The Feral Beauty

She lay curled up on her side on the cold, grimy floor, naked, shaking and shivering occasionally. Her torturers were gone and she still quivered from the onslaught of their blows. Blood pulsed sluggishly through her veins and she felt the electric hum of dormant power beneath her fingertips.

Her torturers were getting careless. It'd been almost a week since her last shot of intravenous silver and she could feel the drowsy stirring of her sleeping wolf. She grimaced. Her jaw ached from being broken several times and healing far too slowly without the help of her wolf.

She took in a deep breath and perceived the sharp tang of residual silver on the torture instruments, the metallic scent of her blood, and the antiseptic smell of raw salt scattered all over every surface, the floor included. The salt served a dual purpose of burning fiendishly on her open wounds and leaving no room for infection.

Today was the day, she thought. The pack had a visitor. She'd heard from a loquacious guard saying too much. That was probably why they had been too distracted to pay much attention to her torture. A distraction that she would utilize to free herself.

Groaning, she placed her palm hard against the salted floor and pushed herself up to a slightly sitting position. The movement jangled the silver cuffs on her wrists and the smell of sizzling flesh filled the room.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed around in the back of her mind, looking for that throb of power that she so desperately needed. Her hands fisted as brute strength coursed through her, breaking her wrist cuffs with one tug. She bared her now elongated canines and morphed into some sort of wolf-human hybrid, that being the closest she could come to shifting. Her wolf-like ears twitched, listening for any signal that she was heard. When she found nothing, she proceeded to rip off the ankle cuffs that bound her feet, ignoring the silver burns on both her ankles, wrists, and paw-like hands.

Her heart beat at twice the usual rate, and adrenaline reluctantly pulsed through her veins. She could hear the bustling of the packing house above her and slowly got to her feet. She knew this place like the back of her hands. If she could somehow get out of this basement and out of the house without being seen, she was certain she could make a run for it.

Suddenly, she felt a pounding in her head, and a ringing in her ears. Her eyesight dimmed, reducing to pinpoints of focus. Her whole body shook uncontrollably and she wondered what luck had made her have an episode now. She couldn't complain though. She could only use this as a means of escape.

Doing something she had never done before, she tuned in to the strange electric hum she felt, drawing in the power. It seemed to s*ck energy right out of her environment and into her. She glowed like a fluorescent light bulb, suddenly feeling as though the months of endless torture had never happened. Using this strange power came naturally to her. She didn't need to move, only focused on what she wanted. The door blasted outwards, with the force and noise of a windstorm, crashing against the opposite wall and splintering into a million different pieces. She smiled. Her broken jaw was completely healed now and she felt no trouble with it.

Alpha Marcus was an arrogant man. He was also a pervert. It was his perverted nature that made him have his basement soundproofed. Adrienne had no doubt that the crash she had made would not be heard by the inhabitants of the floors above. Her only problem was the guards standing right outside.