Mask | ✓

4

I was used to overcoming many hardships in my life. Fear? Not a problem. Pain? Easily solved. Hatred? All too familiar. These were things that didn't hold me back anymore. Things that I could conquer in my sleep.

However, there were two exceptions to this: the unknown and small spaces

I liked to be in the loop about things. I knew that many people enjoyed the element of surprise, but I wasn't one of them. There was an order — a structure that needed to be followed. I didn't like when people deviated from that preplanned structure.

As for the latter, being placed somewhere where my movements are confined; where it felt like the walls around me were closing in, and where it felt like my body was being slowly squeezed to death was not something I wanted to deal with nor was I a fan of.

It was that exact reason why I hated the hospital room I was currently stuck in. The room was unnaturally small in comparison to those we had at the Silver Night. It made me wonder how the people here managed to get anything done.

A quiet knock on the door caught my attention. I walked to the door and opened it. Standing there, with grey eyes full of fear, was a small man.

"I, um, I-I brought y—"

"Hurry up," I told him, the annoyance clear in my tone. My arms crossed over my chest and I stared him down expectantly. I didn't have the patience to deal with slow things, especially slow people.

The tiny man trembled like a leaf and looked as if he'd cry. He wouldn't have survived a say in the Silver Night.

He didn't break down though. Instead, he quickly held out a stack of neatly folded clothes but his eyes remained glued to the floor.

"T-These are the clothes Alpha Tatum requested us to you. If you need anything else p-please ask."

Clearly, he didn't want me to ask.

I took the clothes from the man and closed the door in his face without bothering to say anything else. It wasn't hard to locate where the bathroom was given that there was only one adjoined room in this shoebox. Unsurprisingly, the bathroom was small as well.

I tried to ignore the cramped feelings that flooded my body and sat the pile of clothes down before stripping. Before moving to the shower, I paused and stared at my form.

Scars littered my body. Most were from my childhood, the period before I was able to shift into my wolf form. At many packs, training started as early as nine-years-old or some even waited until the wolves turned thirteen and were able to shift. This wasn't the case at the Silver Night. Training started the moment you were able to walk. We needed to be experts in fighting in both forms so why not start early?

Besides the old scars, it didn't surprise me that there weren't many wounds. Given that I was a werewolf who had already shifted, it was only natural that my wounds healed just as quickly.

I turned toward the shower, but stopped and looked back at the mirror when something caught my eye. My hand raised and I turned my head to the side and sure enough, there was one tell-tale sign that something had happened: my ear. Part of my ear was missing.

Anger boiled inside of me and threatened to explode. I ready knew that once I got home that it'd only be a matter of time before all hell broke loose. I was attacked, that much I knew, but the question was by who? To say I had a lot of enemies in just my pack alone would be the understatement of the century, but most were cowards. They knew better than to attack, but given how it was a group of them, maybe there were some whose balls finally dropped they decided to take their chances.

...No, that wasn't likely.

This was why I needed to get home. Someone had attacked me and I was determined to find out who. The idiot clearly didn't make sure that they'd finished the job the first time and that would be their downfall.

I stepped into the shower and turned on the water. As tiny as the bathroom was, I did have to admit that a shower was needed. I grabbed the unused equipment sitting neatly beside the shower and moved to grab it.

As I cleaned my body, I thought about what had happened just today alone. I suppose it was time for me to leave the hospital given the situation that had happened earlier with the doctors, but to be fair, waking up with someone you didn't know only inches away from your face was a completely valid reason for punching them. Especially if you'd just been attacked not long before. It wasn't as if I meant to do harm, it was reflexes.

Then there was the man from earlier. Just judging by the way he acted, he was the alpha of this pack. What did the grey-eyed man call him? Alpha Tatum? It wasn't a name I was familiar with, but that didn't surprise me. Nolan had always been the one out of the two of us to handle meetings with other alphas. He claimed I was 'too violent and would only get in the way' so I focused more on training and handling disputes.

Nolan.

He was another reason why I needed to get back home. I didn't need whoever attacked me to try and go after him next. Despite growing up in the Silver Night, fighting wasn't Nolan's strong suit. Nolan was the brains behind the operation. He was the glue that kept the pack together, but he wasn't a fighter in the slightest.

If someone went after him next then the only thing that currently stood in their way was Nolan's beta: Roan. I knew that with how close they were that Roan would protect my brother, but I still had my doubts about his ability to effectively do so. The beta didn't grow up in our pack. He'd come back with Nolan just a few months ago when our mother stepped down as Alpha and it was time for us to take over. When Nolan announced the man as his beta, many were against it and I can't say I blamed them. Given the way that the two of them looked at each other, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume that they were fucking.

Something many of the pack disapproved of but didn't have the balls to say.

Once I stepped out of the shower and dried myself off, I quickly got dressed and exited the bathroom. The moment I stepped out, I paused and examined the room as a scent flooded into my nose. My eyes scanned it until they came to a stop on the corner of the room where the man from earlier — Tatum — sat in a plastic chair.

His green eyes scanned over my body before they moved up and landed on my dark brown.

"Are you ready?" He asked. "I have some questions I'd like to ask you as well."