The wolf king Fated Mate

Zara's POV

The taxi smelled of old coffee and pine freshener, and I pressed my forehead against the cold window while the city lights dissolved into long golden streaks behind my exhausted eyes. My heart had refused to slow down since I burst out of that mansion, and every time the car stopped at a junction, I gripped the folded bills in my pocket as though someone might snatch them away from me.

The driver had not asked me a single question when I climbed in. He was a broad man somewhere past fifty, with grey threaded through his hair and a thick scar across the back of his right hand, and his calm manner should have comforted me but somehow did the opposite.

"Where to, miss?" he had asked, and I had been so tired that the truth tumbled out of my mouth before I could catch it.

"Anywhere that leads to the human side of the border," I had answered.

He had only nodded, as if passengers made that request every morning, and then he had pulled away from the curb without another word.

Now we had been driving for twenty minutes, and the mansion's walls had long since vanished behind us. I told myself that I was safe, that nobody could track a stranger through the maze of streets winding across the lower districts of Lychanthria, but my wolf paced restlessly inside my chest and refused to settle.

Narla had not stopped whimpering since I left that bed. She was not frightened of the road or the driver or the lonely miles stretching ahead of us, because what she felt was grief, and the sound of it made my throat ache in a way I could not explain to myself.

"We could not have stayed," I whispered under my breath, so softly that the driver could not possibly hear me.

She answered with a low, mournful hum that vibrated through my ribs, and I turned my face away from the mirror so that he would not see the tears gathering in my eyes.

To distract myself, I slid my hand into my pocket and pulled out the money I had stolen. Counting it seemed like the only practical thing a runaway could do, so I bent low in the seat, shielded the bills with my body, and began sorting them into piles across my lap.

There was far more than I had realized when I grabbed it in the dark. Each bundle was bound with a paper band, and the total was enough to cover a human worker's wages for an entire year, which made my stomach twist when I understood how much of a stranger's life I was holding in my trembling hands.

I was about to shove everything back into my pocket when something stiffer than paper slid out from between the last two bundles and landed face down on my knee. It was a card, yet it was unlike any card I had ever seen, because it was heavier than it should have been and its surface was a deep matte black that seemed to swallow the light from the street lamps passing overhead.

I turned it over slowly.

There was no name printed on it, no number, and no bank logo. In the center, pressed so finely into the surface that I could only see it when the light slid across at an angle, was a crest made of a single silver crescent moon cradled between the points of two curved claws.

The moment my fingertips brushed it, a scent rose from the card and wrapped itself around me. It was musk and cedar with something darker running underneath, the very same scent that had clung to the sheets and to my skin, and Narla surged forward so violently inside me that I gasped out loud.

I clamped my free hand over my mouth because the longing that flooded through me was so sudden and so enormous that I could barely breathe around it. I wanted to press the card against my face and inhale until nothing else existed, and I wanted to order the driver to turn around and carry me back up those marble stairs.

Instead, I forced myself to sit upright and tuck the card into the lining of my dress, where it burned against my ribs like a hot coal.

"Everything all right back there, miss?"

The driver's voice made me jump. I lifted my eyes and found his gaze fixed on me in the rearview mirror, and I had the uncomfortable certainty that he had been watching for far longer than a polite man should.

"I am only tired," I said, forcing a smile onto my face.

"You look like a woman who has not slept in days," he replied, and his tone was gentle, yet his eyes flicked once toward the spot where I had hidden the card before they returned to my face.

My pulse quickened. Had he seen it? The mirror was angled in such a way that he could have glimpsed anything I held above my lap, and the thought sent a cold trickle running down the back of my neck.

I decided to say nothing and fixed my attention on the road instead. We had turned onto a narrow lane lined with shuttered warehouses, and I realized with a creeping unease that we had passed two wider avenues that would have been faster.

"This is a strange way to go," I said carefully.

"The main avenue has a wolf checkpoint tonight," he answered without any hesitation. "The Alphas are searching the roads for someone, and I would rather not give them a reason to peer inside my cab."

Searching for someone. The words landed in my stomach like stones, because I knew exactly who the Alphas were searching for, and I knew my father would have turned every road in Lychanthria upside down by now to drag his disgraced daughter back to the wolf king's selection.

"Then I am grateful for the detour," I said, though my fingers curled tighter around the fabric of my dress.

We stopped at a red light in an empty intersection, and the driver reached into his jacket and drew out a phone. He angled the screen away from the mirror, tapped it with his thumb for several seconds, and then slipped it back into his pocket with a casual movement that did not fool me for a moment.

"Family," he said over his shoulder. "My daughter worries when I drive the night shift."

"Of course," I replied, and I hated how thin my voice sounded.

The light turned green, and he drove on, humming a tuneless melody under his breath that raised the fine hairs along my arms. A man with nothing to hide did not hum while a stranger in his back seat prayed for the journey to end.

After another ten minutes, the warehouses gave way to a sprawling grey structure crowned with a flickering neon sign that read Harrow Terminal. The driver rolled to a stop beside the east entrance, where a handful of travelers huddled under dim lamps waiting for buses that would carry them away from everything they knew.

"The last night bus to Thornwall Crossing leaves at five from platform nine," he said, turning in his seat to face me for the first time. "Inside the east hall you will find an old woman selling travel tonics near the ticket counter, and you should tell her that you need something for your eyes."

My blood turned to ice. "I never said anything about my eyes."

"Your eyes say plenty for themselves, miss, to anyone who bothers to look at them."

I had been keeping my face lowered the entire ride, but in the dim glow of the dashboard I understood that he had seen the black of my irises in that mirror from the very beginning, and he had said nothing until now.

My hand shook as I pulled a bundle of bills from my pocket and held it toward him. "Please take this for the ride."

He looked at the money, and then he pushed my hand gently back toward me with his scarred knuckles. "Keep every note of it, because you are going to need all of it before this journey ends."

"Why would you help me like this?" I asked, unable to stop the question from slipping out.

"Because I was told to," he said, and then he blinked as though he had spoken a thought aloud by mistake, and he forced a tight smile onto his lips. "Because a girl with that look on her face deserves a bit of kindness from a stranger, I meant to say."

Neither explanation made any sense, yet I could not afford to stand there arguing, so I thanked him in a whisper and climbed out into the freezing air. The door clicked shut behind me, and the taxi remained idling at the curb while I hurried toward the terminal entrance with my heart pounding in my ears.

At the glass doors, I could not resist glancing back one final time. The driver had lifted his phone again, and the glow of its screen lit his face from beneath, and because the windshield was clean and the font was large, I could read the message he had just sent.

She has the card. Proceeding as planned.

My knees nearly gave out beneath me as the taxi pulled away from the curb, its taillights shrinking into the dark, and I understood with sickening clarity that I had not escaped anybody at all, because someone had been waiting for me since the moment I ran.