AllFreeNovel
Share Us
All I could do was stare up at the wolf holding my hair. He grinned at me. He had brown eyes. Beautiful warm brown eyes the color of coffee.
Really, what else can you do? Crying wouldn’t have done any good. Begging even less. Pleading? Nope. My brain scratched inside my skull howling for me to do something and all my muscles clenched and I tried to prepare myself for pain, but I’d never been filleted, so hard to know what to expect.
The final final final test of Elder elevation falls to the Luna. After everything else, and the Alpha passed his final trial, the Luna must choose one of three trials: combat, hunt, or torture. Torture means Gaia-knew-what agonies. If she begs for mercy, utters her safeword, or pleads for it to be over in any way, she fails.
Marcella had chosen torture. Mercedes would take that test if the FrostFur bid for elevation.
She wasn’t better than me. She wasn’t even meaner than me.
I was Luna Winter of SnowFang, daughter of Rodero and Autumn of SilverPaw, and I wouldn’t fail my mother, my pack, and I wouldn’t let my father win.
All I had to do to win was not pee myself and not beg for mercy.
Those two things.
Only those two things.
Alan traced the blade over my exposed jugular. The shimmer of his sick, cruel pleasure choked my nostrils like acrid smoke. I coughed reflexively and gagged as Alan pressed the flat of the blade across my windpipe. The silver burned through the first layers of my skin. My chest spasmed as I tried to inhale but I gagged, choking on my own throat. My lung seared hot but my neck burned as silver peeled away layers of my skin.
How thick was the skin of my throat? Was I about to get a custom tracheotomy? Could I survive that? Maybe if I didn’t bleed enough and rescue came fast enough to get me some antibiotics?
Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay. Calm. The camera is watching. This is going in the Archives. You know how this ends.
Tears burned my eyes and streaked out of the corners and the wolf with warm brown eyes smirked at me. With his other hand he tenderly wiped one away. His touch sent a violent shudder of revulsion along my skin.
Alan snapped for the warrior on my left to hold me firm. Apparently whatever he’d wanted from me he hadn’t gotten. The warrior restraining me bent my neck back to creaking, and dug his knee into my kidney.
The knife flicked again in my extreme peripheral vision and Alan stepped to the side. He bent down.
Sterling’s voice slipped through my memories: It is a pain like you cannot possibly imagine.
The sharp, slow press of steel on my skin, then through my skin. I gasped and jerked. The blade slid slowly through each layer of skin, hot blood streaked my freezing arm, and then—
The silver band above the grind made contact with my skin and the burn. My skin parted like a carved goose and melted from the silver band. It curled and peeled and blackened and my heart plunged in my chest like a terrified doe.
Pure shock crystallized my brain. It staggered to absorb and define the scope of the pain. It was impossible, it was like meeting Sterling for the first time again, except there was nothing but the pain, the pain, the pain, no hope, no other soul, no moon, no Gaia, no seasons, nothing but black spots dancing in my vision and pain. There wasn’t even room to be afraid. There was only pain.
“Hold her,” Alan said calmly.
That hand yanked my head back again.
The blade cut a slow groove along the flat of my arm. Pain shrieked along every nerve. My arm became nothing more than a burning branch of agony, and then the agony travelled up my neck through my jugular and into my face and around my scalp and down my side and through my chest. Each beat of my crazed heart pushed the silver through me.
Alan lifted the blade off my skin. Blood poured down my arm and froze on the snow. I sagged against the arms restraining me, trying to gulp air around my bent-back throat.
The blade touched me again. It slid into the fresh cut and drew the violation a single fiber-width deeper. The silver band grazed along raw tissues again.
So. Slow.
So slow.
I wanted to plead, I wanted to scream stop stop stop stop, offer them anything they wanted, promise them anything, grovel and beg, and my eyes burned with freezing tears as shame burned under the screams. My brain shrieked commands to my mouth and I grabbed at all of them and hoped I didn’t miss one and I sobbed under the screams because Gaia, please, please, please I can’t beg…
Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom!
Alan passed the blade through the shallow groove in my skin once more, carving yet another fiber-thin depth into my flesh. My tortured nerves shrieked at the gentle touch and the fresh brush of silver on violated tissues. The scent of burning blood mixed with silver and burning skin, and my fingernails tried to crawl out of their nailbeds.
I only had enough mental energy left to not pee myself and not beg for mercy and I clutched both of those things. Life distills down to a very simple point when there are only three things in it: silver, don’t beg, don’t piss yourself.
