I smelled the air, tasting the change in her scent. There was a bitterness that hadn’t been there. A wrongness I could only associate withhim.
It made my beast angry and scared; angry because it meanthehad done something to her. Altered her like the others. But scared because it hurt her. Confused her. Whatever he’d done made her cry until she slipped into slumber, and it worried me.
My gaze moved to the newest cage. It had been erected between two wolf shifters behind the female prisoner. She hadn’t noticed it, though she seemed to have realised one of the nine male prisoners was gone.
The beast from the other world lay within the new cage, trapped in his shifted form. There were bleeding wounds across his back, dealt to him when he’d been thrown in the cage hoursago. The gashes had yet to heal, and in the hours since being brought here, he hadn’t moved.
His scent was no different than it had been before. Still sweet and strange, unfamiliar here in the prison. Untouched byhimand his dark power. But when she’d been brought back, his scent had shifted ever so slightly, as if responding to her presence.
There were somehow fewer guards now, and Watcher had yet to return. For a moment, I tore my eyes off the other cage to take in the rest of the prison. The darkness was new, but I could easily see through it. With the lights going out, there was a strange quiet that made the hairs on the back of my beast’s neck rise.
The rotation of guards changed out almost silently, like they were shadows along the walls. To most, they would go unnoticed with how quietly they moved. But I noticed every single one of them.
They were familiar faces down here, though none of them were Watcher. None of them were the winged male from the other world, either.
It was easy, falling into the calm, letting it brush over me like it had the others. My eyes moved from the guards lining the walls to the female again. I watched her breathe, the rise and fall of her chest calming my beast. Her hands cupped her stomach, fingers splayed over it protectively. My eyes were drawn to the swell, which didn’t seem any different than it had before being taken.
But her scent shifted slightly in the same way the female shifters’ usually did when they were taken to isolation.
A need to protect swelled within me. My hackles rose as I realised whathe’ddone.
He’d never done it to a non-shifter before. Only to the beasts.
She was with child, and like the others, he would take it for himself.
Would the child be like me? Bred to live a life shifted and never see the outside of a cage unless it was to die?
The thought made the rage worse. The bloodlust I’d felt towards her shifted tohim. It made my beast want to tear him apart for what he’d done.
It made sense why he carried her back to her cage, why he’d been so gentle with her. He never afforded the shifter females the same care, but she was different to him. He needed her for more than just breeding.
There were two scents, however, entwined with hers. Neither belonged to him, though I did vaguely recognise one of them from the other world. It reminded me of the scents here amongst the cages, reminded me of someone long dead—removed from this world by our captors.
The other scent was one I was unfamiliar with, but it was linked to the first.
The silence and calm of the cages was disrupted by the interior elevator opening and guards appearing, escorting a male figure from the lit interior. A bag covered his head, his legs dragging against the ground. He could barely hold himself up; the guards carrying him were the only reason he moved.
I watched the guards take him to the cage across from me where the eight other prisoners waited. The males within didn’t move, though they were awake and watching now. They were careful not to speak, to remain unthreatening.
A guard made it to the door first, pressing his hand against one of the bars to open it. “Any of you move, you won’t wake up,” he muttered, eyes on the eight prisoners.
Some stiffened, others bared their teeth. Anger darkened their scents, but so did fear. They were somehow weaker than they were before. It poisoned their scents.
One of the guards holding the male tore the bag from his head and threw him into the cage with his cuffs and chains still on. The male stumbled before falling to his knees with a groan, but the door slammed shut, the magic reigniting to trap them within.
“Fuck, I hate being down here,” one guard said as he stepped away from the nine prisoners. “The shifters are fucking creepy.”
“You would be too if you were stuck in a cage,” the first one replied. “Especially trapped in your animal form.”
“What, you feel sorry for the mutts?” another asked, stalking towards the hidden elevator.
“Of course not,” the first one spat. “Just fucking sucks for them.”
They would never understand. They were here because they wanted to be. They were not trapped in their own minds like the others, not trapped in their other bodies like us. They were given the choice to be soldiers inhisarmy.
To them, we were nothing butmutts, but to us, the soldiers were darkness—destruction. They were fear and anger and everything we hated all wrapped in puny forms.
The elevator arrived silently, and they entered without another word about us being trapped in cages.
