What the fuck?
“Buh-” My vision doubles, triples, no… it goes completely blurry and everything melts into darkness at the same time as another strong, but incredible scent also hits me.
Warm apple pie. No, better than that. The apple pie from my dreams. And I know, to a cellular level, to the core of my wolf’s soul… it’sherI’m smelling. As I’m plummeting toward unconsciousness, of course this is when I’d smell my fated mate.
5
BAILEY
My eyes feel as if they’re glued shut. It takes effort to pry them open. I reach to rub them, but I can’t. I’m… stuck? Something is cutting into my wrists.
The fuzzy feeling snaps to dizzy anxiety as reality zooms into focus. I’m on a cold concrete floor, restrained with my wrists attached to something behind me.
I squint against light spilling in through a window ahead of me.
Jason is also straight ahead, halfway to that window.
He’s restrained! To a pillar. His eyes are on me, his mouth tight. There’s hellfire in his eyes.
Who? What?
We’re in a basement.
“Jase?” I rasp.
His nostrils are flaring and his hair has flopped into his eyes. His chest is rising and falling with big breaths. He’s as angry as he was when he opened the hotel room door to me. No, worse. The look on his face has me sure he’s blaming me for this.
This… whatever this is.
Something heavily floral in the air knocked me unconscious in that car and it obviously did the same to Jase by the current evidence that suggests we were brought here and restrained.
His chest expands even bigger underneath his chocolate-colored button-down shirt as he blows out another angry breath.
“Wh-what the fuck” I whisper, taking in that the support he’s attached to has a diameter of at least a foot. I look up and can see the one I’m attached to, which is metal and around the thickness of a broomstick. Attached to the wooden ceiling beams directly over me hangs an aromatic tree bough with charms and crystals dangling from it.
Witchcraft.
Wide-eyed now, I’m panicking as my eyes pivot around the large space that’s obviously an unfinished basement in a house, I’m guessing by the furnace and water heater in the corner. The floors and walls are concrete and there are exposed beams overhead. The concrete floor is dusty and the air smells stale and a little musty. Near the window, which is about halfway up the wall, there are around half a dozen paint cans.
My eyes examine Jase more thoroughly and I note his support beam has a light green trumpet bloom ivy wound around it. Some of those same flowers are attached to ivy that’s wound around his cuffed ankles.
He’s got a thick silver ring around his neck, attached to the post behind him. No flowers are attached to me; there’s nothing around my neck. And I think my wrists might have cable ties around them, though I’m not sure. It feels like something thin is slightly cutting in, which might mean I can get out of this.
I can’t see what Jase’s arms are attached to the other beam with but judging by the ring around his neck and the thick cuffs around his ankles, I suspect he’s more carefully restrained than I am, likely with metal cuffs.
His eyes work over me and his nostrils flare again as he pulls in a big breath and lets it out slowly, like he’s trying to calm himself.
I retrace my steps starting from the time I left the hotel. That car was supposed to take us to the airport, but I didn’t check the carmake and model against the app. I was fuming so hard, I just got in, assuming it was our rideshare.
So, thisismy fault.
But whoever abducted us prepared for this. This was intentional, not random, and it’s likely they prepared for this with plans that it would be a wolf shifter and a witch, not wolf with a half-shifter/half-human.
So, yeah, I put us in the wrong car, but it’s not my fault. I just made it easy, I guess, because this was premeditated and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who’s behind this.
“What in the–” I clamp my mouth shut as I hear footsteps overhead. He’s looking up as well. And the way his lip curls as he aims a glare at the ceiling, I’d hate to be the owner of those footsteps. Jase is flippin’ scary right now.
The door squeaks and my eyes bug out as I brace.