Chapter 82: The Escape

Azura’s POV

The first thing I did was stretch.

Arms out, back arching, the kind of long lazy stretch that happens before your brain has fully decided to wake up. My eyes were still closed. I yawned so wide my jaw cracked. For about three seconds, I was just a person waking up in a warm bed with no thoughts, no problems, and no memory of anything.

Then my body sent me a message.

A deep, heavy, very specific ache that started in my lower back, spread through my hips, and settled into my inner thighs like it was planning to stay there for the rest of the week.

My stretch stopped.

My eyes opened.

I stared at the ceiling.

The ceiling stared back.

I looked down slowly. The fur blanket was pulled up to my chin. I lifted the edge and looked underneath it with the cautious energy of someone who already knew what they were going to find but was hoping very hard to be wrong.

I was completely naked.

I dropped the fur back down.

I lay there completely still for a long moment, staring back up at the ceiling, and let the memories come back one by one like they were lining up specifically to ruin my morning. The heat of his hands. The sounds that had come out of my own mouth that I had never heard myself make before. The way I had begged him.

Me. Azura. The same girl who had walked into a cursed forest without blinking had lain in this man’s bed and said please like it was the only word she knew.

"Azura," I whispered to the ceiling. "You are the biggest fool that has ever lived."

The ceiling had absolutely nothing helpful to offer.

I sat up slowly, wincing, and looked around the room. The fire had burned down to soft red coals. Grey morning light was creeping in around the edges of the curtains. The other side of the bed was empty and cold, the furs pushed back like he had gotten up a long time ago.

He was gone.

I sat with that for exactly one second. Something small and stupid moved through my chest at the sight of the empty space beside me. I looked at it, recognized it for the ridiculous thing it was, and buried it immediately under six feet of common sense.

He was gone and that was the best possible news I had received all morning.

Because if he were here I would have to look at his face. I would have to sit in his sheets and look directly at him and somehow form words like a functioning person, and that was not something I was capable of today. Possibly not this week.

I needed to get out of this room before he came back.

I threw the fur back and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. My feet hit the cold stone and I stood up, took one step, and immediately grabbed the bedpost with both hands as my knees tried to give out completely.

"Legs," I said out loud, to no one. "This is not the time."

They wobbled. I held on. I waited. Then I let go carefully and stayed upright through sheer stubbornness and started looking for my dress.

I found it on the floor near the foot of the bed. Crumpled into a sad little pile like it had given up on life. I grabbed it, shook it out once, and pulled it over my head without stopping to think about whether it was wearable. It was on my body. That was enough.

I turned toward the door.

But my eyes caught something in the mirror.

I don’t know why I stopped. I should have kept walking. Every single instinct I had was pointing at that door and saying go. But something made me turn and look properly and I stood there in front of that mirror and took in the full picture of what I looked like right now.

My neck.

I leaned closer.

Marks. All along the curve of my neck and my collarbone, the kind that came from a mouth that had not been gentle and had not been trying to be. I tilted my head and counted four of them before I stopped counting because the number was not helping my mental state.

I looked at my hands. The faint pressure of fingerprints along my wrists where he had held them.

I looked at my legs and then immediately looked back up because that was enough information.

I looked like a girl who had been claimed from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet and then left in someone else’s room to figure out the morning alone.

Then it hit me. The smell.

I lifted the collar of my dress and breathed in and my stomach dropped straight down through the floor.

His scent, soaked into the fabric, sits on my skin, woven into my hair. All of him. Everywhere.

This was a problem.

I had no scent of my own. I never had. Not since I was born, no wolf scent, nothing to mark me as belonging to any pack or any person. I had spent my entire life being invisible in that specific way.

But right now I was the opposite of invisible.

Right now I was walking around wrapped in the Alpha’s scent like a flag. Any wolf in this building would smell me before they even saw me. They would not need to look at my neck or my hands or my dress that was wrinkled beyond any reasonable explanation. One breath and they would know exactly where I had spent the night and exactly what had happened there.

I could not let that happen.

I could not let a single person see me like this.

I grabbed my hair and scattered it down loose around my shoulders, pulling it forward so it fell over my neck and covered as much of the damage as possible. I checked the mirror one more time. Better. Not good, but better. The marks were hidden. The dress looked like a dress if you didn’t look too hard. My face was the problem I could not fix because I still looked flushed, and my lips were still slightly swollen, but there was nothing I could do about that right now.

One mission. Get to my room. Don’t let anyone see me.

I moved to the door and put my hand on the handle. I turned it so slowly it was almost not moving, easing it open one quiet inch at a time, holding my breath against the hinges.

The door opened silently. I nearly thanked it out loud.

I poked my head out and looked left. Empty corridor. I looked right. Also empty. Just stone walls and low torchlight and the quiet of early morning.

I slipped out.

I moved along the wall, staying in the shadows, my feet finding the floor carefully with each step. I was not running. Running looked guilty. I was just a person walking down a hallway at a suspicious hour in a wrinkled dress that smelled like the Alpha. Completely normal. Nothing to see.

I reached the junction where the corridor split in two directions and started to turn left.

And heard voices.

I flattened myself against the wall so fast I nearly knocked my head against the stone. I pressed my back into it and went completely still and stopped breathing.

The voices were close. Coming from the left corridor, which was exactly the direction I needed to go.

I recognized the first voice immediately.

Torin.

He was talking to someone, relaxed and easy the way he always was, like the hour of the morning meant nothing to him. I could not make out the words clearly. I just stood there, stuck to the wall with my heart going entirely too fast and my legs still aching, and prayed to every Goddess I had ever heard of that he would just keep walking.

Then he stopped talking mid-sentence.

A pause.

"Do you smell that?" His voice was different now. Not alarmed. Just noticing. The way a wolf notices something and files it away without making a big deal of it.

I stopped breathing completely.

"Smells like the Alpha," he said. "Strong. Like it’s coming from somewhere close."

I was going to pass out. I was genuinely going to pass out against this wall, and they were going to find me here, and my life was going to be over.

"We should go check on him," the other voice said.

"Yeah, I really need to see him." Torin agreed.

I waited for footsteps coming toward me.

Instead, from somewhere further down the corridor behind them, something crashed. Loud and sudden, something heavy was hitting the floor and bouncing.

Both voices stopped cold.

Then Torin’s voice, quiet but alert: "What was that?"

"I don’t know," the guard said. "Sounded like it came from the armory."

"Then what are you waiting for? Move."

Boots hit the stone hard as they took off running. The sound of them faded fast, swallowed by the corridor until I couldn’t hear anything but my own heartbeat.

I stood against the wall for five more seconds.

Then I peeled myself off it, checked both directions with the focus of someone who had learned their lesson, confirmed the corridor was empty, and walked. Fast and quiet, down the stairs, through the lower hall, along the last stretch of corridor until my door was right there in front of me.

My hand found the handle.

Good job, Pumpkin, some traitorous part of my brain said warmly.

I stopped walking.

I stood in front of my own door and stared at it.

Did I just call myself that? Did I just stand here and call myself that name like it was mine? Like I had accepted it? Like some part of me had decided that was who I was now?

"Absolutely not," I said under my breath.

I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and locked it behind me.

I leaned back against the wood and let out the longest, shakiest breath I had ever produced in my life. My legs finally gave up pretending and I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor with my knees against my chest and my face tipped back against the wood.

I made it. I was in my room. The door was locked. Nobody had seen me.

I sat there for a moment just breathing. Then I got up, crossed the room, sat on the edge of my bed, and lay back flat. I stared up at my own ceiling. My arms spread out at my sides. I breathed in. I breathed out.

The soreness in my body was already becoming familiar, settling from sharp into dull, and I lay there and let my heartbeat slow down and told myself it was over.

It was done. I was safe. I could pretend now.

Then I heard it.

Just a soft thud against the window ledge.

I sat up immediately.

Then the curtain moved. A shadow came through the open window fast and landed on my floorboards without a sound, absorbing the landing with the quiet ease of something built for exactly this. Large. Broad-shouldered. Moving like a predator that had never once in its life needed to announce itself.

My brain did not wait for more information.

I opened my mouth and screamed.

The figure crossed the room at a speed that did not belong to any normal wolf. Before the sound had fully left my throat, a large warm hand slammed over my mouth, and the momentum carried us both, and suddenly I was on my back on the bed with his weight above me and his hand still pressed firmly against my lips and my own scream dying uselessly against his palm.

I looked up.

Brown hair falling forward. A jaw sharp enough to cut stone. And amber eyes catching the pale morning light streaming through the window, burning down at me with a warmth that was somehow more dangerous than cold would have been.

He looked at me for a long moment. His chest was barely moving. Like this had cost him nothing.

Then he spoke.

And his voice came out so low and so deliberate that it moved through my skin before it reached my ears. Something about the way it sounded in that quiet room did things to my body that I absolutely did not give it permission to do.

"You’re not allowed to scream like that, Pumpkin." A pause. Slow. Intentional. "Not unless I’m the one making you."