SWNOVELS : Chapter 117
Alexander
The sun was just starting to set when I reached the pit. The men down at the bottom of it looked truly miserable.
They were hot, thirsty, tired, hungry. Covered in dirt
and dried mud. I could see marks on the walls of the trench that told me they’d done their best to try to scramble up and out during the hours I’d been keeping them down there.
When they looked up and saw that it was me peering down at them, the men bowed their heads and fell to their knees.
“Your punishment is complete,” I told them. “I’ll pull you up one at a time.”
I unspooled the rope from around my body and lowered it down. Once there was enough slack to reach the guys, I got a vice grip with the remaining portion that I was holding, looping it around my waist, then my forearm, before I told them to send someone up and braced myself to pull.
When all seven men were out of the pit and kneeling
on the hillside before me, I finally addressed them as a group.
“Do I need to remind you,” I asked them calmly, “that failure to perform on the battlefield means your own death or the death of your fellow soldiers?”
“Sir, no, sir!” they shouted in unison.
“Another failure to meet my standards will result in removal from the pack. Consider today your one and only official warning. The seven of you are on notice.
Are we clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“And one last thing,” I added. “You are going to tell me what happened in the city. I want every detail.
We’re not leaving this spot until I know exactly what went down while I was away.”
There was a pause. But then one man spoke, his head still hung low, eyes on the earth. A second spoke up after him, sharing more details about the night in question. Then a third man joined the conversation.
That left four men still silent.
I demanded they lift their heads and look at me. Eye contact was enough to get the rest of them talking. To remind them how serious I was about all this.
And so I finally got the full story, told in scattered pieces by seven men who’d witnessed the altercation from seven different points of view.
Neither of the two soldiers who supposedly instigated the brawl were here with us on the hillside.
I would get to them soon enough.
Third person
Scarlet hadn’t heard back from Donovan yet. Waiting for him in radio silence, with no idea when he would summon her or where he would demand to meet when he did… it was keeping her very anxious indeed.
She was not ready for the meeting yet. She had nothing to offer the vampires yet, though she had sure acted like she did. Her old “friend” Donovan was not going to be happy if she showed up empty handed when he was ready to discuss terms. Especially after all of her big talk.
She left Lucas in his room and tried to put the troublesome boy out of her mind for now. How to deal with her lazy, poorly tempered son, how to convince
him to make something of himself… that had always been a puzzle. One she’d put off solving for a long time.
But she had to look at it now. Now that she’d pulled that ripcord and set into motion a chain of events that, well, simply could not be stopped… Lucas had a critical role in this story she was writing. He was going to have to play it out whether he wanted to or not.
Scarlet’s husband, the Alpha King, was in the city for the day. Preparing to sit in judgment for her very own trial. That gave her the run of the palace for now.
Well, most of the palace, anyway. Alexander still kept the West Wing off limits to anyone but his own soldiers, his nuisance of a Luna, and himself. But Scarlet did have some access to that side of the palace, now… limited visual access, at least.
Her stepson had left town for a few days recently, and foolishly left his territory unguarded in his absence.
Scarlet supposed he’d been holding faith in the King Pack to conduct themselves more professionally. But the entire pack had left the palace grounds together one evening, and didn’t return until near sunrise the next morning.
The Queen took good advantage of that opportunity.
She had tiny, discreet surveillance cameras installed all over the West Wing while it was empty. All over the courtyard where Alexander and his pack trained. All over the hallways where he and his pregnant girlfriend resided.
Her biggest problem with this plan was actually finding the time to scrub through all the footage to look for anything that might be useful.
She took her laptop with her into a sitting room, closed and locked the door behind her, and got settled in to chip away at this task for a few minutes.
The live video feed opened first and Scarlet caught a glimpse of activity in the courtyard. To get a better view of what was going on there, she minimized the other camera feeds and full-screened the one that was facing directly out across the field where Alexander and his men often exercised.
And there was the big man himself, trooping across the field with a giant length of rope slung over his bare chest and a small pack of dirt-covered men trailing behind him. They were walking from the far end of the field near the forest and coming toward the palace.
As the group gained on the camera, the others’ faces came into view. Scarlet did a double-take, then zoomed in on one of the muddy, bedraggled pack warriors following behind her stepson.
Yep. That was one of her spies.
Her heartrate spiked.
It looked like Alexander was returning from administering some sort of punishment upon this small group of soldiers. The men looked broken, beaten down and exhausted.
She would have to get in touch with her spy soon.
See what this was about. Hopefully it was something entirely unrelated to their arrangement.
As Scarlet watched on, following Alexander’s movements on the surveillance cameras, her pulse only thrummed faster and faster.
She told herself it was because she loathed Alexander. Was enraged at the mere sight of him.
But that was not true. The truth was that she was afraid of him. Very afraid.
Yes, she feared his father, the Alpha King, too. And that was a man who had put his hands on Scarlet many times already. He had caused her pain for pleasure, and worse pain for punishment, too. But he always held back at least a little… showed his Luna slivers of mercy.
Her husband did this because some sins from his own past were tangled up with hers… because of their long history together and all they had been through.
And also because he still desired her. In fact, he seemed to want her even more during periods of time like this when they were fighting intensely.
Alexander, on the other hand…
He was even stronger than his father. And a more accomplished killer. And, most importantly, he despised Scarlet. He had no reason to show her any mercy, if he ever got his hands on her. And that was even without knowing the worst of what she had done to him.