Page 33 of Starting a New Life

Yet I was sitting in a cell while being their Alpha’s mate.

I felt like I was about to puke.

Did they not know? Had their Alpha kept that information from them? Was he ashamed? Probably. Would he ever tell them? Or would he just… keep me away from everyone? Trapped in his home. His slave to do his bidding whenever he needed me to perform some kind of magic for him or to…

There wasn’t enough air for me to breathe. Not enough oxygen to get into my lungs. My breaths were coming too fast, too shallow, my teeth chattering.

I knew packs like this. Hell, one had been hunting me for months now.

I’d wanted to believe Levi when he’d said I didn’t need to be afraid of the wolves here. Had so desperately wanted to believe that what he was telling me was true, that the shifters here were different.

Hell, I’d been about to tell him everything and let him set up a formal meeting between me and the pack.

And now? Now I was sitting here and learning just how wrong he’d been about everything. The shifters might’ve been nice to him. But they thought he was human. Not a mage.

“Hey now. Breathe, Nix. I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but I promise you’re safe here.”

I wanted to cry at Levi’s unwavering confidence. I was safe here? I was sitting in a cell, waiting for a mate who didn’t want me for me and probably wanted to enslave me.

I was anything but safe.

And once the Alpha got here, I never would be again.

Chapter 8

Gray

My wolf was going crazy, shoving at me with everything he had, trying to get me downstairs to check on the fucking mage we had in custody, but I held firm against it. The mage could wait. The two injured wolves couldn’t.

I watched Jasper washing away the blood on his gloved hands before discarding the gloves altogether.

The wolf he’d worked on, the one who’d been shot, was lying in a plush bed, his chest all wrapped up with gauze. He was still unconscious, but then again, Jasper had given him something to make him sleepy. Not full-on anesthesia, but something to make him sleep through Jasper patching him up and sewing him together.

“The mage did a good job,” he quietly commented, turning his head to me.

I huffed.

The mage was an intruder. Someone who’d been hiding in my territory.

No! my wolf raged again. He’s our mage.

But he wasn’t. He wasn’t part of the pack. Hell, if he’d asked, I’d have welcomed him with open arms. That was what this pack was about. To accept members the way they were. So what if he wasn’t a shifter? If he was a paranormal in need of a home, he’d have been welcomed.

But he hadn’t asked.

He’d somehow managed to get into our territory without being detected and had hidden from us.

“I mean it, Gray. This one would have been dead without him.”

A chill ran down my body while my wolf preened in my chest, irritably proud that our mage had done such a good job.

“He’s still an intruder. An unknown variable.”

I didn’t know much about mages. Truthfully, I barely knew anything about them at all. I knew they were a class of magic users. There were witches, wizards, and mages. That was it. My ancestors didn’t have much to do with them as they tended to keep to themselves.

“Yet from what I’ve heard, he risked his life to help these two young wolves.” Jasper gestured to the unconscious man lying in his bed, then to the wall behind which the second wolf was resting in his own room.

My wolf kept showing off, puffing out his chest, his happiness with the mage’s actions so fucking agitating. What was going on with him? Had the mage cast a spell to bewitch me? To soften me up so I wouldn’t be mad that he’d intruded into our territory?