-Cedric's POV-

The voice was merely a whisper, but in the dead of silence it echoed like a bullet.

"Whose there?" I whispered back. Shuffling of feet continued around me till I felt hands on the binds that bound my wrists. I winced at the contact.

"You don't know me." The voice was masculine with a very heavy accent to which I cannot recognize. "Your new alpha has my brother and said if I do not help release you and the other that he will die." After successfully taking out the knot, the man moved around me and to my feet. "There are cameras in this room that record only light that comes into the room. Someone who doesn't know about it would get caught."

"Can they hear us?" I asked as I stretched the muscles in my arms forward.

"No they would never want to have endless records of screaming in case we would need to move."

"We?"

There was a slight hesitation before the man switched to my other leg. "Yes my brother and I work for them."

"We're you the ones that took us from my house?" My voice harden slightly but the man did not stop this time.

"No but if we don't hurry up then you'll get to meet them." Finishing my other leg, my savior took my hands and slowly pulled me up. I cried out as my muscles protested the change but he did not stop.

"Why can't I heal?" I asked him as he dragged me to the door.

"The room is laced with a plant I do not know, but it has been known to stop healing and in large doses sedate a werewolf's inner wolf."

"When will it wear off?" I grunted as the man balanced me with one hand and opened the door with the other.

"It seems like you were injected with it. We haven't injected it into anyone before, you must be extra special." There was no amusement in his voice, if anything his resentment rung high.

"Sorry to be such an inconvenience." I snorted and the guy dropped me into the doorway, refusing to help me manage my weight any farther. The door slammed lightly behind me and the man who freed me races past me, I had to run to keep up with his long strides through the darkness.

My senses were still mundane. The only sounds I could pick up were the sounds of our feet patting the ground, along with my heavy breathing. Frequently I ran into walls, or did not turn in time and tripped over the corners. The man did not wait for me as I scrambled to find him. He never revealed his name, which I thought of as a good thing. Kidnapped brother or not he still is saving my life, if push comes to shove and I'm being tortured for the traitors name, I would rather not have one to confess.

"Your friend is through here." The black silhouette stopped suddenly, causing me to crash into his back. "Let's hope for all of our sakes that he's finished with all his screaming." Before I could protest, the door was opening and any noise on the other side was flooded into the quiet hall.

Thankfully screaming was not one of those noises. Groaning and muffled sounds broke through the silence, enough to alert anyone standing guard nearby. I pushed myself and the man into the room and closed the heavy entrance before we drew any suspicion.

"Hey!" I hissed trying to get the noise to stop. It took me a minute before I remember the guy from Parker's packs name. "Christian! It's me Cedric." The noise stopped and I crept towards what I assumed to be the middle of the room.

"Over here." I was guided to where I could see a young man lying flat on the table. Unlike me, his feet and hands are bound to the corners of a big surgical table. The more I squinted I could see a bandana tied around his mouth. "At least they shut him up." The other guy muttered as he worked to untie his feet. Christian spit, what I assume to be curses, at him through the bandana, thrashing slightly against the restraints.

"Hey!" I felt my way up Christian's neck till I found the knot of the bandana on the back of his neck. It took me a minute before my fingers could finally unravel the thick material out of its knot.

"Thank the heavens," he coughed as I threw the bandana over my shoulder. "How the hell did you get here?" As I untied his hands, I explained to him my escape, the senses numbing inject and everything. "Shit you mean you can't see anything?"

"No I can see it's just," I struggled for the right words "just not like a wolf can, like a human can."

"Why didn't they inject me with anything?" Christian pondered as I untied his second hand. Slowly, I helped him get into a sitting position. Even without seeing, I could tell the motion pained him.

"I don't know. All I know is that we need to get out of this place." Bringing Christian to his feet ended up being a two man job. Both the man and I held him up and slid him off the table. Although it seemed getting him to his feet was not our only problem. Christian cried out as his legs touched and we managed to catch him before he fell.

"What's wrong?"

"My leg!" He hollered. "Shit I think they is something in my leg."

"You were shot." The man said suddenly. "I would have thought you'd be healed by now..."

"Well I'm not!" Christian snapped. I slung one of his arms around my shoulder and held us both up right, my human-like body protesting from the weight.

"Can you walk?" I asked and Christian said he would try. "You," I pointed my finger somewhere into the darkness. "Scout ahead and make sure the coast is clear. I'll help him walk."

________________
-Parker's POV-

"How long do you think he'll take?" Ian paced back and forth from wall to wall of the pack house basement. "He's been gone for an hour." It did not take long for the youngest of the two brothers to sing once I started to threaten the other. He told us everything he knew, which was not much, but at least he could tell us where Christian and Cedric were taken.

"Will your brother betray us?" I asked the body slumped and tied up in the corner. We had tied him up and covered his mouth with duck tape before the younger one left, he was very persuaded by the gesture. His head whipped back and forth, very enthusiastically telling us no. "See we got nothing to worry about." Despite my calm facade, my insides were a bundle of cords intertwined together. My thoughts rested on Kayla, despite Christian also being in danger. She was asleep upstairs with her parents watching after her. When Ian and the other brother left I talked to Kayla as she slept, reassuring her that we were going to bring Cedric back, that everything was going to be okay.

My wolf stirred with anguish, and I was forced to change my train of thought.

"Land, huh?" A sigh escaped my lips and I put my head in my hands. Even though the rebel brothers did not have much information of any strategies or any more offensive moves anyone could pull against us, they did know what it was they were helping accomplish. "They want to drive my pack into the ground."

"He could be lying." Ian's voice had no hope of what he was saying was true. Anger swelled inside my chest making me pull my hair in frustration.

"Whats the point of lying," I let go of my hair. "He knows we'll kill him if his brother is not back by sundown. They're just omegas, the little bitches of their pack, they have no power or rank over anyone. Why bother lying when they know they can have something better for the other side." The brother stayed hunched in the corner, not trying to deny anything I said. "What we need to find out is why this land? Why us."

"Because we're the weakest option..?" Ian mused, I growled at my older brother.

"We are not weak."

"We don't think so but--"

"No Ian!" I shot to my feet and got right into his face. My brother had a good three inches on me, but my rank would always be higher than his. "I have a mate now! She is part of my pack and I am to protect her with my life. If I can't even defend my own territory then how am I supposed to tell her that I will keep her safe." My breath came out in short bursts of pain. Ian immediately put his arms around me, clutching to me as if I was an anchor to the mess that we are in.

"Parker you risked your life for her." I grasped at my brothers back, holding him with an intensity that shook me to the bone. "If you did not give her your blood to heal her then she would be dead right now, and that would have killed you. You have already kept her safe, now we just have to do it for a little longer."

"We can't be weak." I repeated. "No one messes with us and gets away with it." I let go of Ian and wiped unshed tears from my eyes. "We are not weak. When Christian and Cedric get back we are killing this thing at its source. This war may have not started with us," I look my brother in the eyes and give him a confident smirk. "But it will end with us. They have messed with the wrong pack."

__________________________

-Cedric's POV-

"How many times do I have to tell you two to be quiet," the man in front of us whispers in a harsh tone. "They could have already noticed you are gone, and with all the noise you are making we are to be caught for sure!" His accent was thicker when he whispered, causing my human ears to strain in order to understand him.

"Well it might be helpful to know where we are." Christian pointed out. The three of us stopped at another door in the darkness. Christian's leg was still bleeding, and our foreign friend and I have been taking turns helping him walk. Currently it was my turn and Christian lay limp on my side. Even for my mediocre sense of smell, the smell of blood running down his leg suffocated my nose.

"There are stairs that will lead us up from the tunnel level," I heard him shuffle in front of us. "I can hear other people on the other side, I do not know if we will run into them if we open the doors. There are lights but no cameras."

"Do you think we can wait them out?" I asked, adjusting Christian higher up my shoulder. Before he could reply the ground seemed to vibrate softly, voices echoing off the silent walls.

"They know you're gone," a string of incoherent curse words flew from before me, half of them could not have been registered as English. "We must risk it, follow my lead." I bit back a rhetorical comment about how we cannot follow anything, but refrained. Anyone looking for us now is not as blinded as I am, we have the disadvantage at the moment.

Christian and I stumbled behind the moving silhouette in front of us till he reached a door. Light shone through the opening he made, pushing both us in there, then closing the door again. Florescent lights blinded me. It took a moment before my vision cleared and a concrete set of stairs stood tall in front of me.

"No time to waste!" The man who has helped us through started to run up the stairs, a black scarf now wrapped around his face, obscuring his features. Christian and I managed to stay light on our feet and ascend the stairs behind him, little spots of blood getting left behind like a bread trail. "We need to leave this place before anyone picks up your friends scent."

"Cedric." Christian gasped, squeezing my arm. "I'm just holding you up."

"Shut up." I told him and smacked the side of his head. "You may not be a part of my pack but you are a part of Kayla's. I am not letting anything happen to you as long as I can help it. So you can just shut up and keep moving." He nodded, a grim look on his face as the three of us limped our fastest down endless corridors. My muscles protested and the running seemed to be going in meaningless circles, until we turned the corner to a dead end, an emergency exit shinning bright at the end.

"When we go through the door an alarm will go off, but it is the only choice we have now." A series of distant howls reverberated against the walls. Upon reaching the door, the man threw himself onto the handle, a blaring siren penetrating every pore of my body. "Keep going!" The door lead outside to what looked like the back of some industrial building. There were fences in the distance, a huge electronic gate open widely. "We have to beat the alarm!" As if on cue, red lights started to flash around the gate, and slowly it started to close.

He did not have to yell at us again to get us to run.

My body still had the speed of a wolf. The man next to us shifted as he ran, using all four of his legs to sprint ahead of us to the gate. Christian got his second wind and separated him from me, running as fast as his injured leg would allow on his own. Voices shot out behind us, but there was no time to look back. The gate, thankfully, was slow to close. But still a hundred feet away with wolves running right on our heels, it did not seem likely we would make it.

The rest happened so fast, it was as if everything turned into slow motion.

The black wolf reached the gate and ran right through into the forest waiting on the other side. Christian stumbled and fell behind slightly, reaching back I grabbed his hand, linking us together. A rush of adrenaline pumped through me and my sight started to sharpen. "Do you trust me?" I yelled to Christian and I saw him nod in my now widened peripheral vision. The gate was now twenty feet away, by the sounds of their growling the wolves were only ten behind. Twenty feet turned into ten, and ten turned into five. I squeezed Christian's hand tight before slinging my hand out and throwing him as far as I could. Before me he soared through the air, landing on his bad leg, and rolling forward, past the gate. A set of teeth grazed my other arm and I cried out, tripping forward and falling through the gate, the mouth of the beast closing behind me.

"Christian!" I croaked out and crawled to wear he lay in the grass. "We need to keep moving."

"You saved my life..." he whispered and put a hand over his heart. "How can I ever repay you?" I pulled him off the ground and to his feet, he grabbed my hand to keep himself steady.

"Stay alive and get us back to your territory." I told him. He nodded. Still clutching hands, Christian and I jogged to his pace, losing ourselves in the unfamiliar scents of the forest.

Okay so I just have to say... wow... This is probably the best chapter I have written in SPL so far. I know this book started two years ago when my writing was still in the very early basics but to think of how much I have grown since I first published Chapter 1 is amazing.

I love everyone who has stuck with me and followed me through the course of this novel. I know I lost a lot of support and fans from my rough patch when I could not find my motivation to write anything. After that I made it my mission in life to learn all I can about my writing style and advance it till you get a chapter like this one. It may not be the longest but I think the gravity of everything just happened outweighs all of that.

If any of you guys did not get my message I did just start an instagram account for my wattpad account. The tag is shadowhunter666.wattpad and if you have an instagram then you should come follow me! I will be posting every time I update, hopefully with a new cover but today I might just end up putting up one the covers that are attached to the top of previous chapters.

I hope this little authors note finds you well. Till next time my fellow wattpaders.

Sincerely, ShadowHunter666 😉