CHAPTER 19
ISABELLA POV
My legs slipped over the jagged edge of the rock as I felt the sickening lurch in my stomach.
I looked at my father,he wasn't looking at me, no one was. All eyes were fixed on that man who has no doubt came to finish me off.
My eyes were locked onto the monster on the other side. The Thing from the woods. The predator who had pinned me to a tree and drained me until my heart almost stopped.
He was a silhouette of absolute shadow against the bone-white trees, but his eyes... they were two suns of burning, predatory red.
I fell as the memory of his teeth in my neck flashed through my mind—the cold, the pain, the way he had looked at me like I was nothing but a snack.
We weren't friends. He wasn't a savior. He was just a different kind of nightmare. Don't jump! The command exploded inside my skull, a roar of such absolute terror but I had already fell.
Didn't it tell me to jump before? My eyes looked back at the monster who blurred before my vision.
One second he was on the far bank, the next, he was a blur of silver and black cutting through the mist above the river.
I hit the freezing air of the ravine, closing my eyes as I waited for the impact of the holy water.
It wouldn't burn me, it couldn't. I wasn't unholy but it would surely kill me with the pressure.
I waited for the rocks to crush me. Instead, I hit something as hard as a wall and as cold as ice.
Bands of iron wrapped around my waist, knocking the air out of me with a force that made my ribs groan.
I was slammed against a chest that didn't move, didn't breathe, and didn't feel human.
The momentum of his leap was so violent I felt my head snap back.
CRACK.
A very terrifying sound echo as we crossed the midpoint. I felt a surge of heat, feeling the monster shudder a snarl of agony as we slammed into the white sand of the eastern border.
The monster didn't let go of me while he took the entire force of the landing, his back hitting the earth with a hard thud.
He rolled, shielding me until we stopped but the second we stopped, he separated from me immediately, standing up. He didn't even check on me.
My breathing came in ragged gasps, that fall was high. I wouldn't had survived it. My eyes went up to the misty cliff.
Surprising me with how I could clearly see my father and Alpha Silas pacing the edge, howling in a language of pure murder.
They looked small. They looked like angry dogs trapped behind a fence. The man—the thing—stood a few feet away from me, his back turned.
He was hunched over, his shoulders heaving with a silent tension. Even through the thick mist, I could see the steam rising from his skin.
The smell of ozone and burnt meat filled the air, mixing with the scent of the river. He had been burned by the river.
"Are you okay?" I croaked, trying to push myself up from the white sand. My limbs felt like lead, and my head was swimming with a dizzying, metallic heat.
He didn't answer. He turned slowly, and I recoiled, dragging myself backward on my elbows.
His face was a mask of cold, sharp angles, but his eyes were the most terrifying part. They weren't just red anymore; they were a bleeding.
Along his neck and chest, his silk shirt was shredded, revealing skin that looked like it had been hit by a lightning strike—black, jagged fissures of burnt flesh that were only just beginning to knit back together.
He looked down at me, not with pity, but with a dark, simmering resentment. "You," he rasped, gripping onto my throat.
The coldness of his palm against my windpipe was a shock that snapped my spine straight. I clawed at his wrist, my blunt fingernails digging into the scorched silk of his sleeves.
What the actual fuck? My mind was screaming, he had just dived into a never ending river, endured a holy burn that was literally smoking off his skin, and taken a fall that would have turned me into a pulp—all to catch me.
And now he was strangling me? "You... actually... fell," he jagged a snarl that vibrated through my own bones.
He wasn't checking to see if I was hurt. He wasn't relieved. He looked at me like I was a piece of glass that had dared to shatter when he told it to stay whole.
"I..." The grip on my throat wasn't tight enough to crush my airway yet, but it was enough to pin me against the white sand, making me feel every bit like the prey I was.
Why save me just to kill me? I thought, my chest heaving. Why take the burn as an unholy? I looked into those bleeding, red eyes.
There was no mercy there, only a dark, possessive fury. I saw the way the black fissures on his neck pulsed. He was in agony.
Pain flared through my chest and neck, through the mark on my neck. "I should have finished you off when I had the chance," he spat, his face inches from mine.
The red in his eyes was swirling. "You are so much trouble for a wolfless abomination. A waste of my time and effort."
His fingers tightened. I gasped, my mouth opening in a silent plea, my hands fluttering weakly against his iron forearms.
My vision started to go dark at the edges, the bone-white trees of the North fading into a hazy gray.
"You think you're special because you survived the first night?" he whispered,voice a lethal vibration against my skin.
"You're a mistake I can easily erase. Let's finish this off. Let's see if the river is more merciful than I am."
He lifted me. My toes scraped the sand as he hauled me toward the edge, back toward the churning black water we had just escaped.
He's going to throw me back, I realized with a jolt of pure, primal horror. He didn't save me to keep me.
He saved me to be the one who decides when I die.
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