𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐒✔️

THIRTY|DULCE

I jumped as the car door slammed and Theos climbed in the drivers seat, turning on me like a wild dog.

"I won't ask again Artemis."

"You don't need to." I whispered. I had no clue what to do to diffuse the situation. "It doesn't matter."

"Yes. It does." He said through gritted teeth. His hands client he'd around the steering wheel and for a moment I worried it may break.

"Just drive. Please."

The car sprang to life with a roar, eating up the road to home. Wherever that was.

"I will find out." He hissed.

"Just focus on the road." I sighed, bringing my legs up on the seat and resting my chin on my knees.

We were silent for a long while, the only sound being the dull rumble of tires over tarmac.

I watched as a thousand trees blurred into one long monotonous green line.

I was just watching rabbit run along the side of the woodland when he broke our suffocating silence. "You're not going back to Astoria's cabin tonight."

I frowned, slightly frustrated. "Why not?"

I watched the muscles in his arms shift as he shifted gears. "Because, it's clearly not safe for you anymore and as you won't tell me who did this then I have no choice but to put you in a safe place."

"I can defend myself, Theos!"

He chuckled darkly. "What about the Druers? When were you going to tell me about the years you spent being fucking tortured!"

For a moment I was confused, but then it clicked. The Druers was the official name for the white coats.
I was boiling, a red hot anger rising within me. I wanted to hit him. How dare he.

"Don't worry." He said darkly, "We found their camps."

"What!" I instantly sat up straighter, my anger cooling to something far more cynical, an icy tremor shooting down my spine. "Why didn't you tell me? Where are they?"

He turned to me with a deathly look in his eye, "They're dead Artemis. Every last one of them."

The fine hairs on the back of my neck rose on end. And a foreign feeling began to brew in my chest, I wasn't sure wether I should be glad, that the demons that plagued me had been slain. However, maybe a new monster had taken its place. How has Theos known about my past, or where to find them. Even I didn't know where the White coats where.

And past all that he had slaughtered them all without preliminaries. Part of me wondered what had happened to their other experiments.
Had they been dumped like me? Or had they just been collateral damage that was so easily swept under the rug.

I may not have known any of them however all of us where quite accustomed to each other's screams. That had to count for something.

"Say something." He grunted.

The storm swirled and the war raged.

As I caught his mysterious, dark eyes I couldn't help but wonder what else he was capable of. He was a beast, and like an animal he sensed my fear.

"Are you afraid, Artemis?" The car roared as it sped forwards.

My heart thundered in my throat.
"Should I be?"

He laughed dryly. And I felt my confidence rise enough to ask, "What happened to the others?"

"What do you think?"

Questions upon questions upon questions piled up until there was no one left to answer.
Except one certainty. They were all dead.

"You killed them." I spat in disgust. Why would I have even dared to hope that he had some shred of humanity left inside of him. I thought I had seen glimpses of it when he had told me of Mare. I had seen genuine hurt that was raw and unforgiving, I had hoped that those parts of him still tugged at the sleeves of the beast that roared, to quell the bloodlust.

He turned onto a familiar road and soon we stopped outside of the pack-house. I slammed the door closed harder than I had meant to, my anger getting the best of me. Who was he to decide who lives and dies?

"Come with me." Anger didn't blind my heart to the order in his tone.

And so I did, like a lost puppy we went across the gardens towards the edge of the woodland where the entrance to the dungeons stood proud. The closer we got the more horrid thoughts invaded my mind.

He was going to lock me down there.

At first I dismissed the thought, but then it grew, manifesting into a mantra that was all that I could hear.

I had to run. I had to get away.
I was just turning to flee when his hand wrapped around my wrist like a shackle, dragging me into the depths of the dungeons.
And leaving me wondering, would I ever surface?

It was dankly lit and the air tasted bitter on my tongue through my panicked, gasping breaths.
My wrist burned, but not with a tightness.. with a flickering flame.

The brick paved floor was strangely clean, but blood still lingered in cracks that tired hands couldn't scrub away.

My breath stuttered from my lungs as the mountain of a man before me stopped and I almost collided with his back.

"When I asked you what you thought, I never knew you viewed me so heartless."

I stepped out from behind him.
There, all hunched together sat seven people.
Two males, four females and one child, a little girl no older than eight. With a shock of white blond hair, and piercing purple eyes.

It was me,
except.. it wasn't.
This child stared at me with wide eyes and I couldn't look away.

I wrapped my hands around the bars of their cage. "Why are they locked up." I asked quietly.

"They're in quarantine." The Alpha replied. "Some of them where deliberately infected by the Druers. They'll be out in a few days."

"Infected with what?" I stepped back from the cage, the last thing I wanted was to be quarantined too.

"The Druers we're testing a chemicals weapon to use on the wolves, it spreads through bodily fluids and can kill an Alpha in days."

When Theos has said that they would be out in a few days, I doubted that every one in that cage would leave alive.

***
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