Tall, Dark & Furious (Pyte/Sentinel 6)

He was going to rip her throat out and shove her in that fucking hole, Trace decided as he watched the bitch standing in the corner, tapping her fingers on her phone, looking bored before he shifted his gaze to the small woman who’d been forced to sit in ice-cold water until her lips had turned blue and she’d finally stopped trembling.

She hadn’t said a word while they’d beaten her until she’d passed out or when they’d forced her to sit in ice-cold water for hours, or even when they’d dragged her into the cell, but she was talking now.

“P-p-please don’t,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut as her body continued to tremble.

“You’re free to go,” Mary said, not bothering to look up from her phone.

“Go!” his father snapped, but she simply shook her head and curled back into herself as Trace glanced from her to the cell door they’d opened a few minutes ago with the news that she was free to go.

“Are you sure?” Mary asked, finally looking up from her phone.

Instead of answering, the small woman simply laid there, biting her lip as her heart raced, letting him know that she was fucking terrified. His gaze shifted to his father briefly before he forced himself to look away. His father had barely looked at him since he’d apologized, but that was to be expected, Trace thought as he-

“You never thanked me,” Mary pointed out as she walked past his cell while he struggled not to look at his wife, knowing that it would break him if he did.

He wasn’t ready to say goodbye to her.

“Why would I thank you?” he asked, staring straight ahead at that tomb that they wouldn’t be able to get him in unless they weakened him.

He didn’t think that they’d shoot him in the heart again, not when that meant that he would miss everything and there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that she wanted him to watch as they buried him alive. Why else would she have given him blood to wake him when it would have been easier to keep him unconscious?

She didn’t want him to miss anything.

She wanted to make sure that he suffered and what better way to do that than to force him to-

“Because you would have died if it hadn’t been for me,” Mary said, cutting into his thoughts with a bored sigh.

“I hit my immortality. It had nothing to do with you,” Trace bit out angrily as he took in the shifters in the room, noting that they weren’t Alphas and neither were the ones that he could sense upstairs or the ones surrounding the house. The Alphas that he’d sensed earlier had left a long time ago and so had the vampires and demons, which made him wonder what she was up to. She had two Alphas, a vampire, a Sentinel, and a Pyte locked up that she wouldn’t be able to handle on her own, so why send away the only ones strong enough to protect her?

“True,” Mary conceded with a nod. “But if I hadn’t pulled the rock free, you would have suffocated before you reached your immortality.”

When his eyes shot back to her, she shrugged it off. “They measured you for the hole, but by the time that they stuck your body in there, you wouldn’t fit. When they pulled you back out, I’d noticed that your sleeves were too short for your arms. I considered telling them, but I wanted to see what would happen.”

“You…fucking…bitch,” his father bit out coldly as Trace sat there unable to believe what he was hearing.

“I was curious,” she said, shrugging it off. “I’d asked my father about you and he explained what you were. So, when I realized that you’d slipped into your immortality, I decided to see what would happen. I knew that they wouldn’t be able to leave anyone behind to make sure that the rocks set correctly, not with the sun setting and your father coming to look for you.”

“So, when the others went back to camp, I pulled one of the stones loose so that you could breathe. They were holding off on building the house until fall, so I knew that I had some time before anyone found you. I wasn’t able to get back for a few weeks, but by then, you’d changed and I knew that my father was right. I was able to sneak away from camp a few more times before we had to leave for good. I didn’t want you to follow us, so I put the stone back and sealed it.”

“You knew that he was alive and you left him in there?” Trace heard his wife whisper, sounding horrified, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the woman that had made sure that he’d fucking suffered.

“Yes.”

“Why was he put in that tomb in the first place? What did he do to deserve that?” his wife demanded, asking the one question that he’d wanted to know since he woke up in that tomb.

“Because he’s a leech,” Mary said, sounding unconcerned as Trace slowly allowed the rage that used to consume him to take over as he watched the bitch.

“He was a child!”

“He was a monster who didn’t deserve to live!” Mary snapped back.

“You sent those men to check knowing that he was still alive,” Samantha bit out angrily as everything suddenly made perfect sense to him.

She’d fucking used him.

“We’re not allowed to kill our mates and I needed him gone. He was holding the Pack back and that just wasn’t something that I could allow,” Mary explained as she glanced back to see how the men were making out with that hole.

“You sick fucking bitch,” he heard Nathan weakly mutter.