“So, what is your plan?” I panted, stepping around a fallen branch. It seemed as though we had been hiking into the woods blindly for what felt like hours, but I knew it was probably thirty minutes.
“We’re going to have to delay our visit to the city until tomorrow. We will have to visit her.”
Xander didn’t sound out of breath at all as he led us through a grove of trees. This brought me enormous amounts of frustration. After everything I had put my body through today, it was protesting violently. My lungs were burning, my muscles aching as I put one foot in front of the other.
Blowing out a long breath as a wolf howled somewhere in the distance, I stumbled alongside the much-larger male. “Who is she?”
There was no response.
No matter how much I pushed and prodded, Xander refused to answer any of my questions. It seemed as though he lost himself to thought, for every single question I asked got the same answer: a grunt.
Eventually, I gave up all hopes of finding out who this mysteriousherwas. I trudged along in silence, listening to the sounds of the forest as we trekked. When an hour or so had passed, Xander finally stopped.
My mouth fell open as I took in our surroundings.
Thiswas his solution?
Nonna Doesn’t Bite
“Let me get this straight. Your master plan is to bring me to a ramshackle cabin in the middle of the woods?” I hissed at Xander, digging my feet into the ground as he dragged me towards the decrepit cabin.
He was so large that my feet were barely making grooves in the dirt as he pulled me along against my will.
“Do you have a better plan, Ana?” he asked, his voice sharp. Any trace of kindness that might have been in his voice earlier was long gone. “One that will allow us to spend the night somewhere safe and give us the opportunity to dry off before going into the city tomorrow?”
“Well, I don—”
He shook his head, his grip tightening around my arm as he continued to rant. “A plan, perhaps, that involves finding appropriate clothing in the woods? One that might also, as an additional benefit, not get us killed? Despite your seemingly natural inclination towards violence,Iwould prefer to make it through the night alive.”
I pinched my mouth shut. I didn’t have a plan, but I still didn’t like the look of this… this… shack. And that’s what this was.
A shack in the middle of the dark, deserted woods.
This cabin looked like the kind of place only someone with nefarious intentions would go. Which was exactly what I was beginning to suspect of Xander.
Not only was he rude, disrespectful, and arrogant, but it also seemed that he might have been planning to murder me.
Of all the things I’d planned for today, being murdered was not one of them.
I could just imagine what the servants would say as they hurried along the halls of the king’s castle.
She escaped, only to be killed and taken apart limb by limb in the woods by a crazed male. Fitting. She got what she deserved.
A shudder ran down my spine.
“Come on, Ana,” he hissed.
I shook my head. “No.”
Wooden shutters hung on the walls where broken glass covered what had been, at one point, a window. A lopsided chimney stack reached above the cottage, and even from here, I could see that bits of stone and mortar were missing from it. To say that it looked unsafe would have been an understatement of vast proportions.
Green vines crawled up the walls of the log cabin, and a garden that looked like it had seen better days took up most of the clearing. Even in the dimming light of the evening, I could see that this wasnotsomewhere I wanted to spend any amount of time.
Blowing out a deep breath, I grabbed onto a large tree limb and held on with all my might.
He scowled, the sound sending shivers down my spine. “What are you doing, Ana?”
I shook my head, kicking him as he tried to come closer. My voice was high-pitched as I said, “I’m not going in there with you. How do I know you won’t just murder me?”