me,” I tried to say, but my voice came out too small, too weak. “You beat me. You made me lose—”
His hand moved faster than I could track. The slap connected with my cheek, snapping my head to the side. Pain bloomed across my face, hot and sharp, and I tasted copper.
“You don't get to speak,” he said, still in that reasonable tone. “Not anymore.”
The first blow to my stomach drove all the air from my lungs. I doubled over, gasping, and his fist came again. And again. Each impact sent shockwaves through my abdomen, and I felt it—that terrible, familiar cramping pain that meant something inside me was dying.
No. Not again. Please, not again.
But my body remembered. It remembered everything. The pain, the blood, losing something precious that I'd never get back. I curled around myself, trying to protect what was no longer there.
“You're ours,” Bane said, and his face was suddenly close to mine, his breath hot against my ear. “You'll always be ours. Did you really think you could escape? That some rich Alpha and his pack would want damaged goods like you?”
His words burrowed into my brain like parasites. Damaged goods. That's all I was. That's all I'd ever be.
“They'll get tired of you,” he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that somehow filled the entire warped space around us. “They'll realize you're not worth the trouble. And when they throw you out, we'll be waiting. We'll always be waiting.”
I tried to shake my head, tried to deny it, but I couldn't move. His face filled my vision, those cold eyes boring into mine, and I felt something in my chest crack open. The fear was suffocating, pressing down on my lungs until I couldn't draw breath.
“You'll never escape,” he said, and his hand moved to my throat. His fingers closed around my neck, not quite choking but promising it. “Never. You're mine.”
The room spun. Pain radiated from my abdomen in waves, each one worse than the last. I could feel it—the blood, the loss, the emptiness. My hands scrabbled at his wrist, trying to pry his fingers away, but they wouldn't budge.
The walls pressed closer, the ceiling lowered, and I realized with horror that the room was shrinking. It was going to crush me, trap me here forever with Bane's hand on my throat and his cold eyes watching me suffocate.
My body thrashed against restraints I couldn't see. Sheets tangled around my legs, damp with sweat. My heart hammered so hard I thought it might crack my ribs. Somewhere distant, I heard myself whimpering, the sound high and broken and terrified.
“Never escape,” Bane's voice echoed, multiplying until it came from everywhere. “Never, never, never—”
I shot upright with a strangled cry that tore from my throat like something physical being ripped out. My eyes flew open to darkness, and for one horrible moment, I didn't know where I was. The nightmare clung to me like a second skin, Bane's face still swimming in my vision, his hand still tight around my throat.
My chest heaved. I gulped air that wouldn't satisfy, my lungs refusing to expand properly. The room spun around me, shadows moving in ways that made my pulse spike higher.
Not real. It wasn’t real. But it felt real. My abdomen still ached, and when I pressed my hand against it, I half-expected to feel blood.
I was shaking so violently that the bed trembled beneath me. Tears streamed down my face, hot and unstoppable, and I couldn't catch my breath, couldn't slow my racing heart, couldn't make sense of where the nightmare ended and reality began.
The darkness pressed in from all sides, and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to ground myself, trying to remember where I actually was.
The penthouse. I was in the penthouse. Safe. I was supposed to be safe.
But the nightmare had felt so real, and Bane's final words still echoed in my skull: You'll never escape.
Chapter Twenty-one
Jasmine
Movement in the darkness made me gasp, my body jerking backward against the headboard. A large shape near the bed. My mind immediately supplied the nightmare's ending, Bane reaching for me with those icy hands.
