Destined for Disaster ✔️

Chapter 16

"Beta." 

Austin rolled onto his back in his sleep, his closed eyelids fluttering slightly.

"Beta!" 

Ridge's voice registered somewhere in Austin's mind, but wasn't pervasive enough to stir him from his slumber. The knock on Austin's bedroom door that followed not a minute later, however, was. With a jolt, he sat up. He didn't get a chance to get up and receive whoever was wanting his attention before the door swept open and a guard appeared in the opening.

"Beta, Ridge linked me to inform you your assistance is required in the infirmary. He said to tell you to hurry."

And so Austin did. Barefooted and still half asleep he stumbled down the stairs and outside, the pine needles covering the ground tickling his feet as he hurried along.

"What's going on?" he asked as he burst through the infirmary doors. The question proved unnecessary.

Ryleigh was screaming, yanking at her chains with such fervent desperation that blood trickled down her wrists. She was sitting up in her bed, her unruly hair in wild tangles in front of her face, her dark eyes wild.

"Let me go!" She lunged her body forward in a futile attempt to break her chains, which only resulted in her arms being twisted back painfully. "I can't! I can't! Stop! Stop!"

"Do not just stand there, do something!" Ridge said.

"Do what?" Austin asked, staring wide-eyed at his mate. She'd lost her mind. What was he expected to do against insanity? He took a few hesitant steps in her direction, halting at a safe distance from her bed.

"Use the mate-bond, Beta," Ridge said, as though that was something that went without saying. As though, somehow, their wretched mate bond was the cure to everything.

"Get away from me!" Ryleigh shouted when Austin approached her further. She wildly shook her hair out of her face and glared at him before doubling over, another scream rupturing past her lips. "No!" She jerked at her chains, putting her weight behind it.

"Stop that!" Austin said, gripping first her left hand and then her right, stilling them both. For a moment – a terrifying second – she fed him her panic through their mate bond, then she snapped back into her pillows, panting, her vision clearing. Her face was pale and sweaty and her chest heaving. She blinked and looked up at him.

"What are you doing here?" Her gaze shot to Ridge. "Did you link him? I specifically told you –"

"The beta outranks you, and he insisted to be linked when your condition changed," Ridge said with a shrug that said don't kill the messenger.

"My condition hasn't changed," Ryleigh said, looking down at her hands still caught in Austin's.

"Your condition hasn't changed?" Austin said. "How would you explain what just happened?"

"A nightmare," she said. "Nothing more."

"You were awake."

"Do you never have nightmares so bad that when you wake up, you think you're still in it?"

"No."

She blinked. "Well, lucky you. I do. It's over now. I'm fine."

"What was it about?"

"What?"

"The nightmare. What was it about?"

"Really? I've been tortured for a month, I should think I have plenty of traumas to pick from. Now let go of me."