I'm the Alpha's Mate

Chapter 19

Sweet Cover by @Bethany21Thornton

The door to the room opens again, and a man I do not recognize comes to collect me. That man—Victor—said that we were waiting for our last guest, and all I can do now is believe that my love has arrived. He had toyed with my heart by telling me my mother and father are in the building, and after he left my room about three hours ago—a panicky guess—they were all I could think about. Somewhere in here, somewhere trapped in these same walls, my parents sit, alive. Once the first year had passed at grandmothers, I had given up waiting for them to come knocking on her door. Part of me always thought they had died somewhere and somehow and I would never discover why or how they did. It would be a mystery embedded in my mind for the rest of my life, one whose importance would die over time, but one that would always be there.

Again, my future has been flipped. It all started to change once I hopped over that stream and once I crossed onto his land. He was the key to a different path, and I took it obliviously, not thinking about where this would leave me. Even if I did think about it, I would have never imagined myself here.

The bulky man holds me tightly as we walk down a dim hallway, one that is plain and concerning. My legs have begun to work again while I waited for the last guest, and I assumed the mixture had worn off. Victors words about too much of a dose had frightened me, but my mind reminded itself that he was not gathering my parents and my love for kicks. There is something he is pulling together, and I need to be alive for it.

The hallway is silent besides the maddening thud of our footsteps running over and over again in my mind, and when we come to a halt, I still hear them. My head lifts up to see a door in front of us, and the man behind me leans forward, keeping his grip on my arm, and turns the knob, dragging the door open. It is brighter inside the room as artificial lights in every corner flare up against the walls. Then some small, sad, real sound comes to me from one of the corners, and I see my mother there, crouched down, hidden away like a ghost of herself. Her eyes peer up at me, and she breaks down even more.

I do not know what to say if I am allowed to say anything.

"Evangeline," a masculine voice calls to me from the other side of the empty room, and in the opposite corner of my mother, I see my father. He too is jammed in the corner like dust kicked to the side. "My baby," he whispers to himself, but there is nothing to block his voice from making it to me. He looks different, like a stranger, but familiar in odd ways.

Just before I scratch up a word, the guard who walked me here pushes me down into my corner and takes a pair of heavy cuffs from the loop in his pants. He roughly fastens them around my wrist, brings my hand behind my back, and locks the other cuff to a metal half-circle in the ground, one that; I down. The entire act seems quite bizarre, and my clearing mind cannot help but focus on the fact that this maniac bolted such things to the floor all to hold people down. This must be some sort of prison room.

My head recklessly hits the wall as I realize the cuffs have been dashed with silver, painfully burning my skin and returning me to such times in a cell back at the Tate Pack. With a winced expression, I gaze over at my two parents, and they do not seem affected by it anymore, and I wonder how long they have been chained down. My father watches me like a man observing something extinct while my mother cannot bear to look at me. In that strange moment, I hear more footsteps from the hall—this time being on the inside—and the louder they get, the more my body starts to wake up. It is like small electric shocks to my heart.

The door opens into the white room and through it comes two large men holding my mate. It only takes me one good look to come to terms with the fact that I love him. My mind lingers back to our times in his bed, innocent and bothered, to times of truth and acceptance, and to moments where I knew that my future would be alive with him.