Chapter 25

Spencer

The beast pullsme into consciousness. There's someone else in the cell. Not a guard. Not Christopher Kennedy. This man's scent is strong and wolfish.

Another werebeast.

I know it before I drag my eyelids open and through my blurry vision, see the other man chained to the wall opposite me.

His skin is brown, although not as dark as mine, his tangled hair almost black. It hangs in a matted curtain over his face, his head dropped forward so I can't see his features at all. However, it's clear he's older than me by ten, fifteen years at least. He's unconscious, his ragged clothes soaked in blood, his feet bare and cut to smithereens, his left arm broken.

Through the haze of pain, I watch him. He's alive; his chest expanding and deflating feebly and the occasional groan rumbling in his throat.

I can tell he's a werebeast by his scent but I look for other signs too. Is there a way to know? The build of his body, the configuration of his face. I don't see anything obvious, but as I examine him, he begins to stir.

I've never met another werebeast outside my tight family circle. Of course, I know they exist. But my mom has kept us away from them.

His eyes flicker open and with a great effort he lifts his head and peers through the gloom in my direction.

"Spencer Moreau," he says, his voice raw with pain. "I thought it was you."

"D-d-do I know you?" I ask.

One corner of his busted lip curls upwards. "I doubt it. Your family's always been too good to socialize with the likes of me."

I stare back at him blankly unsure what he means.

"My family is dead."

The man stares at me with little emotion. "Be thankful you had a family to begin with. Be thankful you aren't dead with them."

I scoff. There have been moments, moments when the pain has sucked me into its dark, dark depths where I've longed for death, prayed for it, anything to stop the agony.

"Why aren't you dead?" the man asks, wincing sharply as he shifts his body. "Why aren't we all dead?"

"All?" I say. "There are others?"

The man smiles, the teeth he has are scarlet with blood.

"I was one of six they captured. There are more in the cells down here."

"Six?" I say, amazed. That many.

"My pack," he says, for the first time the bravado fading in his eyes, sadness lurking beneath. "Three killed."

"I'm sorry," I say and he lifts his eyes from the ground to look at me.

"Your sympathy means little when you have done nothing to help our cause over the years, Moreau."

"Cause?"

He spits a mouthful of blood onto the hard ground and glares at me. "Maybe you are more of a pup than I realized."

I don't have the energy to rile at the insult. It sails right over my head. Everything hurts too much to care what some stranger thinks of me, not when I think so little of myself. But I am intrigued. Packs? Cause?

"I've never heard of weres living in a pack before," I admit. Although maybe pack is just a fancy way of saying family.

"Some of us have refused to play by the authorities' rules and restrictions," he hisses. "Some of us have chosen to live our own way, even if it's branded us exiles and criminals."

I stare at him. Is this true? "And why have I never heard of this?"

He snorts. "You expect me to believe you haven't?"

I growl at him, my beast for once stirring inside me. The other man examines me.

"Your parents were collaborators–" I start to argue, but he ignores me, plowing onwards regardless. "Happy to live in luxury while the rest of our kind suffered."

"It wasn't luxury," I mumble. "They suffered too."

I think of my dead brother. Of my dad, lost to madness by his grief, rarely returning to his human form, and my maman trying to hold the family together. I think of the scars on her body.

"It doesn't matter now," the man says, the fight deflating from his voice and his head dropping forward, his chin resting on his chest. "They're going to kill us all."

"I can't die," I whisper, more to myself than him.

"We all have to die, Moreau."

"I have a fated mate."

The man chuckles, lifting his head to peer at me. "Sure you do. We all have people we love."

He peers towards the door.

I shake my head, pain shooting up my neck and searing into my skull. "I don't know about love," I mutter. Do I love her? Am I – a monster, a beast – even capable of love? "I do know she is my fated mate."

"You? A were? Why would fate give you a mate?"

"I don't know. But I'm not the only one."

The man's face crinkles in confusion. "You know of other weres with fated mates? I've never heard of that."

"No, not weres. My girl, my mate, she has others. Four in total. Four fated mates." I wonder why the hell I'm telling him this. He could be a spy for Christopher Kennedy, a clever way to extract information from me.

I close my eyes. Idiot. Stupid idiot.

I hear the man laugh, a laugh that descends into a coughing fit. The sounds making my ribs hurt.

"You're mad," he whispers eventually, "mad."

"Yeah," I answer. "Perhaps I am."

Why would fate want me as a mate for her? A useless mutt. A curseded. Chained to a wall, defeated and broken. No use to her. No use to her at all.

"Jacob. You didn't ask," the man says, "but my name is Jacob."

I open my eyes and meet his and I realize there is the clue, the giveaway, deep in his eyes, I can see his beast lurking there, right below the surface. "Don't tell them," he says. "Don't tell them about the girl."

"Don't tell who?" I ask.

But his eyes are drifting shut and soon he's lifeless again.