Back in Silver. Away from the beauty of the pack and deep underground where only the criminals and offenders were kept and broken down. The cries of men being tortured echoed through the space in waves, bouncing off the stone walls and coming back distorted.

Even the floor of the dungeon was pooled with blood in places, the kind that soaked into the soles of shoes and left stains that wouldn’t come clean, and the stench in the air was something that sat on the tongue long after you left.

"Let me out of here! I need to speak to your Alpha!" Evan’s hoarse voice cried out to the men standing in the shadows of the dark dungeon where he had been locked away without sunlight or any of the luxuries an Alpha of his standing deserved.

To make matters worse, his Luna had been thrown in here alongside him, and every hour of every day they were lashed and sprinkled with wolfsbane until their skin felt like it was peeling from their bones.

Had he known that woman, Viola bitch, was going to become the supreme Luna, Evan would have strategized his approach entirely differently and known exactly how to handle things. But he had believed, so convincingly and so foolishly, that it was Ember, and he had gone ahead and made the worst mistakes of his life because of it.

"They won’t listen to you, Evan. Keep it down before you bring another whipping on us. I can’t—" Leni said from the corner where she lay with painful wounds covering her body, but Evan growled at her.

"Shut up! If you had even half the sense that woman has, you wouldn’t be here with me and I wouldn’t still be rotting in this cell!"

He knew exactly what she had done to end up here because she had been hauled in wearing little to nothing with another man’s scent all over her. Beta Matt who had brought her hadn’t even spared him the details, making sure he knew precisely what his mate had gone and attempted to do in the Alpha’s office.

And Leni still had the nerve to tell him she had done it to help him. His anger had no end to it, and if his fingers hadn’t been broken and his legs hadn’t been chained at the time she was brought in, Evan didn’t want to think about what he might have done. But the worst of it all was that he still loved her, but she kept disappointing him to no end.

He had let go of a smart and genuinely useful woman for her sake, and she couldn’t even manage to do things without resorting to using her body. A body that was supposed to be his and his alone to see and touch.

He didn’t know how he was going to survive being locked in here with her for all those months, and the fact that his Beta was sitting in the next cell made it painfully clear that he had no one left on the outside to pull any strings and get him out.

His brother would probably laugh his ass off if he heard about his imprisonment. And if it wasn’t for that bitch, Viola, who had cheated to make him pass the Alpha test over his elder brother, he would still be in a good relationship with him!

That woman had truly gone too far in ruining everything around her former pack when she was the real villain of her own story. If she hadn’t been so wicked and heartless, Evan thought he might have managed her and kept her as his Luna, but she had been ruthless enough to want to cage him to her when she wasn’t even his fated mate.

Unlike Leni his mate, she didn’t allow him have his fun with other women. She suffocated him by attacking innocent women who found him interesting.

Viola was nothing but a two faced bitch. It was surprising she hadn’t come for Leni’s head yet for attempting to seduce her husband. He never knew her to be the kind to let things like that slide.

Evan still couldn’t understand how the supreme Alpha had been blind enough to choose that woman above all others. But having now tasted the full agony of this dungeon, Evan knew better than to badmouth her or go after her in any way he couldn’t back up.

"I need to talk to the supreme Alpha! I will apologize to the Luna personally if that’s what he wants, just get me out of here!" Evan yelled, already knowing that in the next few minutes their punisher would be arriving with wolfsbane and whips that tore through skin like it was paper.

"If you don’t keep your voice down you will lose your toenails as well." Came the flat warning from one of the guards.

Evan had already lost all of his fingernails and knew that particular agony intimately, so he swallowed his next yell and lowered his voice. "I genuinely need to speak to the supreme Alpha about something important. You—"

His words fell away as he noticed the bulky Gammas stationed along the long hallway of cells suddenly drop to their knees one by one, their heads bowing low to the ground.

"I am here, you can speak to me." Came a voice that made Evan look up sharply from between the cell bars as a shadowed figure moved through the dim corridor toward him.

In the limited lighting of the dungeon Evan couldn’t make out the face clearly, but he could feel the aura pressing against him and that he could identify without question. Was that not the supreme Alpha’s aura? He had finally come. Evan’s heart leapt with relief.

"Supreme Alpha. I am truly sorry about—" Evan began as Leni scrambled up beside him at the cell bars, both of them instinctively bowing under the weight of his aura, but the figure raised a hand to cut off his words.

"Whatever you wish to apologize for can wait. I need to ask you a few questions about the new Luna. If your answers satisfy me, you will be a free man within two days."

Evan nodded quickly and eagerly, even as something at the back of his mind noted that this voice sounded slightly different from what little he remembered of the supreme Alpha’s, but who was he to question it when he had only been in the man’s presence once and had barely escaped with his life that day.

"I will tell you anything you want to know about her, supreme Alpha!" 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

By the time Evan finished giving the figure everything he had asked for, he watched in stunned silence as the man turned to the Gammas positioned around him, raised his palm, and a flash of silver light pulsed from it and released into the air, seeping silently into each of their heads one by one.

Evan had no way of knowing that their memories of his visit had just been wiped clean, and his eyes widened at the astonishing display of power. What the hell was that? Did the supreme Alpha have special powers? What the fuck was he doing to his own men?!

Whatever it was, Evan stood watching with wide curious eyes, too stunned to move or speak, not until the light drifted toward the cell and seeped into his head and Leni’s as well. His eyes rolled back for a brief moment before returning to normal.

Evan blinked, staring at the empty space in front of the cell bars, momentarily unable to recall why he was standing there at all, until the familiar frustration came rushing back and he resumed his yelling. "I need to speak to the supreme Alpha about something important!"

"Did I not warn you to fucking keep quiet?" The guard growled, then turned to the others and ordered, "Bring the tools. It seems he hasn’t learned nearly enough."

Evan went pale. "You never warned me to keep quiet! You have to give a verbal warning three times before any punishment is carried out!" He argued, completely unaware that the meeting he had just had with that mysterious man and the guard’s prior warning had both been scrubbed entirely from his memory.

"I gave you the warning four times. It’s punishment time."

"Oh for the love of— you cannot do this to me!"