Page 12 of Meeting Her Mate
Tied in shackles, I was dragged through his mansion to his basement, where there was an elaborate trap made of some form of glass. Once they put me inside it, I was unable to move or shift into my wolf form.
With no windows or any source of exterior light in that murky basement, it was impossible for me to know what time of day it was. All I knew was Edward would appear periodically with vials and syringes and inject me with pain-inducing chemicals that would make me go berserk with agony. I would pass out and wake up weaker. He would drain my blood and take it away.
During these sessions of torture, he would talk to me, almost like one does to a friend. He told me that he was an occultist who knew all too well the existence of vampires and werewolves. He wanted to derive the secrets of my genome. He wanted to unlock the secret to strength and immortality using my blood.
He’d keep me sedated for long stretches of time, barely keeping me alive. After a while, I was too weak to struggle or even think of fighting back. His men would torture me whenever he wasn’t in the room, prod me with electrical sticks, and bludgeon me with batons. When I’d be at my wit’s end, they’d feed me scraps.
I was robbed of my sanity. The perception of time was completely lost to me. But even in that delirious state, I noticed that the mad occultist was aging. His hair was graying, and his face was becoming populated with lines and stretch marks.
The only thought that kept me alive was Ariana. She was out there, waiting for me. If or when I’d escape, I’d make my way back to her and become her fated mate. We’d be married, have children together, and grow old alongside each other. This was my sole tether to whatever sanity I had left.
But the occultist, it transpired, was not having any success with his experimentations, despite the effort he had put in. Soon, he stopped visiting me altogether. I was left stranded alone in his basement, tied to iron chains, locked away in an inhumanly small cage, malnourished, a mere ghost of the man I once was.
Then one day, his soldiers rushed to the basement, telling me that my imprisonment was at an end. My captor had issued the order that I be set free by way of death. They said it was his dying wish.
It brought me bittersweet joy to know that Edward, my captor, was dying of old age. This notion gave me enough strength to defend myself against the soldiers. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I was able to escape from the basement, leaving a pile of corpses in my wake.
I could just as well escape by then, but boiling vengeance was coursing through my veins. So, I searched the mansion and came upon him, lying withered on his deathbed, tied to machines that beeped and whirred.
He laughed at me as if this was what he had expected.
“You will never truly be free. Not after what I have done to you.” These were his last words.
I shifted after ages and pounced upon him, tearing into him, rending limb from limb and ripping apart his body, leaving a mess of entrails, bones, and torn muscles in my wake.
And once I was done, I escaped into the woods, thinking it had only been a short while since I had been imprisoned.
***
“And that’s when I met you, Alexis,” I finished my tale, my hands quivering as I struggled to hold the empty glass. “And that’s when I realized that my merciless captor had me imprisoned for seventy-something years. It’s only now that I understand that his experimentations on me altered me in some way, robbing me of the ability to age normally, leaving me stuck in a young man’s body with an old man’s mind and soul.”
Fred was at a loss for words, and his mouth hung wordlessly open.
Alexis’s hand closed around mine and squeezed. “To think that you have been through such horrors…I can’t even imagine,” she said.
But upon listening to her empathetic words, instead of feeling reassured and comforted, a bizarre emotion took hold of me: Wrath.
“How would you be even able to imagine?” I said, my voice rising. “I have just recounted a tale as harrowing as one could ever hear, and you bring me this hollow sentiment?!”
“I…I’m sorry,” Alexis whispered, her eyes wide with disbelief.
For some twisted reason, this enraged me even more.
“What would I do with your apology? Would it turn back the wheels of time? Bring back the woman that I loved? Unbind me to you, a complete stranger I don’t know? What does your extra apology accomplish?”
“Wilhelm,” Fred said softly as if to warn me that I was letting my temper get the better of me. I had no control over it at this moment.
Watching her rush out of the room, distraught, made me feel a wicked sense of satiation. As if by projecting my misery onto her and making her miserable, in turn, quenched the desolation I was feeling.
And just as swiftly as this malignant rage had consumed me, it left just as fast, leaving me confused at my outburst. I intended to go after Alexis in an attempt to make amends for my behavior, but Fred put his hand on my shoulder and sat me down.
“I don’t blame you. You are at your most vulnerable right now, having just told us your story. She’ll be fine. I want you to rest and recover your strength. When you wake up, I want you to meet the pack. Rest now; rest here. I am glad you are back,” Fred said.
“I feel like I am a mutated man,” I said as I lowered myself into the bed, feeling wearier by the second. “I feel like I will never be normal again.”
And with that statement, I fell deep into slumber, my sleep haunted by cloaked occultists, mercenaries running through the forests with torches, and snarling vampires with their strange firearms.
Chapter 5: Alexis