My Fated Alpha's Cruel Game (Elena and Marcus) novel Chapter 13

Chapter 13: Chapter 13 Accelerated Healing

Elena’s POV

The water ran hot for once.

I stood under it with my forehead against the cheap plastic wall and I let it hammer down on the back of my neck until my skin went pink. I scrubbed my face twice. The expensive foundation came off in streaks, running pale brown down my collarbone, down the dip between my breasts, into the drain.

I washed my hair.

I washed it again.

By the time I stepped out, the mirror was fogged to nothing and my fingertips were pruned. I wrapped a towel around myself and I padded back to the front room in bare feet, and I looked at the dress.

It lay across the couch where I had put it. A long dark pool of silk in the lamplight. It had cost more than our tight budget could ever afford, and I had sat in the dirt in it, and a woman had bled on the hem.

I picked it up with care I did not feel.

I folded it back into its box the way it had come. Tissue paper first. Then the ribbon loops. Then the lid. The box went on the top shelf of the closet, behind a stack of old blankets where my mother would not reach without a stool.

Professional cleaning. Pressing. A receipt in an envelope with the return, so nobody could say I had kept so much as a thread of it.

I thought about what that cleaner’s bill was going to cost.

I sat down on the couch that had been my bed since we moved into the trailer, and I pulled the afghan up over my shoulders, and I did not remember closing my eyes.

I woke with the grey light coming in.

For a second I did not move. I lay there and I took inventory the way I had learned to do. Ribs. Wrist. Ankle. Cheek.

I waited for the ache to come.

It didn’t.

I pushed the afghan off. I sat up slowly. I pressed the flat of my hand along my ribs where the deep bruise had been sitting since the alley. Nothing. I rolled my ankle in a slow circle. Nothing.

I got up.

I walked across the front room and I did not limp.

I stood in front of the small mirror by the door. My cheek was not swollen. The ridge along the bone was gone. There was a faint shadow of color, the barest smudge, nothing a person would look at twice.

I touched it with two fingers.

It did not hurt.

I stared at my own face for a long moment. I did not understand. Werewolf healing was fast, but not this abnormally fast. Not bruises like that. Not ribs like that.

I did not have the energy, this morning, to chase the thought.

I put on what I owned. Grey sweater, soft from too many washes. Black running pants. Thick socks. Running shoes with the soles starting to come loose at the toe.

I tied my hair back.

I stepped out into the cold morning and I ran.

The road was empty. My breath came out in quick white clouds. My feet found their rhythm on the gravel and then on the cracked asphalt at the top of the hill, and for a little while I did not think about anything at all. I ran past the darker places where the trailers stopped and the pack’s nicer houses began. I ran past the line of white fences. I ran along the edge of the packhouse grounds, where the grass turned green and even and somebody was paid to keep it that way.

It was just past six-thirty in the morning, and I was just past the packhouse gate when Beta Hugo stepped out onto the path.

I stopped short.

My shoes skidded a little on the gravel.

He stood with his hands loose at his sides, in his usual dark jacket, his face set in its usual neutral line. He did not look surprised to see me. He had been waiting.

“Beta,” I said.

“Elena.”

“I’m running.”

“Alpha Marcus would like to see you.”

I wiped the sweat off my upper lip with the back of my wrist.

“I’m busy.”

“It’s not a request.”

I looked past him at the packhouse. The windows on the ground floor were already lit. Of course they were.

“Fine.”

He did not smile. He did not frown. He turned on his heel and I followed him up the path, along the drive, in through a side door that opened for him without anyone touching it. Our footsteps echoed on polished wood. He took me down a hall I had never walked and through a set of heavy double doors.

The bar room.

That was what they called it, apparently. A long dark-paneled room with a counter along one wall and bottles behind it and a big carved table in the middle that did not belong at a bar. It was covered in papers this morning. Folders. Stacks. A laptop pushed off to one side.

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