Alpha Xander's Undoing Chasing my Unknown Mate Back novel Chapter 84

Chapter 84

Chapter 84

*Rory*

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The sound wasn’t what woke me. What woke me was the gap.

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The absence. A type of silence where Zerina should have pressed close, silence where Xander’s bond usually burned steady. The kind of silence that had weight and shape.

I reached for her the way I always did, a mental hand against a door.

‘Zerina?’

Nothing.

Not even the patient huff she gave when she wanted me to slow down. I turned inward for Xander, searching for that steady tug, and found clean emptiness.

The drip went on mocking me.

Where the hell was I?

The drip seemed to come from water slipping from a pipe into a pan, steady as a clock. My cheek was pressed against a cold, ragged stone, telling me that I was on the ground.

Chains were wrapped around my arms, making my shoulders ached. My back screamed.

On top of the chains, handcuffs held my hands and feet together in front of me. The cuffs weren’t so tight that they cut, but tight enough to tell me that moving was no longer my choice.

My eyes adjusted to gray. I was surrounded by rough walls with rust stains. A slit of a window was high up, too narrow to be anything but cruel.

Damp air pressed into my lungs, reeking of mildew, copper and old blood. This wasn’t a room built to hold someone briefly. It was built to erase them. It was some kind of dungeon.

I tried again for Zerina. For Xander. But I was once again met with nothing.

A phantom ache opened in my chest, not grief yet, just wrongness. Like missing teeth you keep tonguing until your gums bleed.

The bonds hadn’t been with me for long, but they were both so strong and had been part of me so long that without it I felt amputated.

I groaned as I tried to move and centre my thought-trying to remember how I even ended up here. That’s when the memory stuttered back.

The circle, the truth runes waking, the hinge behind my heart, the pull that wanted me three ways at once.

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Chapter 84

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The seam in the air splitting open. And Durnham’s face, alight with joy where everyone else had screamed.

I forced myself upright again. The chains protested and my muscles trembled, but I got my back against the

wall.

Cold soaked through my spine. I fixed my eyes on the door until they blurred. Anything to stop listening to the drip.

The door opened without sound. The dark shifted first, then his outline. No robes this time-just a dark shirt, sleeves rolled, as if that made him smaller. He moved to the pan of water and crouched at a careful distance.

“Aurora,” he said, my name smooth in his mouth, practiced like kindness rehearsed in a mirror. “I wasn’t sure when you’d wake. The pull took more than I expected.”

“Take the cuffs off.”

“I can’t,” he tsked. “For your safety.”

“Mine?” I scoffed, though my throat protested as the dryness grated against it.

“You. And everyone else.” He leaned his elbows to his knees. “Do you remember what happened?”

“I remember enough,” I spat.

“Good. Then you understand why we’re here.”

“Here in a dungeon? Let me go, Durnham. Or you’re dead when my mate finds you.”

He didn’t flinch. “I didn’t chain you because I enjoy watching you bleed. I chained you because if I hadn’t, you would have set half the countryside on fire.”

“You kidnapped me,” I spat.

“And it saved you.” His tone never cracked. “I had to unfasten something to move you. Your wolf tethered you together. I loosened it. And I took a piece with me.”

I stared. “You took-”

“A piece of your power,” he said gently. “Not to own. To use. You opened a door. That door isn’t going to close because the Council says so. Someone has to decide what comes through. Or what goes in.”

“And you think that someone is you.”

“I think it’s you,” he said. “But you can’t guide anything if every hunter in the packlands follows the flare of your bond. I removed what made you easy to find. I removed what made you break.”

Raw rage burned in me so hard as I thrust myself forwards despite the chains.

“You’re the one who took my bonds?”

“I kept you from being cut apart by less careful hands,” he said, voice soft, words sharp. “If you want it back,

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Chapter 84

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you’ll have it-when it’s safe.”

The emptiness inside me widened until it hurt to breathe. I reached again for Zerina, desperate, promising anything if she’d just put her paw against my ribs.

Nothing. I searched for Xander, for the warmth of his name. Nothing.

“What did you do to them?”

“Nothing to them. Something to you. You were a bridge, Rory. Bridges break under armies. I cut the bridge so you might live long enough to become a road.”

“You took my wolf!” I screamed.

“I took the tether,” he corrected. “The bond. The piece that tied you to them. Without it, you’ll be harder to find. Harder to kill.”

I wanted rage. What I found was hollowness. My voice cracked anyway. “Give her back.”

“Not yet.” He stood. “Rest. Eat. The world feels different without the noise. You’ll see.”

He poured water into a tin cup, lifted it to my mouth. I wanted to bite him, but thirst won. The water tasted of iron. I spat the rest in his face once the scratch in my throat eased.

It killed me how he still didn’t react. Instead, he stood an dleft.

At the door he paused. “I didn’t bring you here to keep you from yourself. I brought you so you aren’t standing in a circle someone else drew.”

“Go to hell.”

He didn’t smile. “We’re already there.”

And he left.

The door shut with a sound that was too final for wood. The drip came back, steady and smug.

I pressed my head to my knees and tried again, clawing for Zerina until my skull ached, calling her names I’d never dared, begging. Nothing.

I reached for Xander, desperate for the warmth of him, and found only glass again.

Something broke. My hands shook against the cuffs, the tremor spreading until it owned me. I bit the inside of my cheek until copper filled my mouth. But it wasn’t enough.

The sound crawled up from my chest, raw and unshaped. Not words. Not a name. A scream.

It ripped through me, animal and bare, shaking the stone. The chains clanged. The pan rang like a bell. Somewhere beyond the door, a boot scuffed. I screamed again, louder, because the first hadn’t touched the depth of it.

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I didn’t stop because stopping felt like betrayal. I screamed until my throat rasped and the sound broke into something hoarse and ugly. I screamed until my body remembered oxygen like a favour. I screamed because I had no words left to tell the world what had been stolen.

I let it rake me until there was nothing left to throw but breath, and when the sound finally ran out, the drip kept count like it had been appointed to keep time for grief.

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13:20 Wed, Sep 17