Captive of The Beast Alpha: Drugging the CEO Was a Mistake.-Chapter 37: Naya: The beast unleashed II

I looked up to find a middle-aged woman smiling at me from the seat next to Adam’s now-empty seat. Her smile was polite but it had no warmth in it.

"I’m Eleanor Ward. Hansel’s Stepmother," she announced. "I couldn’t come out earlier to greet you when you arrived but I want to think you for coming all this way with him. You must be his girlfriend? Or are you pregnant?"

I stilled a bit.

What did this family have with being pregnant?

"Ah!" the woman chuckled. "Forgive my directness it’s just that, Hansel has never brought any woman home, much less a human. So, we were just wondering if..."

"No ma’am," I shook my head interrupting her. "I don’t know how to explain my relationship with Hansel but we’re not friends, neither are we lovers. I was the only person available to help when he fell ill."

"Oh!" the woman arched her brow; she didn’t believe one bit of what I said. "Okay. If you say so."

"But, is he—is Hansel okay?"

Before she could answer, a deafening roar filled the house.

Everyone at the table froze. I looked around and saw that everyone was tensed.

"What is going on?" I leaned in to ask Elon who only indicated I remain quiet.

Elon turned to his brothers on the table and they all started speaking in Gaelic. They seem to tell to the women to take the children and leave the dinning because that was exactly what they started doing.

Midway into that, the second roar came this time around, it was punctuated by screams from somewhere upstairs.

We started hearing loud screaming and the running of feet. All the men at the adults at the table jumped up and grabbed the children, pulling them away. They were barking orders at each other in Gaelic.

The children that couldn’t be move at the time, the older ones formed a protective line in front of them.

"What’s happening?" I asked, but nobody answered. Nobody was paying attention to me at all.

Everyone was moving toward the living room, and I followed on instinct, not knowing what else to do. My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears.

Then I saw it at the top of the grand staircase.

There was a monstrous creature at the top of the stairs. It was the size of a small car, maybe bigger. I had nothing in my experience to compare it to.

It wasn’t a dog, though it had four legs. It wasn’t a bear, though it was just as terrifying. It was something else entirely.

Its fur looked like molten silver, catching the light so brightly that it would hurt just to look at it directly.

Each strand seemed to shimmer and shift with each movement. The muscles beneath rippled with every breath, visible even through the thick coat.

But it was the eyes that froze me in place. They glowed with a crimson ring around silver irises, and the pupils were strange.

They weren’t round like a human’s or a dog’s. They were slits, horizontal like a goat’s, but somehow more terrifying because they didn’t belong on anything that looked remotely like this.

Its claws were longer than kitchen knives, curved and wickedly sharp. They dug into the wooden banister as it leaned forward, splintering the wood like it was made of cardboard.

A symbol glowed faintly across its broad chest. It was some a marking that pulsed with light in rhythm with what I assumed was its heartbeat. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

Everyone was scrambling for cover.

Someone grabbed my arm and tried to pull me behind a sofa, but I couldn’t move. My legs had stopped working. My brain had stopped working. All I could do was stand there and stare at this impossible thing that couldn’t exist but was right there in front of me anyway.

The creature tilted its head as its gaze swept across the room, and I saw its mouth open slightly to show rows of teeth that looked sharp enough to tear through flesh and bone without effort.

Then it opened its mouth wider and let out another sound that made my entire body vibrate with terror.

The sound made several of the children start crying and made me want to curl up in a ball and pray this was just a nightmare.

One of the healers, I knew it was a healer because of his uniform, ran towards to stairs holding up a vial. I wanted to scream at him to stop, to not go near that thing, but my voice was frozen in my throat along with the rest of me.

The creature moved so fast I almost couldn’t track it. One second it was at the top of the stairs, the next it had grabbed the man mid-lunge and flung him against the wall like he was made of paper.

The sound of the impact made me shiver. The man slumped to the floor and didn’t move, and blood started pooling beneath his head, spreading across the hardwood.

The screaming resumed.

The creature started down the stairs, and each step made the entire staircase groan under its weight.

And it was looking directly at me.

Those glowing eyes locked onto mine, and a sensation I’d never felt before flitted through my chest as if someone had reached inside and grabbed my heart. It wasn’t painful at all, it was just overwhelming.

Terror flooded through me. My hands were shaking so badly I could hear my bones rattling.

My breathing came in short, panicked gasps that made me dizzy. Every survival instinct I had was screaming at me that I was about to die, that this monster was going to tear me apart and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

This was it. This was how I died. Killed by a hideous creature, in a place I didn’t understand, and nobody would ever know what happened to me. Reese would never know. I’d disappeared without a word and now I was going to disappear permanently.

The creature reached the bottom of the stairs and started moving toward me. Slower now, like it had all the time in the world.

And then, just when I thought it would pounce on me...

"Naya!" someone screamed my name.

Before I could make out who the person was,

Strong arms wrapped around me and yanked me back.