Winter: Taken

One

Chapter 1

Clutching the sheets in her white-knuckled grip, Winter rose from her bed with her heart racing and images of the dark-eyed man with sharp teeth still dancing across her vision from the nightmare. She swallowed down the bile that threatened to rise up from her chest as she stared at the darkened corner of her room, swearing the tall figure of a man loomed over her from the corner. She reached for the bedside lamp, quickly turning it on to illuminate the room. No one was in the corner.

Feeling her heartbeat start to slow, she released the bedsheets from her grip and brought her knees up to her chest to rest her chin on. The nightmares had been persistent ever since she turned sixteen years old and began her first cycle. Each nightmare was filled with images of the dark-eyed man. Each nightmare the same. Him destroying the world trying to find her. His aggression she was still able to feel in the back of her throat even as she rose to consciousness. Her single-mother at the time had taken her to every psychiatrist known to man, each one prescribing a different regiment of prescription drugs to make her sleep. Those were the worst nightmares. Unable to wake herself up as the dark-eyed man got closer and closer to finding her.

"Hun, are you alright?" Her bedroom door opened to reveal her exhausted mother. It had been five years since the nightmares started and in that time, her mother had gotten married and given birth to a little boy; Rye.

Winter's stepfather, Ray, begun complaining about the nightmares within the second trimester of the pregnancy. Being a high risk pregnancy, Ray didn't enjoy it when Winter's mother was pulled from her bed to console Winter after a nightmare. Sometimes he forbid his wife from leaving the bed and going to Winter's side.

"Just another dream, mom." Winter grasped the cool glass of water and slowly took the liquid into her mouth until her body was cool and she could feel the tendrils of sleep snaking around her consciousness once more.

"Take your pills and go back to sleep." Nodding her head, she took another dose of pills and swallowed them down as her mother softly closed the door to return to her own bedroom. Ray's upset words barely making it past the threshold before the door shut.

"Winter." An unknown voice filtered through her room just as her bedside lamp clicked off. Warmth like no other seeped into her veins and made her heart beat slow, her skin covered in goosebumps.

Rousing from her bed, she quietly walked towards the window, where the curtain softly blew against the floor of her bedroom. She gasped when she saw her window was open, barely cracked at the bottom to allow cool air from the night into her room. Moving to shut it, her eye caught on movement just below and then what could only be described as a dark figure loomed up at her from the middle of her yard. Clearly a man by the size of his thick chest, his face was obscured, but something inside Winter made her aware of the man like she knew him.

She blinked and he was gone. No longer looking at her from the ground below. She shut the window, shaking her head and moved back towards her bed. The pills had never made her hallucinate before, but the likelihood that they now were did not shock her. She had probably already fallen asleep and this was another one of her dreams.

With that in mind, Winter climbed back into the bed and tried to fall back asleep. At twenty-one years old, with who knows how many prescription drugs in her system, she could no longer feel herself become paranoid about the dreams that plagued her unconscious mind. A by-product of medication.

Slowly feeling herself drift off into a dream slumber, feeling the warm relaxation of her own mind, Winter succumbed to the medication induced sleep.

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The Alpha scented the air. Five years he had been searching for the specific scent of his female. The source herself always just out of his reach, she found herself mangled within his own dreams and he hers, until now.