Page 57 of Meeting Her Mate

Here, the smell of blood was more pungent. A carnage had taken place here, of course. When the mercenaries came to kill me, there were dozens of them. Their bodies were gone; God knew where—maybe Blair had been here after all—but the stench of their death lingered thickly in the air.

“Will?”

I turned to where Alexis was. It was a shelf containing empty test tubes, beakers, pipettes, and other lab equipment. I recognized the thick needle syringes that they had used on my body, the syringes that had hurt like hell when they pierced me. I grabbed a handful of them and threw them across the room.

“Do more,” Alexis said, her eyes wild. “Let’s do this.”

She grabbed a bunch of beakers and started flinging them at the cage.

“Let this stupid act be a metaphor for you becoming free from this place,” she said, throwing more beakers into the air, creating a cacophony of crashing sounds and shattered glass.

I liked the idea of letting loose. I grabbed the entire shelf, uprooted it from the ground, and threw it at the cage.

The cage broke in half when the shelf collapsed into it. It felt good.

“Here. This cabinet,” Alexis said, laughing.

I paused for a moment to notice how beautiful she looked, standing there in the semi-darkness, her hair undone, her eyes luminescent.

Then I dug my nails into the medicine cabinet and tore it free from the wall. It created the loudest bang as it crashed on the floor, its contents leaking out, permeating the smell of sulfur and ammonia in the air.

“Will, go long!” Alexis said, handing me a long piece of wood that had come loose from the broken cabinet.

I complied, running to the far end of the basement.

Alexis chucked a huge blue canister at me.

I instinctively rammed my makeshift bat into it.

The canister exploded upon coming into contact with the bat, throwing salt into the air.

“That was fun!”

“Hey, we’ve got all day. We can burn this place down to the ground if you want,” Alexis said.

Suddenly, the image of Beckett Manor in flames conjured itself in front of my eyes, and at that moment, I knew it was the only thing I wanted to do right now.

“Will?” Alexis was bent over the broken cabinet. “There’s something here.”

I walked over to her and found her holding a diary.

I took it from her hands and opened it.

“The Journal of Lord Edward Beckett” was written across the first page in cursive.

“What’s this journal doing here?” Alexis asked.

“Beckett, in all the time I knew him, was a notoriously precarious person. Sometimes he would conduct an experiment on me five times in a row just to get the results exactly right. He would starve me so that my body would be more receptive to the chemicals in my body. He was the devil himself, but he was also a detail-oriented devil. I don’t doubt that this is just one of the many journals he left in this place,” I said, rifling through the pages.

I needed more light. I excused myself from the basement and went outside of the manor to read the contents of the journal. It was like talking to Edward one last time. I was shivering as I read each word.

Alexis wasn’t here. She was still inside the house. I guess she realized that I needed my privacy while I read the final words of my captor.

After going through page after page, it dawned on me that these were not just lab notes of his experiments. These were diary entries detailing his life. I turned the journal to the last page to see what he had written before he died.

It read:

This is to be my final journal entry.