The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 541

Avery’s POV

I’d stopped screaming a while ago. There was no point. My voice was gone, and even if it hadn’t been, the witch had told me the truth—no one out here would hear me. No one was coming to save me this time.

Gideon was probably already at home in bed with the thing that wore my face, and Bjorn was being tucked in by it, and my mother was probably setting a place for it at the breakfast table tomorrow morning, all of them none the wiser.

That was the part that hurt worse than anything else.

They wouldn’t even know I was gone. She would slip into my life so cleanly that no one would ever think to look for the real me. She would kiss my son and sign away my company and lie in my bed, and I would be out here in this hut, rotting in a spider’s web until I starved.

I let my head fall back against the silk and shut my eyes. The tears came again, hot and useless, sliding down into my hair.

Maybe this was it. Maybe I really was going to die here.

I don’t know how much later it was that I opened my eyes again. The hut was darker now, the moonlight thinner. I turned my head to the side, hoping to relieve some of the tension in my neck, and stopped.

A few feet away, strung up against the wall, hung a shape I hadn’t noticed before in the dark. It was wrapped head to toe in silk, bound so tight it looked more like a chrysalis than a person, only a sliver of a face showing through.

I knew that face.

The web stretched from wall to wall, thickest in the center where I hung. My right arm was stuck worst, glued from shoulder to fingertip. My left had a little give near the wrist, but not much. My legs were pinned but my knees could bend, just slightly, if I tried hard enough.

The hut was small. Mud walls, a low ceiling, a cold hearth in the corner. A table off to one side with a single chair. And on the table, half-melted, guttering low in its own pool of wax, was a small candle, nearly burnt down to nothing, but still lit.

My heart started to pound.

The table was close to the web. And there were thin threads that ran down to the table’s edge, where the silk caught on the rough wood corner. If I could shift my weight to make the web move, I might be able to tip the whole table, along with the candle.

It was a long shot, but it was the only thing I could think of. I just had to reach it and hope the candle stayed lit long enough to catch the spiderweb.