The Alpha

Chapter 17

Axton POV

I pull away from the kiss to find us both panting from lack of air. I hadn't planned on ambushing her like this, but the second I saw her, I just needed to kiss her.

Resting my head against hers, I stare into her deep eyes, "Sorry."

She gives me a light smile, "It's okay."

We stay there for a few moments, my hands on her waist as hers rest against my chest. We just stand there looking at each other. For a moment, it is as if time has frozen still and we are just us.

My gaze wanders down to her mark and the scar lying across it. As if she can sense my anger and curiosity for what happened, she lifts her hand off my chest and places it on the mark to cover the scar before pulling away from me and moving to sit on the edge of the bed.

"We need to talk," she starts, taking the words right out of my mouth.

"How did you get the scar?" I ask first.

"The same place I get all my scars," she mumbles, looking anywhere but me as I take a seat next to her.

Trying to hold back my wolf from scaring her, I pull Ellie's hands into mine in order to get her to face me, but she keeps her head down, "How?" is the only word I ask her.

"I don't think you want to hear this, Axton."

"I don't think I want to either," I say, "But I have to."

Nodding her head a little bit, she raises her eyes to look me in the eye as she starts, "When I first left, all I did was keep running. I was terrified about you coming after me to kill us," I growl at the insinuation, but she gives me a look and keeps going, "I was so focused on making sure I wasn't being tracked, I didn't focus on where I was going."

She takes a deep breath as if to prepare herself, like she is breaking the glass of a box that says shatter in case of emergency, "I crossed into a rogue's territory. The moment I crossed, I was taken. He didn't like strangers coming into the territory since he had started his plans to take down the packs. He put me in the cells where I was to wait for a hearing to decide if I was good enough to live or not. When he interrogated me, he saw my mark. He knew I was the mate of an alpha, and with his obsession to destroy the packs, he thought I could be used as leverage. He was wrong."

"What do you mean?" I ask softly.

"He wanted to know who my mate was, which pack I had come from. But no matter what he did, I wouldn't tell him. He spent three months torturing me to try and get me to confess, but I wouldn't do it. Even when he... when he started kidnapping pack members."

"What?" I almost scream. How did I not know about other missing pack members?

"He thought if he could kidnap members from each pack, at least one of them would recognize me and know where I belonged, but none of them did. So, he killed them. Slaughtered them all right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do about it. Until I escaped," she says, raising her hand to rub her mark again, "The scar on my mark is from the first time I refused to tell him about you. You used a silver knife coated in wolf blood. It was spelled by the warlock he had with him, so even though it was used on the mark, it wouldn't heal without leaving a reminder."

"Ellie-" I start to say, but she cut me off when she abruptly stands up.

"You know, that's how I knew it was you," she says, turning to face me with not just pain on her face but anger too.

"What do you mean?" I ask her as I stand up to move in front of her.

"I mean that he scarred my mark, your mark. If it wasn't truly you the night that you rejected me, then you would have felt it. You would have known how much pain I was in and you would have come," she whispers the last part, her eyes drawing to the ground for a moment before lifting them back up to mine, "Every day I would tell myself and my wolf that you knew, that you could feel it and you were coming, but you never did. I don't know the exact day it was, but after so long, I just accepted it. You had rejected me, and if you were coming for me, it wasn't to save my life. It was to end it."