Sodie pushes his bowl away.
“Are you fucking serious right now?” Shadow asks Darwin.
“What? I’m hungry,” he mumbles around a mouthful of noodles. We all chuckle, which helps lighten the intense mood.
Shadow clears his throat and starts moving the contents around in his bowl.
“How did you get involved in Jessica’s life? What is her real name?” Darwin asks between bites of food.
“My sister named her Jessica, but the Beta called her Grit.”
So that’s what the G stood for on the tags of what was left of her clothing.
Sodie drinks from his new beer before continuing, “Anyway, with the Ruby Falls Alpha's assistant’s help, we devised a plan to plant a couple of us within the territory. But none of our trained guards were young enough to pull off the school-aged look without suspicion. My brother and I were the youngest guards in training, so we volunteered. When we got there, Skunk and I accidentally made friends with the Young Alpha. We didn’t know who he was when we first met him. He was friends with Jessica.He watched over her. He told us about all the crap her supposed parents did and what they let Bart do to her. Bart is supposedly her older brother. Then, my sister befriended Jessica by giving her piano lessons.”
“Wait. What the fuck!” Shadow exclaims, pushing his bowl forward and rubbing his temples. “Your sister was there with the two of you?”
I glance at Darwin. His chopsticks hover over his bowl, and his eyes widen with astonishment.
I guess I assumed she would remain in hiding, considering she was an alleged criminal who escaped from containment. On top of that, wouldn’t she be worried about the mysterious person who set her up and took her child? On the other hand, if someone goes into hiding, Territory Two is the perfect territory to hide in, given their strict pack laws. However, the risks are too numerous.
“She wanted her daughter back. Before anyone could stop her, she got a job at the school as a music teacher, courtesy of the Alpha’s assistant. We showed up later as transfers from a smaller pack to live with, well, our sister. We blended in well enough due to our coloring and rumors that my mother has Ruby Pack blood in her veins some generations back.”
“Hold on. You said you were the youngest among your guard training? How old were you?” Shadow asks.
“In the Quartz Pack, anyone interested in becoming a guard is eligible to train from the age of twelve. Direct descendants of the original royal guards train from the age of four. I’m also older than my stated age.”
He narrow his eyes. “I figured, based on your story. By how much?”
“Five years.”
“Shit! Were you holding back during training then?” Darwin asks between bites of noodles.
Sodie nods. “The idea is that you don’t show your opponents all your cards, stay under the radar, and bring less attention to yourself. In our case, we weren’t prepared for what we faced when we arrived.”
Apparently, considering what Jessica looked like when we found her. Folding my arms, I brace myself for the rest of the story to unfold.
Shadow sighs. “Get to the meat of it. I already dread what’s coming next.”
Sodie drinks his beer and stares down at the table, lost in memories. “We thought we could get in and out within a few months or so, but things were so bad. They picked on her outside of the home and forced the teachers and the other pack kids to beat her or pick on her. One of the field workers once stopped by the Beta’s house and witnessed the Beta’s mate beat her. It was so awful, he intervened and took her home to clean her up. Three days later, she was sent back home because the field worker was found dead. No one questioned it.
“Another time, a teacher rallied the courage to take his class on a field trip, and they somehow smuggled Jessica on the bus. Before the bus could pass the territory boundary, the bus was stopped and searched. They found Jessica, punished her, and the teacher returned to school the next day with severed fingers. A pack member once tried to feed Jessica for free because everyone knew they were starving her. It worked for a while, until word reached the Beta, and then her restaurant burned down. Of course, they blamed rogue shifters attacking their territory, but everyone knew better.”
He starts peeling the label off of his second beer bottle and stares out the window.
“My friend tried to help her. As the Alpha’s son, he thought that he could do more. But then they began punishing him, too. Jessica being Jessica, she pushed us away. She stopped beingfriends with Dimitri to stop his punishments by association. She isolated herself, so they wouldn’t punish anyone else in the pack either.
“Years passed by, and I couldn’t take it anymore—watching her suffer. So, when a bunch of the pack kids, including her brother, started to beat her up one day, I got involved and fought with them. Without thinking it through, I took her and ran. But we were caught before we even reached the territory boundary. I was punished severely for interfering in pack business, they called it. Even though I lived there, I wasn’t considered part of the pack. I was hung from the rafters in one of the winery's warehouses, stripped and beaten within an inch of my life by the Alpha and Beta.”
He closes his eyes tightly, pain at the recollection of the memory clearly written on his face.
“They made an example of me, a warning to anyone who dared to help Jessica leave the territory. I probably would have died that night, if both Jessica and Dimitri hadn’t intervened.”
Territory Two is as bad as the rumors made it out to be. I cringe at the worst-case scenarios of what they endured during their time within those boundaries. I shake my head, thinking how they had no one to help them—two partially trained teenagers and a single female—who couldn’t even use their magic to escape their situation for fear that they would be caught and killed directly on the spot. How the fuck could Miller and Alpha Agnus support them doing this alone?
“How did they intervene?” Darwin asks.
“I don’t know what they said or promised because I was unconscious at the time. I just know that they didn’t kill me. I was banned from returning to the territory with a warning that if I ever returned, I would be killed immediately.”
