What do you do when her father doesn't like you?

“I wish to have a word with your toy,” Vulpis spoke directly to Red, completely ignoring that John was his own person.

Red looked ready to protest, but the harshness of Vulpis’ eyes cowed her reply. The best she could do was give John a reassuring smile (which wasn’t all that reassuring in the face of Vulpis’ gaze).

“You’ll be fine,” she said in a hushed voice.

John’s reply was just as quiet. “Right,” he said, stepping towards the man.

The chill John felt as he noticed the slight smile on her father’s lips did nothing to boost his confidence. Vulpis held the study door open for John to pass by, before closing it behind him. John now found himself for the second time in three days stuck in a room with a man he didn’t trust. Somehow, he didn’t think things would go as smoothly with Vulpis as they had gone with Nancy.

Inside the study everything was impeccable. Not a thing out of place, not a cobweb to be found. The soles of the man’s shoes tapped on the polished wooden floor as he slowly walked past John and stopped by his desk to pull out the chair.

“Sit,” the Alpha instructed.

“I think I’ll stand, thanks,” John replied, trying to maintain a tone of confidence in his voice.

Vulpis eyed him smugly. “You are afraid, boy. I can hear your heart race, smell the terror in your sweat. You cannot hide it from me.”

’He’s just posturing… don’t let it get to you,’ John assured himself.

“What is it you want to say?” John voiced, after finally managing to swallow the lump in his throat.

John noticed that his features began to take on a more wolfish character. “What business do you have with my daughter?” Vulpis demanded, his voice taking on a distinct guttural sound as a his teeth sharpened and his tongue became more wolflike. Evidently, he wanted to be the one asking questions.

“Red’s just helping me get into the Depths,” John tried to assure the father. “There’s nothing more to it than that.”

“Do not lie,” Vulpis’ voice said, taking on a distinct guttural sound. “I have seen the way you look at her, smelled your arousal. You desire her, but she is not yours to take.”

“You’re right…” John agreed as he swallowed the lump in his throat, “but that’s for Red to decide, not you.”

Vulpis clenched a clawed fist in an attempt to resist clawing John’s face out, then and there. After a long moment, he breathed out a heavy snort through his nose and began to laugh.

“You are a toy,” he stated once he’d caught his breath. “A brief outburst of rebellion that will be discarded once she realises you aren’t worth anything more than the dirt under her claws,” the wolf explained, emphasising the point by picking at some grime underneath his clawed fingers. “Do not delude yourself into thinking she likes you; she is merely acting out against me through you.”

John didn’t quite understand where Vulpis was coming from with that. Sure, he’d seen that Red had daddy issues, but love-life was separate from that, right?

Vulpis seemed to read the confusion on John’s face and gave a smile of understanding. “Let me show you something,” he said calmly, moving towards one of the bookshelves against the wall.

Pulling down on a book revealed a false wall and a spiralling staircase leading down. With great apprehension, John began to follow the Alpha down. He wasn’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of putting any more doors between Red and him. ‘What’s the worst a possessive daddy-werewolf could do to you?’ he asked himself satirically. But at least he still had Escape I.D. in case things went terribly south.

“Do you know how one becomes the leader of a pack like mine?” Vulpis asked as they descended.

John kept his mouth shut, expecting that the man was going to tell him whether he said anything or not.

“They fight for it,” Vulpis continued just as John suspected he would. “They fight and kill for it if they have to; only the strongest inherits the title of Alpha, and as Alpha they own everything…”

The spiral staircase opened into a dim basement lit only by wax candlelight. The room seemed mostly spartan save for a wooden table and a few chairs. John couldn’t really tell because the far end of the room was too dark to see clearly.

“Power…” Vulpis swiped a claw through the wall, leaving five long gashes in the brick of the cellar. There wasn’t even a chip on his claws.

“Money.” There was no need to emphasise the point; John had been through the mansion.

“... And women,” Vulpis gestured into the darkened room. John’s eyes widened as he peered through the murk. The two of them were not alone, he realised as he began to make out three figures by the wall. “As the Alpha, they are all mine by right,” Vulpis finished.

‘So what? You brought me down here just to gloat?!’ John thought bitterly, without the courage to voice it. John’s eyes were adjusted now, and so were his other senses. The cellar reeked of sex, sweat and grime, to the point where John was almost **** as he breathed it in. He could also make out the three figures much better.

The first had long blonde hair, similar to Red’s, though the golden sheen was muddied with grime. She lay curled up, naked and chained, on the stone floor but sat up as they drew closer. John’s eyes widened at the sight of her body: bruises and dry blood dotted across the entirety of her pale skin. She sniffed at John and eyed him curiously, though she said nothing for her mouth was gagged. Even with her mistreated body, John could tell she was quite beautiful, and he could recall seeing her portrait hung up in the main hall. Curious as to the woman’s identity, John cast Observe on her.

Observe is now level 4. Can now see the sexual experience and ‘assets’ of the person observed.

As he’d suspected, the golden-haired beauty was Red’s mother. Looking at her stat sheet, John had to wonder what the letters equated to in numbers, but it was not the time to investigate that.

The second figure wasn’t a woman but a wolf, yet she still suffered the same mistreatment as the first. Her blue fur was grimy and bloodied, and John noticed several spots of singed fur and burnt skin. A mouth harness had been placed over her maw, and she was chained closely to the wall by an ankle.

The third lay spread eagled on a Saint Andrew’s Cross, gagged and blindfolded. John gulped as his eyes followed her long locks of dark hair down her nude body to a heavily pregnant belly. She was less damaged than the other two, likely due to her pregnancy, but was marked nonetheless.

John could rationalise the mistreatment down to a dark sexual kink with the other two, but the way Vulpis was treating Ellyn had crossed the boundary into cruelty.

“What the fuck?!” he swore and rushed to the pregnant woman’s side.

“Keep away,” Vulpis growled as he reached out to grab him.

“She’s starving and in pain!” John protested, hoping that there was some vein of mercy in the bastard he could appeal to. “You need to let her down to rest; she’s pregnant for fuck’s sake!”

The harshness in his features softened just a little, and he gestured for John to untie her. The Warg named Cheyenne sniffed around his legs as he did; though with the harness firmly in place over her mouth and the bonds chaining her to the wall, she could do little else. John could see a fire in her eyes; she didn’t want to be chained up in that dank cellar. But there was little John could do for her, with Vulpis’ claws so close to his neck.

Once John had freed the pregnant woman, he helped her over to the chair, but Vulpis pulled him away when he tried to remove her gag and blindfold.

John found himself wondering how a father so intent on protecting his daughter’s virginity could be such a cruel bastard himself, then the pieces started falling into place. Vulpis had claimed to own the women of his pack, hell, he’d even been **** his sister, and he felt threatened by John’s arrival…

This wasn’t just a possessive father trying to protect his daughter’s innocence. This was a possessive father that wanted to claim her innocence for himself. John scolded himself for not realising it sooner, but in his defence: it was a lot to take in at once. His finger twitched on the hilt of his schiavona, wrath demanding he fight Vulpis. But rationality warned him it was hopeless. He had no idea how powerful Vulpis really was, and the murky cellar wasn’t what you’d call a prime locale.

As if he knew what John was weighing up in his head, Vulpis pounced on John and **** him to the floor.

“Boy,” Vulpis snarled, pressing a sharp claw to John’s throat and leaning in close enough for John to see the inside of the Warg’s throat. His breath was hot, blasting John like the heat of an oven after you just opened the door. “When your business with my mother has concluded, you will leave, and you will not return. Should you breathe a word of this, I will tear you apart, and should you lay so much as a hand on Charlene, I will make it slow.”

John slowly nodded, carefully, so as not to be cut by the sharp claw bearing down on his neck. The ability to speak had long since fled him in the face of this terrifying wolf. After several tense seconds, Vulpis finally eased his grip on John and stood up,

“You may go now,” Vulpis told him, brushing the dust off his black suit.

The Warg’s words snapped John out of his stupor, and he let go of the breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding. John’s eyes never strayed from Vulpis as he climbed to his feet, and he gave the man a wide berth as he stepped towards the exit. Once at the cellar door, John cast one last glance towards the three captives, a mixture of guilt and relief plaguing his conscience. Before turning away, John quietly activated Photo Mode, taking two quick snapshots of the scene, before climbing to his escape.

’I can’t do anything for them now…’ he told himself.