The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 369

Chapter 369: Silver Looks Different From This Side

Agnes Viremont woke up in a chair that didn’t belong.

She knew her father’s study the way she knew every room he had ever occupied: by its architecture, by its scent, by the particular arrangement of power that Reginald Viremont applied to physical spaces the way other men applied wallpaper.

The mahogany desk. The bookshelves lined with ledgers that contained the financial anatomy of half the minor houses in Skardos. The window behind the desk, tall, narrow, positioned so the light fell on the chair across from it, which meant the person sitting in the chair was always lit and the person behind the desk was always shadowed.

The chair she was in was metal. Straight-backed. It did not belong in this study, which meant it had been brought in for this conversation, which meant this conversation had been planned before she ran.

Silver burned on her wrists.

The manacles were standard suppression cuffs, the kind she had seen on prisoners, on interrogation subjects, on wolves who had been stripped of rank and were being held for tribunal. She had seen silver used on other wolves a hundred times. She had watched it sizzle against skin, watched men twice her size flinch from the contact, watched the particular chemical reaction that occurred when silver met wolf blood and the wolf blood lost.

She had never felt it on herself.

The burn was constant, low, the kind of pain that lived at a frequency designed to exhaust rather than overwhelm, and the exhaustion was the point, because an exhausted wolf couldn’t shift, couldn’t fight, couldn’t access the strength that made a wolf dangerous in close quarters. The cuffs were a leash, and the leash was tight, and the woman wearing it had spent her entire life on the other side of the mechanism.

Her wrists were already red. The skin beneath the silver was blistered at the edges, and the blisters were weeping, and the weeping burned, and the burning fed the exhaustion, and the cycle was deliberate and efficient and had been perfected over centuries by people who understood that the best way to control a wolf was to make the wolf’s own body the instrument of control.

Her wolf was muffled. Present, but pressed down, the way a voice sounds through a closed door: audible, recognizable, unable to reach full volume.

The connection to Garrett was there but thin, attenuated by the silver into a signal she could feel but couldn’t use, and the matebond that had been humming in her chest for months was reduced to a whisper she had to strain to hear.

She tested the chains. The links were heavy, anchored to the chair’s legs, looped through the armrests, giving her approximately four inches of movement in any direction. Enough to shift her weight. Insufficient for anything else.

"Why?"

The word was aimed at the shadow behind the desk.

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