Chapter Thirteen

Claire didn't stop walking when she was past the large gates of the resort, terrified that she would be stopped and taken back to Lukas.
She couldn't barely remember the path through the woods that Rachel had used to bring her here but she had grown up hiking through the woods, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out.
As soon as Claire was in the cover of the woods, she took off her heels and continued her journey barefooted, barely fighting the urge to break into a run.
She wouldn’t be able to breathe freely till she was out of Lockwood, and even then she would keep running farther and farther away from the man driving her crazy.

~*~

Lukas sat quietly, waiting for the little human to return. Ever since she crashed into his perfectly organized life, everything started to go haywire.
Lukas had never considered for once that his mate would be human, it was why he was at a loss for what to do now.
He had no long term plans, he just wanted her to be miserable. Although it was a double-edged sword because hurting her made him ache as well.
Even though she begged him several times, Lukas had never once thought of letting her go. She was his…
*Mine.*
Well, there was no mistaking that she was his Fated mate because he had never been this possessive over anyone before.
A loud beeping intruded in Lukas' thoughts, making him pick up his phone to look into it.
A sinister smile lifted one side of his lips, showing sharp fangs. There was nothing his possessive wolf hated than what belonged to them going away.
He tsked as he watched the red dot that was his little human scurry through the woods beside the resort. It was entertaining to see how she always managed to fool the guards placed to watch over her.
Lukas shot to his feet and strode out of the dining area. The tracker he put on her was programmed to go off when she got a certain distance away from him, he promised to give her a headstart after all.
Lukas drove a car to the gates and then ditched it, startling the gatemen who didn't know what to do when their Alpha King jumped out of a car, ordered them to open the gates and then dashed out of it.
Lukas was worried about the dumb little human, he was confident that he could find her anywhere she went but for some reason, as soon as he saw the tall gates, panic bled into his bloodstream.
It was a foreign emotion because previously he was confident and laid back but now adrenaline was burning through him at the new emotion he felt.
Consumed with a sudden urgency to find his dumb little human, he yelled orders at the gatemen and dashed out.

~*~

Claire had made a blunder, a rather big one.
She had been making good time, lifting the hem of her dress with her heels in her hands to move faster. Her heart was pounding so loud from nerves because she hadn't even started running yet.
As she ran, her attention was divided between checking for if she was being followed and trying to remember the path. Considering that she was already unsettled, it wasn't an easy task.
So when she heard rustling in the bush behind her, it made her jump in fear. As she looked back to check who it was, she tripped on a pebble, falling face first.
Claire yelped, using her hands to break her fall in time, although this meant that her knees and palms were bruised. The rustling in the bushes turned out to be a wandering squirrel which made her roll her eyes in exasperation.
She was too jittery, she had to calm down or she could really get herself hurt. Even if Lukas already noticed she was gone, it would be impossible for him to track her down and by the time they were done combing through the woods, she would be long gone.
After taking a few moments to calm herself down, Claire was ready to keep moving. She hoisted her dress up again, uncaring that it was dusty and had bits of things stuck to it.
Her journey was almost over, she just had to take a slight turn soon.
Unknowingly to Claire, she had already gone the wrong way right from the start and was slowly going deeper and deeper into the woods instead of out of it.
It was advised not to go wandering alone in these parts because the terrain started to get dangerous. Claire found this out on a firsthand basis when she fell into a pit that had been partially hidden by leaves.
It was luckily the abandoned house of some burrowing animal so there was nothing dangerous waiting for her at the bottom. She screamed as she lost her balance and fell, terror clawing at her throat.
The fall was luckily not too far down but the impact injured her nonetheless. A hanging branch on the body of the hole gave her a nasty cut on her leg, her arm absorbed the impact of her fall, and she slammed her head into a partially buried rock which knocked her unconscious.

~*~

Lukas had to slow down when terror sank its teeth into his skin, he held his head as he tried to make sense of another foreign emotion.
*'Was it the Fated mate bond at work?'*
He hadn't been expecting any connection to the mistake that fate had granted him, not to mention, he hadn't marked her and she was human so it was next to impossible for the bond between them to be so strong.
But he couldn't ignore the terror, *'what had the dumb little human gotten herself into this time?'*
Just as abruptly as he felt terror, it stopped and this time, a fear that was all Lukas' doing clawed at his heart as he sprinted into an all out run in the direction that Claire had run to.
He took the shortest path possible to get to her and as he pushed away another branch from his path, he wondered just how she had gotten so far while wearing heels.
He tried not to think too deeply about it but if he could no longer tell how she was feeling, it meant that she was unconscious or worse. Although previously, he had been irked by her emotions invading his head, now he desperately wanted it back.
Giving in to his clamoring wolf, he shifted, wincing at the sound of his shirt ripping; that was one of his favorite dress shirts.
Werewolves didn't shift often because they had to blend in with humans but now that they were slowly getting a space that consisted of only werewolves, it was starting to become an accepted practice in many towns and cities where their population consisted solely of werewolves.
In his wolf form, he could move three times as fast, easily scaling bushes and branches that he would have to push aside before.
In a span of minutes, he arrived at where Claire was, he didn't even have to use the tracker as that would have been rather difficult to do in his wolf form. Instead, he sniffed her out, which was how he had been able to find her so quickly.