The Luna's Escape

Chapter 4 - A Bath

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TRIGGER WARNING

This chapter contains topics of miscarriage, manipulation, love bombing and S.A

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Jasmine

Dominic came with a feral roar, dragging me from the daydream I wanted to live to the reality I would do anything to escape from. Despite this, I fell back into my performance, faking a cry of ecstasy and throwing my body into just enough shudders to add some authenticity. He planted sloppy kisses on my lips, curling my tongue around his as he panted for breath.

His fingers dug into the flesh of my rear, the tips of his claws threatening to pierce my skin should he squeeze harder. As I bit my tongue to keep my whimper at bay, building up my nerve to tell him it hurt, his grip let up, cradling me instead of groping. He nuzzled into my neck, remaining buried to his hilt between my aching legs, and whispered his usual sweet nothings.

“I love you.”

“You’re so beautiful, so perfect.”

“My angel.”

I could almost write his post-s*x honeyed words to the letter.

He pressed his forehead to mine, rocking ever-so-slowly to nuzzle against my nose – a common werewolf behaviour shared between mates, their blood-kin and close friends.

“I can feel our pup,” he whispered, breaking script and stroking my stomach, easily holding me around him with a single arm. “Just a tiny tug of a bond, but it’s there.”

“I wish I could feel it too, like you do.” I gripped his hand, hoping I could sense the unspeakable tether – which bound mates and blood-kin together – vicariously through his skin.

A silly notion, really; we weren’t even soulmates. There was nothing binding us except Dominic’s obsession. Or should I say there used to be nothing. What connected us now was growing in my womb.

He let go of my abdomen and tilted my chin to his face, his thumb tracing lazy circles across and down my throat. “Our wolf bonds have their pros and cons. Nothing can compare with feeling your pup grow before you even meet them… but it’s soul-crushing when that bond starts to unravel. I’m glad you didn’t have to go through that like I did.”

I had lost count of the number of times my miscarriage had been held over my head today. The man seemed bent on reminding me of the stakes of bearing his child. But I suppose I had walked myself into the topic this time.

With a guttural grunt, he pulled out of me, a stream of thick and sticky semen following to dribble down my thighs. He scooped me up within his arms and carried me to the bath he had prepared, setting me on my feet so he could test the heat. While he added some more hot water to bring it up from its lukewarm state, I bunched my curls up in a hair clip out of the way.

“That should be back up to temperature.” Dominic held out his hand for me to take and dip my toe in to check for myself. “Guess we got carried away.”

I laughed along with him for the sake of it, knowing the smile never reached my eyes. With immense begrudgement, I would concede that he knew how to draw the perfect bath. My blissful sigh at its warm embrace was taken as an invitation for his roving hands.

“I wish I could climb in there with you” – he squeezed my breasts, still tender and raw from his rough treatment – “and really take my time on round two. But there’s a lot of work to catch up on, and I can’t let you distract me all day.” He tilted my head back to kiss me upside down, not rushing to tease my tongue around his again, and slowly brushed his thumbs over my n*****s, gentle and affectionate for once. “Goddess, you know how to make everything hard.”

He pecked my lips one more time and finally left me alone to get himself dressed, keeping the bathroom door open as he slid his clothes back on.

“I’ll be working until late with Conan and a few warriors. I need to have a rotation worked out to accompany you at all times, wherever you go.”

Conan Moses was Dominic’s Gamma, a native Alaskan wolf from a Yup’ik territory that sat across the north of Tundra River, a sort of pack within a pack, and was home to the only humans permitted on pack grounds. I didn’t know him well, but he was young for his position – the same age as myself – and seemed like a sweet and good wolf. I knew from personal experience that what ‘seemed’ and what ‘was’ were often two separate realities, so I didn’t know how true my inklings of him were.

“Do I need more? I already have one that guards me everywh—”

“And now you’ll have more,” he cut off my protest and slammed the door wide open, his shirt clasped so tight in his fist that his knuckles were white. The green of his eyes swirled black, and I knew well to remain silent. “It’s all for your protection, angel,” he cooed, dropping back into his charm. “You know you can’t mind-link if anything happens. I’m only doing this to keep you safe, so that I know where you are at all times.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, accepting that further surveillance was happening whether I wanted it or not, and sank into the bath further.

“You’re carrying the heir to this pack.” Dominic came to a crouch at my side. “It’s for our baby’s safety too. If I have to pull my entire team of warriors from their duties to watch you, then so be it.”

And I knew that he meant it by the way he gripped the side of the bath, his stern gaze and his flaring nostrils. The man would go to every length imaginable to keep me under his watch. Under his control.

“I won’t be back for dinner, so Tessa will come by to cook anything you ask. I don’t want you lifting a single finger around our home anymore.”

I nodded, despite his back being turned as he left without another word or chance for me to voice a protest. I had nothing else to do in this cage except housework and cooking. It may have been my cage, but it gave me some purpose to maintain it. I did, however, love cooking. Losing that small liberty was going to cost me some sanity.

If it were any consolation to me, Tessa was a lovely she-wolf, not an Omega, though she did work as a cook in the pack house. Before my contact with the pack house was limited under Dominic’s control of who I interacted with, she had told me her older brother, Rafe, was a strong warrior and beamed with pride whenever she mentioned it. I hadn’t met him face-to-face, but I had seen him around a couple of times from my home windows, usually with Conan somewhere nearby.

Four years of living in one, and I still didn’t fully understand pack dynamics or whether this was how all other packs worked. I knew the basics: that they were led by an Alpha, a title passed down to the eldest by blood. They kept the pack unified and possessed superior strength, speed and senses, along with a strong aura that compelled other wolves to bend their necks in submission but not control them. I knew the Gammas here specifically operated differently. They were appointed by the Yup’ik territory on Tundra River and served the pack and its security, not the Alpha. Since the Alpha was supposed to do what was right for the pack, their goals were meant to align.

This pack once had a Beta, a wolf who would’ve trained and drilled the warriors and trackers. He met a similar end to the former Luna, killed to maintain Dominic’s lie – a lie all because of me and my damned powers.

I foresaw how I was taken four years ago, but at the time, the vision made no sense. Every day for a week, my vision struck the same: piercing animalistic howls followed by a black void of nothing. I would wake after fainting with the same migraine and nosebleed tagging on behind it, but with no shred of light as to what it foreshadowed.

When it came to pass, it occurred exactly as the vision presented. I was picking wild herbs with my mother late one evening for her salves, right by the twisting tree bark path to our home. A crunch, a howl and then oblivion.

I awoke in a cinder block cell with a small strip of bars as the only source of light, an apparent detail my vision deemed unimportant to warn me of.

As the days blurred together, I lost track of how long I had been locked behind a solid door. No matter how much my throat turned hoarse from screaming, sobbing, or yelling every curse under the moon, no one ever answered. Food would appear, and that was it. I had no clue where I was, what had happened to the Family or if my parents, my sole blood-kin, were alive.

Aside from the shadow of bars that traced the same arc along the wall, my imprisonment had one other constant. A vision that remained with me to this day and evolved in detail over four years, my secret green-eyed man.

His face was unclear, and when I tried to focus on his features, they vanished, leaving me alone in that tiny, grey prison. Because the vision of the man’s eyes had begun before my nightmare descended, I clung to it as my only fragment of my former life that no one could take from me. My father always said to me, when I first told him with my premonition of the man for guidance, that if this person returned to me with repetition, it meant he would be important. I wanted to believe, so much, that the man with no features would be the love of my life, or at least lead me to them.

When Dominic first appeared in my cell, tearing the door off, I was terrified. It was the first time I had seen another person for who knows how long. I recoiled away from him, but he drew closer, taking my chin between his fingers, and, with a feather-soft tug, he turned my face up to meet his. His green eyes were what I noticed first.

Was this the green-eyed man of my vision?

Was I meant to follow him?

Or was I meant to be wary of him?

I wished I had listened to the latter instead of his assurances that he was there to save me from rogue wolf traders, that I was all who was left of my blood-kin and Family, that he would protect me no matter what. I fell for the lies and believed every word he spoon-fed me, like the naive soul I was. I let him carry me out. I let him take me to his pack. And I let him weave me into his trap.

I sank further into my hot bath, blowing bubbles out of my mouth under the water’s surface like I could blow my bad memories away just as easily. A shadow of bars from the lattice of the bathroom window shaded the tiled walls, just like the bars of that cinderblock cell. One prison exchanged for another.

Closing my eyes, I let the water take the weight of my body and wash away Dominic’s touch. Out of nowhere, the image of a pair of pale jade irises drifted in front of me, my secret green eyes and one of the few good memories I wanted to hold on to…

…The edges of his features were fuzzy, almost clear but not defined, enough to show he possessed a face more handsome than a man had right to. Despite their icy-green shade, his eyes heated my skin more than the hot water in the bath ever could, trailing over me hooded and intense. The thick stubble around his full lips made them all the more inviting and pleaded for my fingers to trace their contours.

He leant towards me in the tub, the supple bronze of his skin glistening beneath the beads of water, harsh shadows of muscle colliding with soft lustre, and what might be sleeves of tattoos up both arms. What caught me off guard was that he stopped, making no attempt to come closer, as if he was waiting for me to make the first move. I had spent so long having my decisions made for me and my voice silenced that I had forgotten what it was like to speak or to have a choice.

Is this what my secret green-eyed man was truly like? Would he let me be the one in control?

On the tail of the realisation that I could either push this man away or pull him closer, I chose the latter. Gaia had been trickling this man to me for years; it couldn’t be for nothing. Without knowing this man, I knew that I wanted him, even if all he would ever be to me was a daydream to escape my prison and Dominic.

I reached out to my secret man, his smile broadening to be embraced, yet something told me he would have been just as content to sit back and appreciate me if I so chose. The heat of his skin slid against mine, settling over me, but the tight dread of being caged didn’t descend. Quite the opposite. Excitement fluttered my insides, craving to be touched for once, not shying away.

His lips hovered over mine, and his feather-light touch outlined the curves of my hips, again waiting for my permission. I slid my hands around his neck, drawing his lips and body close, never wanting to wake from this fantasy with him.

“Roman…”

… I jolted upright, sloshing the tepid water with my motion.

My head whirled around, expecting to find another figure retreating, but I was alone. Frustration thrummed and flushed through my body at being yanked back from a wondrous edge, a pleasure that lingered on my skin with a ghostly caress.

What had I just said?

It was a name… the name of my green-eyed man that sat on the tip of my tongue and the cusp of my memory. Lingering but elusive. How would I know his name? It had never been uttered before.

If that was a vision, it was the weirdest one I’d had to date.

I wiped under my nose, which was clear of blood, finding no crimson streaks staining my index finger and no migraine pounding behind my eye sockets. Certainly no vision; only wishful thinking and longing, or the moon goddess playing her games with my sanity again. Gaia was her cruel mistress to keep flashing this man’s image to me, knowing full well I would never meet him.

There was little point in staying in my bath. The water was cold, the slimy film from Dominic’s touch lingered and I was strung out on my daydream. And that was just from the last hour. The sun had barely vanished beneath the horizon, and I wanted to crawl under the bed and pretend today hadn’t happened, that I hadn’t been domineered into silence, prodded and poked, used to slake a man’s lust and reminded of my past miscarriage at every single step while I found out I was pregnant. But I couldn’t afford to think purely about what I wanted. I had a tiny little life depending on me to figure out how to do better.

“Luna?” a feminine voice called from beyond the bedroom door, causing my hand to slip as I stepped out of my bath.

“Who’s there?” I fumbled for the nearest towel and clutched it high to my chest, trepidation rising over who was in my home.

The door opened a fraction, and through it popped a crown of long, sandy, golden brown hair. “It’s just me, Tessa. The Alpha said you wanted my help around the house?”