Roger
Something was wrong.
Actually, something was very, very wrong. I knew that with a bone-deep truth but what I didn’t know waswhatwas wrong.
I was in a room that was entirely too quiet with absolutely no memory of how I got there.
The walls and ceiling were all stark white. There was a window on one wall, the light coming in diffused by some sort of gauzy curtain. The bed I was chained to was situated in the center of the room and, other than it, there was no other furniture, no medical equipment, so it obviously wasn’t a hospital room.
I tugged carefully on the chains that bound my arms and legs to the four corners of the bed, testing their strength and found that I could barely lift my limbs.
Warded silver.
If I was bound to the bed with warded silver manacles, things were even more wrong than I’d first thought. Whoever had restrained me knew I was a shifter and, worse, knew how to keep me from releasing my inner beast.
I relaxed my limbs and scanned the room more thoroughly. Other than the obvious lack of furniture, I saw that there was a strip of LED lights running along the perimeter of the ceiling and unobtrusive surveillance cameras mounted in each corner and painted to blend in with the walls.
No point in pretending I was still asleep, then, so I tested the chains again, raising my head to try and see how they were fastened, expecting my captors to burst into the room any moment now that I was awake.
Nothing happened. Curiouser and curiouser. I couldn’t be sure that my inner clock was working, but I thought I’d laid there, tense and waiting for nearly an hour when I finally gave a mental shrug and closed my eyes. I wasn’t tired, but it allowed me to focus my mind on trying to remember how I ended up there.
I focused inwardly, calling to the monster who barely whimpered in response, the warded silver rendering him nearly unresponsive. I coaxed and prodded, but it wasn’t until I began focusing on the thought of our mate and the unborn child he carried that the beast managed to rouse himself long enough to speak to me.
In my mind, I watched as our wolf picked his way through the small border town we’d been sent to investigate, rising to place his front paws on the windowsill of a small cinderblock building with three heavy padlocks on the door. Peering through the murky window to see a small group of beings -humans, from the scent coming through the drafty window– huddled together around a large cement circle. The tiny room was lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling by a wire. The harsh light showed that the captives were all obviously pregnant and chained to metal hooks mounted to the concrete. The events that followed slowly began to come back to me.
Having confirmed the presence of captives, I’d dropped back to the ground, preparing to shift, my mind on the need to pull the camera free of the bag around my neck when a searing pain shot through my hip, tearing a screeching scream from my throat. Turning to find a figure a few yards away with a rifle still trained on me, I’d loped away as fast as my injured body could escape, knowing I needed to get back up and rescue the captives before the criminals had the chance to move them, and move them they would now that they had to realize they’d been caught. After that, everything faded into something of a blur.
Memories and visions seemed to be vying for my attention as images of Ari gazing up at me with passion-hazed eyes morphed into erotic imaginings of intimate moments with an unfamiliar werewolf, of soft skin and firm muscle giving way beneath my fangs, then into members from my unit who seemed intent on overpowering me.
All in all, none of it made any sense and the beast was no help at all, having surrendered to the effects of the warded silver and crawled back inside my soul for protection after sharing his memories.
The slightest creak of a floorboard from beyond the door alerted me that someone had arrived at my cell. When the door swung open, I was staring at one of the last individuals I would have expected.
“Commander?” Relief and confusion were both clear in my voice as I stared at him.
Commander Alfried exhaled hard, a relieved sigh. “Roger. Damn, it’s good to see you finally conscious, son.”
“Finally?” I repeated, a ball of dread settling in my gut. “How long have I been out?”
“A little over three days,” Alfried said quietly. “We’ve been worried.”
“Shit!” I groaned and tried to smack my fist to my forehead only to have the chain stop it short. “Ari is going to kill me.”
Alfried gave me a tight smile. “He knows you’re here. He said to tell you not to worry about him. Also, I texted him when I sent for the doctor, so he knows you’re awake now.”
That had me breathing easier. “Thank you. What happened?”
Alfried gave a small snort, but it definitely wasn’t amusement. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and began to tap on the screen. “Give me a minute to get the doctor in here and then I’ll tell you what we know.”
An hour later, I’d been unchained, received a full physical and been declared reasonably recovered, a newly discovered allergy to acepromazine had been added to my file, and I was wolfing down a stack of limp ham on stale white bread sandwiches from the vending machine while Alfried walked me through what our command had pieced together.
The shot I’d taken was apparently a tranquilizer dart but with my previously unknown allergy to acepromazine, my unique shifter metabolism had gone haywire and sent me into overdrive instead of knocking me out. When I’d missed my check-in, the members of my team had been sent to track and retrieve me. It had taken seven werewolves and a set of warded silver restraints for them to take me down so that blood tests could be evaluated and, finally, an antidote could be administered. That was when I had lapsed into the coma I’d just woken from.
Alfried finished talking right as I swallowed the last bite, but he couldn’t seem to look me in the eye.
“Commander?” I waited for him to meet my eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?”
“Nothing that I’m at leave to tell you,” he said with a sigh. “It’s not, well, I don’t think it’s a problem.”
