Little Red's Riding

Let Them Go

"Silas? He's the one who took you then?" her brother didn't bother to conceal his disgust when he said her mates name. "I've heard of him. And I didn't expect you to go for an old man, Dahly." She knew that had tried to sound teasing as he said the last sentence, but his voice still dripped with contempt.

"He's not old. He's hardly older than I am." She argued as he set her down on the edge of a bed in a room that she didn't recognize.

"Oh is that he's told you. Maybe that's what he looks like. But he's old. Alpha Varlett, if it's the same Silas, has been a thorn in the crown's ass for at least as long as our mother has been alive. He's probably not that much younger than our grandmother. Well. Your mother I guess. Does that make it less creepy?"

Dahlia closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath. "It doesn't matter. He's my mate. And he certainly doesn't look like he's too old for me."

"Crap. What did they bash you in the head with?" Dahlia winced as her brother tried to move her hair to see where the bleeding was coming from. It had slowed considerably, but he couldn't tell if it had stopped.

"I don't know. I don't even remember it. Ouch."

Dahlia glowered at her brother as he began to search the room. "There must be bandages here. I think that the bleeding has stopped. But we need to get that wound cleaned up and bandaged. And I'd like to get a better look so we can figure out if you need stitches."

"Just let me and the children go home, Deck. There's no one else here. You can tell whoever that we escaped."

"I can't do that Dahlia. This is for your own good. You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into. And apparently you're so brainwashed that you think that you're one of them. If you were one of them then my mother is one too. And that is impossible."

Dahlia managed to keep herself from making the mistake of shaking her head again. Her brother guided her to one of the three single beds that was in the room that he had led her up into. She glanced around while he continued his search, her eyes gravitating towards the door.

"Then at least let the children go." She knew that she sounded desperate, but that was because she was. It was hard to imagine that her brother had gotten caught up with people who were selling non-human children as pets to the rich, but she couldn't ignore what she had seen with her own eyes. He didn't see werewolves as human, and his hatred for them blinded him to the fact that his sister was exactly the thing that he had spent his adult life hunting and killing.

"I can't do that Dahl. Stop asking." He said the words firmly as she saw the anger in his eyes again. He was so different from the boy who had left to become a soldier and she was rapidly realizing that she didn't really know him anymore. "But I am going to give you a choice, which is more than anyone else who's going to walk through those doors is going to do."

Deckard cast a worried look towards the door before he turned to face Dahlia again. He'd found a bucket and a few towels and helped her lay on her side as he began to work through the mass of blood matted hair, trying to find the wound that all the blood had come from.

"Mother has decided that you will marry Archer Dubois. You will move with him to his cabin, which I visited last night. It has basically become the base of operations for a vigilante group of young men from the village. They have guards stationed and scouts and while it wouldn't be able to hold off even a small number of my men, I was impressed with what they had come up with, with so little training beyond the sort of play that boys here do growing up."

'You sound so far removed from the boys you were friends with and grew up with. Archer was your best friend." The idea, by itself wouldn't have bothered Dahlia at all, if it wasn't just another example of how this Deckard, who was trying to gently clean the blood from her hair, was so very different from the Deckard that she had grown up with.