Sold as the Alpha King's Breeder
Chapter 1103 - 14 : Entering the Tunnels

Chapter 1103: Chapter 14 : Entering the Tunnels

*Daphne*

“Mind your own business,” he told me.

I didn’t care much for the snarl he threw at me, but I understood that my asking about Eva had struck a nerve in him. I didn’t push it. Instead, I mustered a compassionate expression. That seemed to satiate him, judging by the subtle softening of his features. It always came naturally to me to make someone else feel at ease.

As there was a silent exchange between us, his eyes glazed over and wandered, and so too did my thoughts. What had just transpired while he had been asleep was foreign to me. I couldn’t explain it.

I wasn’t sure how to explain it to myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the images inside of my head while I lay with him, sleeping, were also his. It was as if I was reading his mind or watching his dream vicariously as it happened in real time.

But the nature of the vision that had passed before my sleeping eyes was alien to me. Was it a dream or was it a memory? I was unsure. My mind whirled as the strangeness of it all unsettled onto my shoulders like a second skin, giving me just one more thing to worry about in the litany of concerns I already had.

The dream or memory remained in my mind as though I was a bird hovering over the situation, watching the grisly events of a family being torn apart unfold. I assumed it was his family.

The little boy in the dream or memory looked too much like him for it to be a coincidence. He had the same silvery gray eyes and dark hair.

At first, I watched as the car rolled to the side of the road near a ditch, it looked as though it had stalled. An older man got out to fix it. Within minutes, the car was surrounded by a band of rogues who mutilated the man and stuffed his corpse into where the engine usually went.

The mother did not fare much better as she was yanked by her arm from her seat and had her head bashed in with a blunt tool. She collapsed to the ground.

I watched in horror as the little girl was next. She was ripped out from the backseat and flung over the rogue’s shoulder like a sack. I assumed that was Eva, and judging by the family resemblance, they were brother and sister.

Young Rion was next. I jolted when the rogue shot him and left him for dead, bleeding on the roadside, at the mercy of the next good Samaritan passing by.

I shuddered at the cruelty and harshness of it all. Those guardians–or were they his parents?–didn’t stand a chance against the rogues.

There was just so much to unpack in that short exchange. I wanted to ask him about it, to perhaps explain a few things to me, or at the very least, to verify that it was him and his sister who were hurt like that so long ago.

It would explain the separation between the two. But I knew he would clam up about it. The events ensuing from that short exchange, which I still couldn’t explain rationally to myself, were a wound that still needed to heal.

I knew there was no way now that he would open up about it, so I decided not to press it. I wanted to be on his good side, after all, not only for my survival but because I felt it was what I could do for him, to help him out.

I wanted to help him, as crazy as that sounded after all he had done to me over the past few days.

I cleared my throat to speak to him again.

“I understand you don’t want to talk about it. That’s your past and it’s not of my business. But if you talked to my parents, I’m sure they’d be able to help you.”

He turned away from me with a grunt. His back facing me felt like a little slap and I was just a little bit offended, especially since I was reaching out to him after he had kidnapped me, but maybe my efforts would be fruitful. I had to at least try.

I continued, shaking off the rejection, and tried again.

“How do you know you can trust Hestia and her group? What if you don’t get what you want?”

His back was still turned to me, but I got the feeling he was listening. His posture and ear slightly turned to me indicated this, though I was sure he was unaware. This gave me a little spark of confidence to keep going.

I continued. “At the very least, my parents will want to know if Hestia and her followers are a threat to the kingdom. I’d go so far as to guess that if Hestia needs a child of Light and Dark, which is what I am, it can only spell trouble for the entire realm... maybe both realms, if the stories about that witch I heard are true.”

He still didn’t move, but I had a feeling that I was getting through to him. He didn’t wave me away, wrap a blanket around his ears, or otherwise try to block out my talking.

He and I were both silent for a few moments before I heard him say, “Hestia was my mother.”

I found myself at a loss for words. After enough silence passed between us, he scoffed. He turned around. There was derision in his eyes, but also something else buried deep in the steely gray. He got up and began rummaging around in his backpack.

“You better eat something. We’ll be on the move soon.” He tossed me a protein bar and water, which landed near my knees where I sat.

I murmured a soft gratitude, but he had already turned his back to me again and went about packing up his things. I knew he only busied himself to deal with my lack of reaction, but I was unsure of what to say about her being his mother.

I said nothing as I tried to open the protein bar packaging with bound wrists. At first, it proved to be a challenge, but luckily my long fingernails helped accomplish this.

I mulled over the fact that Hestia was his mother. I couldn’t imagine having a mother like that, or rather one with a reputation of such a woman as her. She was powerful, but ruthless and cold.

Her reputation was known throughout the land as a merciless witch, and her followers were not much better. No one I knew had anything good to say about her. No doubt he was fully aware of her reputation. He had to be.

As I worked the bottle cap of the water bottle open with the tips of my bound fingers, my thoughts wandered to his cuts from when I bashed him with the brick earlier. They healed so quickly, even for a shifter. It was all so strange.

It seemed that he accrued more and more mysteries about him for me to solve. I tried not to think too much about it; I already had a lot on my plate, namely survival.

By the time I was done, the group was on their feet and ready to go.

“We’re going to go through the tunnels,” he told me as he grabbed me by the forearms to hoist me to my feet.

We left the temple and walked through a large field of other temples. I glanced around, finding that there was a lot of wildlife that I had never seen before. On old maps that I’d glossed over in my extensive education, I had seen areas where old ruins were located. This was perhaps it.

After taking an hour or so to cross the field of ancient buildings, arcane structures left abandoned to be nothing more than relics of the past, we came upon the entrance to the tunnels.

Inside, it was too dark to see more than a few feet ahead other than the sparse distribution of lights exposing pockets of illumination. I gulped. We walked through the entrance and into the dim, cool passageway of the tunnels. Our collective footsteps echoed against the ceiling far above our heads, where wiring and tubes ran the length of the tunnel.

I was surprised to see that the tunnels were wide enough to let several large trucks through with room for people to walk on either side. It was also somewhat maintained. I expected piles of animal excrement or other gross things, but they seemed clean enough... not steller, by any stretch of the imagination, but they were reasonably clean.

The yellow-brown of the lights made me uneasy and a little sick, but they were sparsely located. I realized this was because it was mainly used for underground carts that looked like locomotive cars that passed by on steel tracks with a soft hiss. A few motorized vehicles swept past us, but otherwise, it was dank and quiet.

Next to me, Rion spoke to his cohort, whose name I believed to be Jasper. Jasper held out a map and used a flashlight in his other hand as Rion held the opposite side so the two of them could look at it while walking. Jasper’s fingers followed one of the few straight lines on the maps. I assumed it was the tunnel.

“Here’s the route I was talking about earlier. Some of the smugglers used it to get to the dark forest a while ago. Not many people use it. I think we can evade detection pretty easily on this route. But we’ve just got to keep an eye out for anyone or anything bigger than us that wants to pick a fight.”

A train passed overhead, and in my mind, I pictured the railway that traveled through left the dark first toward the capital. I got a rough idea of where we were.

The train was loud enough to cause Rion’s voice to become quieter. It was difficult to hear the ensuing conversation as the train rushed by, but I recognized the name “Brutus.” I remembered this as the name belonging to the gang leader he talked about who owned the house that Rion’s group invaded the other day to rescue me.

The train passed and he continued to whisper. I strained to listen. It seemed he wanted to keep this conversation from me, though I wasn’t totally sure why.

“The house isn’t too far from the tunnels. Brutus could be on our heels, so we need to make good time. We’ve got to at least get to the dark forest before nightfall. We can get to Katheryn’s for shelter.”

I wondered who this Katheryn person was but assumed it was in my best interest to keep quiet. Either way, I would find out soon enough.

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