CELESTE’S POV
The last thing I rembered before everything fell apart was the sound of the elevator doors sliding shut.
Brett had walked away without looking back, leaving standing in the hallway of the Vesper Grand Hotel with more questions than answers and my pride burning like acid in my chest.
I chased after him without thinking.
I never reached the elevator.
A hand clamped over my mouth from behind. Another arm wrapped around my waist, dragging backward before I could even scream.
Sothing sharp and chemical soaked into the cloth pressed against my face, and the world tilted violently as darkness rushed in.
When I woke again, I was in chains.
At first, I thought I was still dreaming. My head throbbed with a dull, relentless pain. Every part of my body felt heavy and sluggish, as though I had been subrged underwater for hours.
The air slled of oil, rust, sweat, and sothing sour that churned my stomach.
It took several long seconds for the reality to settle in.
I was sitting on the tal floor of a moving truck.
Chains bound my wrists to the floor, and a heavy collar weighed against my throat.
Around were other girls—so crying quietly, so staring blankly ahead as if their minds had already retreated sowhere far away.
That was when I realized what had happened.
I had been taken.
The organization that purchased us specialized in supplying beautiful won to wealthy clients.
At least, that was the part they didn’t bother hiding. Politicians, businessn, Alphas who valued discretion more than morality—those were the kinds of n who paid extraordinary sums to indulge themselves.
I learned that much quickly enough.
What I didn’t understand at first was that the brothel was only one piece of a much larger operation.
That truth ca later.
At the beginning, my attention was focused on sothing much more imdiate: surviving.
The n guarding us treated us like livestock. They laughed when I demanded to know where I was being taken.
When I told them my na, when I inford them exactly who my family was, the laughter only grew louder.
No one believed .
Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.
Even though Kharis was suppressed, I could still feel her sotis, but this ti, I couldn’t.
They had drugged before the abduction. Between the drugs and the silver restraints, I couldn’t feel her for two days.
Two days.
Two days where I scread and threatened and demanded they release .
Two days where no one cared.
On the third night, one of the guards ca into my cell.
He thought I was helpless.
He was wrong.
The mont his hands closed around my arm, sothing inside snapped awake.
I didn’t fully shift; Kharis was weak from the silver and suppression.
But fangs erged before I realized what was happening. The guard barely had ti to scream before I tore his throat open, and blood soaked the floor.
The entire compound descended into chaos.
After that, everything changed.
The leader of the organization—everyone called him Severin—took a personal interest in .
I never learned whether he believed my claims about my identity, but he certainly believed what he saw that night: Kharis was not an ordinary wolf.
Noble blood carried a certain...value.
They moved out of the cell after that. The room they gave was marginally more comfortable, though still filthy by any reasonable standard.
There were guards posted outside the door at all tis, and caras installed in the corners of the ceiling.
That was where I t Olivia.
She was assigned as my maid. At first, I assud she was just another servant working for the organization.
I treated her accordingly.
Cold. Dismissive. Sotis cruel.
But Olivia never reacted as I expected. She t my temper with quiet patience, replying to my sharp remarks with a small, polite smile.
It took several days before I realized sothing unusual was happening.
Whenever a guard grew too aggressive, Olivia appeared. Whenever Severin lingered too long in my room, she managed to redirect the conversation or create so excuse to end the visit.
Eventually, I confronted her.
“Why are you helping ?” I demanded one night.
She hesitated before answering.
“Because I saw what your wolf did.”
The mory of that mont still lingered vividly in my mind.
“You’re not lying about who you are,” she said quietly. “Wolves like yours don’t co from nowhere.”
That was the first ti anyone in that place had believed .
When I asked why she cared, Olivia told about her sister, a younger girl who had disappeared years earlier after being taken by traffickers.
Olivia had spent years searching for any trace of her, and she believed the organization that held us might know what had happened.
Helping escape, using the Lockwood influence, she thought, might finally give her the chance to find her sister again.
It was a desperate gamble.
But by then, we both understood desperation.
So we made an alliance.
Over the following weeks, we began to plan.
She had more freedom than I did, so she morized the guards’ patrol patterns.
Gradually, through careful observation, she pieced together a rough map of the compound, studying it until she found the smallest possible weakness in their security.
Sowhere along the way, our arrangent shifted into sothing more complicated.
She began treating with a gentle affection that went far beyond what our plan required.
When my hair beca tangled, she brushed it carefully.
Whenever she could, she smuggled better food into my room.
Sotis I caught her watching with an expression I couldn’t quite place—soft, almost affectionate.
Eventually, I realized who she must have been seeing when she looked at : her lost sister. It explained the care in her actions, motivated by a hope to save what was left of her family through .
I never acknowledged it.
But the truth was, through each endless, wretched day, Olivia turned that horror into sothing almost bearable. Her quiet presence fought off the worst of the loneliness, and I clung to it far tighter than I ever dared admit.
I only understood how much that mattered when everything fell apart.
When it was ti to escape, chaos erupted through the corridors like wildfire.
We almost made it.
But almost wasn’t enough.
Guards flooded the compound before we could reach the outer gate.
Olivia stayed behind to distract them while I ran. Kharis fought with everything she had left, but the silver and the sedatives had weakened her too much—not to ntion that she had been suppressed for so long.
They caught before I could reach freedom.
By the ti they dragged back inside the compound, both of them—Olivia and Kharis—were gone.
The mories, although faded now, still haunted .
The fierce determination in Olivia’s eyes just as the bullet tore through her body.
The feeling of Kharis giving the last bit of her essence to protect .
Severin was furious.
Several guards were dead, alarms had been triggered across the entire facility, and the damage to their operations was significant.
He had already begun planning exactly how he intended to punish for it.
But before he could carry it out, a buyer appeared.
An elderly man with more money than dignity paid an enormous sum to claim exclusively as his personal concubine.
The compound buzzed with excitent once the deal was finalized. To them, it was a victory. A troubleso prisoner had suddenly beco their most valuable sale.
Preparations began imdiately.
They bathed , dressed in silk, and fastened jewelry around my throat as if I were so kind of ornant being prepared for display.
I sat in front of the mirror while they worked, watching my reflection with detached disbelief.
rchandise.
That was what I had beco.
On the night I was ant to be presented to that man, the door opened.
I expected to see the guards returning to escort to whatever private suite this old man had prepared for his purchase.
Instead, soone else stepped inside.
She was tall, poised, dressed in elegant black that moved around her like shadowed silk.
Even before I fully processed her face, the sheer force of her presence filled the room with the kind of quiet authority that made everyone instinctively straighten.
For a brief, disorienting mont, I wondered if I was hallucinating.
“Catherine?” My voice ca out hoarse with disbelief.
She dismissed the guards with quiet authority before approaching .
For a mont, she simply studied my face.
There was no shock in her expression. No concern. Only a thoughtful, asuring look that made sothing uneasy twist in my stomach.
“You’ve been through quite an ordeal, Celeste,” she said gently.
Relief crashed into so suddenly that my knees nearly gave out.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, still in awe.
She never answered that question. Never explained how she’d found and how she wielded the authority to take .
“If you want your wolf back,” she said softly, “you’ll co with .”
The words stopped cold. All other inquiries took a back seat.
“The damage done to her can be undone,” she continued. “But not here.”
“Where?” I asked, my mind racing as hope and suspicion collided violently in my chest.
“In the Maldives.” Her smile was soft and sweet. "You loved it there once, rember?"
I rembered.
And so I went with her.
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