The Luna's Escape

Chapter 3 - A Pair Of Green Eyes

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TRIGGER WARNING

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

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Jasmine

The freshly lit fire in our bedroom crackled behind its guard, and woodsy steam billowed out of the opening in the en-suite door. Snow had begun to fall heavier on the way back from my appointment, plummeting the January winter well-below freezing, and Dominic hadn’t wasted a second hurrying me out of the cold.

Delicate flecks swirled and danced on the breeze behind the glass, adding to the white blankets piling against the surrounding forest and the weaving river past our home and the pack house. Frost crept around the window pane, spreading across the glass and obstructing my view, almost as if the ice obeyed its Alpha to hide me from the outside world. I lived in a pretty log home amid a pretty Alaskan landscape on the Yukon Delta, with pretty things surrounding me and pretty clothes to wear. All of it was an illusion, a gilded cage. Pretty, but a cage nonetheless.

Would my baby see this home as a cage as well? Or would they grow up thinking this was completely normal?

A sickening dread plummeted in my stomach, clinging on with lead claws.

Would Dominic hurt them? Would they become just like him?

I moved to my full-length mirror near the closet by the en-suite and stuck my tummy out, leaning back for the full effect. Turning to my profile, I slid my hand under the prominent but fake baby bump that would become real in a few months, stroking around the small mound. For the first time in quite a while, I wished a vision would visit me. I just wanted to know that my baby would be fine this time around and that I’d get to hold their tiny hand.

A plume of steam pushed from the doorway reflected in the glass, and out of it emerged Dominic, his long cotton sleeves rolled to his elbows. His smile broadened, flashing a perfect white set of teeth. The scent of a woodland rolled off of him from the steam, rich in cedar, amber and patchouli; he’d used my favourite bath oil.

“You’re so beautiful like this,” he practically purred, the green of his eyes flickering black with his wolf as they settled on my exaggerated baby bump.

His thick arms encircled me, cupping the small mound with ease as his giant hands spanned over it. I let my stomach go, unable to poke it out any longer, and I missed my little bump the second it deflated.

Dominic rested his chin on my shoulder, kissing the bend of my neck where I disliked him touching, which in turn caused me to shudder. He chuckled, mistaking my revulsion for excitement, and lapped his tongue the entire length of my neck to my ear, keeping my gaze through the mirror.

“Your bath needs a little time to cool,” he whispered, feathering the height of my cheek with his lips and tickling my skin with his short beard. “Just enough time to get you all hot first.”

His hands traced around the curvature of my hips to the hem of my knit dress, peeling it up my body and over my head to display me like his present. I shivered, but not from any cold draft. The fireplace roared, keeping the winter chill at bay. I shivered because I knew what was about to follow.

“Goddess, look how perfect you are, angel.” His palm gripped my waist as he slid my bra strap loose, kissing the exposed round of my shoulder. “Perfect, and mine,” he growled for emphasis.

I had nowhere else to look except at myself in the mirror, and I didn’t like the woman reflected. She wasn’t perfect; far from it. Weak wasn’t the word I would use. She was broken, only I didn’t know how to put her together again, how to fill in the fractures and patch the pieces that were lost.

Too preoccupied with marking my skin with bruising kisses, Dominic hadn’t noticed my face had fallen and that my fake smile had slipped off completely. He never wanted to sink his canines into my neck and brand me permanently as his. In his words, he couldn’t risk hurting me by putting his own desires ahead of my safety because I healed as a human would. Once again, like an i***t, I believed him at the time. In the stark light of day, I realised it was because he didn’t want to be tied to me in case, in his eyes, I failed him like his first Luna.

“Do they hurt?” Dominic’s lips brushed across my left knuckles, sparking me out of my head like they’d brushed an electric fence instead.

He had hold of the hand that he’d gripped in a vice at the pack clinic during my check-up. The side of my pinkie finger was developing a faint blue tinge, bruised from the pressure he had applied.

“… No.” Another lie because admitting the truth that they were sore while an Alpha, far stronger than I could ever be, was wrapped around me was an unwise decision, to say the least.

“Good, because you know I didn’t mean to hurt you, right?”

I nodded as he kissed each finger and unclasped the back of my bra, pulling the white lace from my chest. Dominic preferred me dressed in revealing white lace underwear, so that’s what I wore. Another choice stripped from me that had been done so subtly, it hadn’t registered until it was too late.

“I never want you to think I could hurt you on purpose.” He cupped under my breasts with a delicate touch, brushing over my n*****s and sending pleasant tingles straight to my core. “I love you too much to ever hurt you, and you know I’d do anything for you…”

The tips of his fingers trailed down my stomach, slipping below the frilly white lace band of my thong and stroking along my slit. I wished my body wouldn’t respond to his caresses or sing as he stimulated all the right nerves. It was a natural reaction, something I couldn’t control, but the logic didn’t stop the wave of shame washing its slime all over me for growing wet for a touch I didn’t want.

“What happened last time… I was just upset that you lost our pup, and I didn’t handle it the best.” There it was: the excuse and the minimising. He hit me, but it was my fault; he wasn’t to blame. “How could I ever want to hurt you? I love you. And you love me, right?”

I nodded and smiled, a moan hanging from my lips as his thumb spun circles on my clit and his fingers pressed inside me. He kissed along my jawline, following the path to my ear.

“Say it. Say you love me. Tell me you’re mine?” His voice was a husky whisper, an order disguised as a soft begging plea.

“I-I love you… with all my heart. I belong to you; I’ll only ever be yours.”

When he was like this, I could almost mean it. The gentleness of his touch as he explored me, the warmth of his solid muscles – all of it disarmed the protests my body wanted to raise. But as always, the real Dominic reared his head, reminding me I was falling down his rabbit hole of manipulation once more.

The grip on my breast squeezed tight, and my n****e was pulled and twisted further than the skin would allow, causing a lancing pain to strike through my chest. The force thrusting in and out of my entrance turned harsh and sharp, stripping away any form of pleasure that had been building. It was what he always did; he pushed his roughness beyond what was tolerable to me – too demanding, too dominant, too savage.

Withdrawing his sinking touch, Dominic whirled me around and crushed his lips into mine, invading my mouth and forcing his height over me to back me against the wall. I couldn’t keep up, and he stole the breath from my lungs, not in the romantic sense but in the suffocating sense. It was the expanding burn of being trapped underwater and in desperate need of oxygen – the weight of fear surrounding me that it would never be granted.

As my vision blurred at the edges, flickering in dark spots, he let go of my mouth so I could gulp for air, and he devoured my neck. A honed edge ran along the upper curve of my backside, catching under the tiny triangle nestled between the cleavage of my cheeks. His extended claw sliced up, yanking the lace with it, which bit into my skin and left a burn trailing behind.

His lips peeled away from mine to strip his clothes off, laying him bare before me and displaying the muscle and power he possessed as a mature wolf. At forty-nine, he was more than twice my age. But as an Alpha and a werewolf capable of living up to a hundred and fifty years, he was approaching his prime, the pinnacle at which he was strongest and most virile.

With the steps of a predator stalking his prey, Dominic backed me against the wall, trapping me between his arms. He lifted me with ease, wrapping my legs high around his waist and pawing my hips to line them up with his.

“Wait… I—” I stupidly pushed at his chest to halt his rough kiss about to brand my lips.

He caught my wrist and pinned it like a vice to the wall above my head, the flicker of irritation pulsating as black in his narrowed eyes. He and Dolph were not happy to be denied.

“I want to show you how much I love you, that’s all.” He turned on the charm, releasing the punishing clamp on my wrist and tilting my chin up with the tip of his finger, peppering my lips with the lightest caress. “When I found you, I knew I had to save you. I’ve loved you from the moment I rescued you. Do you remember that day? When you clung to me for safety?” He agitated his hips to slide the head of his c**k to notch at my entrance, ready to thrust with a single harsh movement that I braced myself for. “If it weren’t for me, you could still be in that cell. Or they could have sold you to someone who wouldn’t have loved you like I do, who doesn’t take care of you, or who gives you a home.” He pressed his way in with such care that I unintentionally moaned in pleasure, not anticipating that he would be so tender.

A tear trickled down my cheek, which he wiped away, lingering in his touch where he had once struck me. I despised the creeping filth that clung to my skin as pleasure built from his languid yet deep thrusts. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want him on me or in me. But my refusal was strong-armed with his pressure and coercion until I shut up and accepted his touch.

Dominic grunted, low and guttural, jolting pain through my bones with his next forceful thrust. He never stayed gentle for long, not even during our first time when he took my virginity.

I let my mind close in on itself for the second time today, drifting away and leaving my body behind until the Alpha was finished with me. It normally wandered to reminiscing memories of my former life or a region of self-loathing, accompanying the disgust from the first buds of pleasure Dominic always evoked before he turned brutish and severe, extinguishing the pleasant waves.

This time, it drifted to something sweeter, something most guarded, my secret pair of green eyes who had visited me in fleeting visions – and even my dreams – for the past five years. Those beautiful man’s eyes first greeted me when I was seventeen and still living in my Family community, a brief and fleeting image of a pair of irises, upturned in longing. The elements of his face were becoming clearer in this last year from the distorted mass they once were, and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the green-eyed man in my visions was not Dominic.

My jailer’s eyes were as green as a dark forest, and his chocolate brown curls were cut short, arranged with purpose like a script. The man from my dreams had eyes that verged on impossible – the most beautiful shade of pale jade, like frost on a spring morning – framed by deep chestnut curling waves that brushed his shoulders.

I had long since buried any yearning for my familiar, my soulmate whom Gaia would pull us towards. However, the pining my soul carved in my heart when my mysterious green-eyed man paid his visits unearthed my deeply buried desire. Whoever he was, Gaia’s tendrils were pulling our paths to merge. But how could I step off the path I was on when Dominic seemed determined to keep me chained to him?