When I woke up, my head rested in Mrs. Lee's lap. I blinked my eyes open and stared up at the woman who looked like she had been beaten and tortured for the past day by The Council. I didn't know how much time had passed but she looked so bad.

All because of me.

"Where are we?" I whispered, my voice hoarse and my throat dry.

I hesitantly sat up and held a hand to my head, grunting. Milo sat in the corner of a cell with his head against a stone wall and his body stripped of all clothes. His skin was coated in a thin layer of dried blood.

"In their prison," Milo said.

Chest tightening, I glanced over at Mrs. Lee who had tears on her cheeks.

"My son has been waiting for you for years," she said, a tear sliding down her wrinkled face. She gently grasped my hand with her trembling one. "That first day he saw you, he came home with a huge smile on his face. I have never seen him that happy before."

Everything seemed so disoriented. I didn't know what was happening or where this was coming from. We should've been trying to escape, not talking about the stories of Callum and the pack. Though... just hearing his name made me sad.

"When they come back, find a way to escape." Mrs. Lee smiled strongly at me despite half her body being broken and the gashes all over her flesh. She was stronger than I ever hoped to be. "I'll hold them off the best I can."

And while Callum hadn't really taught me much about pack dynamics yet, his mother was willing to die for me. She wanted to sacrifice herself, so the new luna of her pack and her son's mate would survive.

But I wouldn't let that happen. She could barely move.

"No," I said, pulling my hands out of hers and standing. I stormed over to the cell bars. "We're getting out of here."

"Don't touch the bars," Beta Milo said from the corner, his right eye swollen shut and his bust lip bloody and bruising. "They're solid silver and will sear your skin right off, Bria. Silver is especially dangerous to humans becoming wolves, as they don't know how to handle the pain."

Milo might've told me not to touch the silver, but I couldn't sit in this cell with Beta Milo and Callum's aging mother. We wouldn't survive here like this through the night. I've seen and heard the terrors of what The Council did to people during the night.

I refused to let that be us, or at least I refused to let that be them.

If I had to stay here to please Thiago and have him torture me day in and day out, just to ensure that my mate's pack was protected, then I would. Nobody deserved to die because of me, especially because The Council could care less about Callum and his wolves.

They wanted me. They found me. They had me.

Everyone else would be useless to them.

After taking a deep breath, I grasped the silver bars and ignored the searing pain that shot through my body. Milo shot up from the ground, wrapped his arms around my stomach, and tried to pull me away.

But I refused to let go.

I held on to the bars for dear life and used all the damn strength I had left inside me to pull them apart, literally forcing them away to create a space big enough for even Milo to slip through and escape.

Once the space was large enough with some wiggle room, I dropped my hands from the bars and relaxed in Milo's arms, my chest rising and falling and hot tears welling up in my eyes, threatening to fall from the sheer pain of silver.

"What's wrong with you?" Milo asked, letting me down gently.

While his question might've been full of anger and spite, his voice wasn't filled with annoyance, but instead it was filled with wonder. He glanced at the silver bars, shock on every part of his face, and let me go for a second. When his hands left my waist, my knees gave out, and I collapsed.

Before I could fall to the ground, Milo caught me and helped me to my feet.

"We have to go," I said once I regained my balance.

"But you—"

"I'm fine." I pushed him away and toward Callum's mother. "Carry her. You won't be able to carry us both and get out of here alive. I'll run beside you. But it's important to me that you get her to safety yourself."

"You better follow me," Milo said, scooping Mrs. Lee in his arms. "If Callum finds out that I left his mate here and brought only his mother home, then he will kill everyone in his path. He's been waiting for you for far too many years."

My stomach twisted, because I knew we all wouldn't make it out of here alive. I had slipped through The Council's fingers once. They would not let me escape another time. But I needed to buy enough time for us to get as far away as possible.

I needed Milo and Mrs. Lee to escape.

Not for the sake of my consciousness, but for Callum's.

"I'll be right behind you. Don't look back. Just keep running," I said.

After glancing out of the cell, Milo stepped out with Callum's mother, sniffed the air, and hurried down the left corridor, propelling himself forward quicker than he had during our run mere hours earlier.

Even though I told him not to look back, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was running after him. I pumped my legs as quickly as I could, though I was still so much slower than a wolf who was even in human form and carrying someone else.

The hallways and passages were all underground, and I swear we ran around them multiple times, unable to figure out how to get out. There was barely any light, beside a couple flickering torches, down here.

"A door," I whispered. "Up ahead. Go through it."

"Are you sure?" Milo asked.

"There looks to be light from underneath it. Go."

Though I wasn't sure in the slightest.

Still, Milo sprinted ahead, ripped the door open, and stared out into a dark pathway that led out of this building. But as we were about to escape, Thiago captured me by the waist from behind and pulled me away from Milo. "Oh, you're not going anywhere, Bria Benton. You've gotten away from me once. I won't let you go again."