Lone Wolf (First in Lone Wolf Series)

Chapter Sixteen

Puppet made her way hastily down the empty hall. Her bare feet echoing off the cool stone floor and her heart thundering in her chest. Her white cotton shift dress was damp from both sweat and the moisture in the stale air and it clung to her chilled skin.

Her stomach was tied in knots but now that she had started on her mission to escape she knew that she had to see it through.

She was so close!

The Master was distracted by the disappearance of his pet lion and the lion’s escape had finally snapped Puppet from her obedient trance. She had no idea how long she had been in this place. It had felt like lifetimes. Eons.

She came to a corner, the last turn before she came to the door that would lead her out of the dungeons and into the back courtyard. From there she could slip through the gap in the hedges that she had noticed the last time she’d been taken out for a walk.

She pushed her back against the rough stone wall and took a deep breath to calm her heartbeat as she scented the air. She could smell the blood, sweat, urine, waste and fear that was always cloyingly strong here in the dungeons. The sound of creatures begging for their freedom filled her ears but she couldn’t worry about them.

Puppet had to worry about herself for once. She had to get herself free. The Master had been using her and her body for long enough. She would not allow him to do so any longer.

She had been here for so long that she had forgotten most of what her life had been like before. Flashes of her past would come to her now and then. Memories of the life she had once had. She could not remember anything about her pack or her family. But there was one person, one part of her history that she remembered vividly.

Nickolai. Strong, stoic Nickolai. She could remember the way his pale blue eyes had always looked at her with so much love, so much desire. She could remember what his thick brown hair had felt like as she had run her fingers through it. What his lips had felt like against her own. The way his hand had always seemed to find its way to her own.

She remembered Nickolai and she also remembered that Nickolai was dead. A man in her memories, she suspected he was her father but couldn’t really remember now, had told her so. That was when her Master had come. He had taken her away, and she had been too heartbroken and devastated by the loss of her mate to put up any sort of a fight.

Puppet shook her head to clear her thoughts and peeked around the corner. Empty. The final one hundred feet to the outside was clear.

Her thin cotton dress whipped around her shins as she ran to the exit and then took a deep breath before grabbing the rusted iron handle and opening the heavy wooden door, just a crack, with shaking hands.

The rusty hinges squeaked and Puppet winced, though she had knocked out the guard with her iron feed bowl, she worried that someone else may hear the sound and call up an alarm.

She let out a light sigh of relief when everything remained calm and then she poked her head through the door crack and looked around the courtyard. It was dark, and while there was a tower guard who kept an eye on the courtyard, she knew that he was only a half demon and therefore his eyesight was no better in the night than a mortals. It was his sense of hearing that made him dangerous but Puppet knew how to move silently. She had mastered at least that much while she had been her Masters prisoner and mistress.

If she stuck to the shadows then she could make it.

Where would she go? She didn’t know. She would worry about that later. Her first priority was simply getting away from here. Away from her master. Away from his bed and his cruelty. She slipped out the door, closing it silently behind her and then slipped through the shadows.