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The forest... I was still in the forest. And I was sitting... against a tree.

I looked around frantically. Too frantically, because my head started to hurt and I felt dizzy.

I wanted to get up, but something was holding me down. My hands... were tied together...

I was tied to a tree.

Panic shot through my body, into my aching limbs, and I pulled harder and harder on the thick rope.

During training with Laurent, I had already freed myself from several restraints, including many ropes and even metal chains. But the rope that painfully wrapped around my hands seemed to come from another universe. It didn't even let me break my hands.

“What the...” I managed to say as I pulled harder and harder, but the rope only tightened around my wrists.

Was this Laurent testing me?

“Oh, oh,” a deep male voice sounded, full of mockery. “Is our little Ruisangor stuck?”

I looked up and stopped pulling when I spotted a person in black jeans, a black hoodie, and a leather jacket of the same color seven feet in front of me.

Kieran.

He had attacked me. He had...

“Did you seriously tie me to a tree?!”

The right corner of his mouth turned up.

“You sick psychopath!”

I suppressed the urge to keep pulling because I already knew it was pointless. Whatever kind of rope it was, Kieran knew what he was doing.

How stupid of me. I had just run instead of walking normally, not looking behind me or to the sides, only straight ahead.

Once again, I had been too careless. The result was that a werewolf had knocked me out and tied me to a tree.

Great, Larissa.

So much for my latest break-in mission.

“Usually women like it when I tie them up,” Kieran teased.

I looked up, looking him straight in the eye.

He wasn't drunk, but there was something playful in his gaze that I didn't know. Something that sent a slight tingle down my spine.

Memories suddenly came flooding back.

Lillian Champson.

I felt sick.

“How do you know my name?!” I snapped at him more heatedly than I usually did with people who made me angry.

It helped to suppress the nausea and the memories I associated with that name.

With both hands behind his back, he began to pace back and forth in front of me.

“You're not the one asking the questions here,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I'm asking the questions.” He stopped and looked at me expectantly. “Now please tell me what you were doing near Pavati Lake.” The smirk returned, along with that predatory gleam in his gray eyes. “A lonely little Ruisangor. All alone in the forests of the Senseque.”