The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 537

Avery’s POV

The cold seeped up through my back, through my shoulders, through the backs of my legs, soaking into me until I felt it deep in my bones. I shivered, and something shivered with me. Something that tugged at my wrists and ankles, like rope, but stickier.

I opened my eyes, and as my vision adjusted to the dark, I realized where I was. Pinned against a wall inside a familiar little hut in the forest. Only unlike the last time I was here, something was different.

All four walls, the floors, everything…

It was all covered in thick white spiderwebs.

And I was trapped in one of those webs.

With a gasp that was half-sob, I jerked my arm. The strand holding it didn’t give. I jerked the other. Same. I bucked my whole body up off the web, but it held, like glue binding my body to the strands.

“Help!” The word came out cracked and small and dry, like it had been days since I’d last had water. I cleared my throat and tried again: “Help! Somebody—Gideon!”

My voice was left unanswered.

Heart pounding, I forced myself to remain calm and reached for the bond. Gideon couldn’t be far; the moon was still up, I could see its light filtering through the small windows. I had just been at the party. He was probably looking for me now.

But when I tried the bond, I felt nothing. Just that gray, dense, endless fog. Only this time, it was further away. I couldn’t even feel the coldness of it like before. It was too far to reach.

Tears stung my eyes. I blinked them back and turned my head, scanning the dark for any way out, and startled at the movement I saw at the edge of the web.

She was crouched at the edge of the web, just past the reach of the moonlight. Eight legs, jointed and black and slick, each one longer than I was tall, lifting her up and up until she towered over the web on a swollen abdomen that pulsed in the dark.

Her face was still there, sagging and gray, set into the front of all that bulk like an afterthought, and around it, where her hood fell away, dozens of eyes opened in slow rows and caught the moon and threw it back at me.

An enormous spider with an old woman’s face.

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