Chapter 26: Trapped Without Troops

[RANIA]

"Park Jihoon."

"Hey."

"Jeez, are you dead or what?" Rania called out again when she barely got a response from Jihoon and for some reason, that bothered her, a lot. She was okay with him yapping her ears out, hell she was ready to bicker through hell with him.

Jihoon's silence was unnerving and it was evident that Rania didn't feel it was right. She had woken up a few hours ago, and still the sun wasn't up, which didn't make any sense because they were in the summer season.

She should have been whining about Jihoon's sweaty ass, instead, here she was, worried sick for a man who would probably wake up, just to kill her.

Rania may have hated Jihoon, but more than anything, she hates surprises. And right now, everything around her screamed surprise, which she knew she wouldn't like. Looking beside her in whatever they were in or at, Rania saw Jihoon still asleep.

That was the second red flag because Park Jihoon was a light sleeper as Rania had learned over the years.

She knew he would never sleep with anything making noise around him, and Kim Rania was making noise, a lot of it by calling out his name. That alone was enough to irritate the man, but instead, Park Jihon was fast asleep. Hell, he even let out soft snores.

Rania didn't like what was happening.

She didn't know where they were but she knew for a fact that they were not in the lands they had stopped in last night. She could tell that time had passed, because she had been awake for hours, literally and she hadn't even heard a bird chirp outside.

It was almost like there was no outside to begin with. This right here was nothing she had experienced, and for the first time, Rania was worried about herself and the bastard resting beside her.

How a person could be so out of it in such states was something she couldn't understand, and maybe there was a good reason for it all. But when had anything to do with Jihoon made any sense?

What if he was just pretending?

Rania wanted to check up on him, but she still needed to know what was happening around her. This, was not something she experienced on a daily.

'Stay calm, Rania,' the Incayon alpha said to herself when the efforts to wake Jihoon up were fruitless. She knew she had to know when they were, and she needed to be wary, if this was an enemy's space. So using her alpha senses, she listened.

Rania wanted to catch any and everything that was going on around her. Of course, Jihoon's snores were a hindrance at first, but the more Rania focused, the more Jihoon's stories became her background music.

She couldn't hear anything from where she was, and she was unable to smell any fresh air. It was almost like the earth had decided to take a break and all the trees had been cut. She took another whiff and caught the disgusting smell of rotten flesh.

From her experience, she had learned the different scents, which is why she frowned upon the terrible scent she was getting. How the fuck had Jihoon not woken up anyway?

As she listened, Rania could hear the rats running around. They had been captured. Whoever had done it had to have been killed, for them to take on the worst of the worst in Obren. Turns out they were not that terrible, yeah?

Angrily, Rania tried to listen for more sounds and smelled for more scents, anything that could make her know where they were. She couldn't feel the magic of the Valley of the Whites, which could only mean that they were nowhere near home.

She hated this, she wanted to get away from this, but what else could she do? Giving up using her sense of smell, Kim Rania decided to focus on her sight, maybe then she could be able to know what was happening and why they were here anyway.

At first, her werewolf sight did her no good, but the more she paid attention to the details, the more Rania knew how fucked they were.

For starters, she was in literal enemy territory. It could have helped if Jihoon was a figure she could use to show she was empathetic, but Jihoon was just as bad as her. She had never wished for Jihoon to be a man of better stature than her, more than she did at the moment.

Rania could see the wooden walls surrounding them. It was clear that the two of them were in an underground hole, the kinds that had been used by hunters over the years to contain the werewolves.

These were the holes that no wolf had ever broken out of, and as much as Rania wished she could be the first werewolf to break free of it, she knew she couldn't, not with Jihoon passing out next to her. The hole was a seven-by-five hole, that was meant for one person.

However, in this care, it held two people who hated each other so much. Two people who could kill each other for their freedom, if it ever came to that. These two were terrible for each other and worse, with each other.

The Incayon and Calindra alphas were doomsday disciples, and right now, they were about to be their own doom. Rania focused her sight on her surroundings, but nothing about that shit made her feel better, if anything, it all made her feel worse than the last times.

The wooden walls were bitten off by termites and had remained so tiny that any irregular tap on the walls, and the soil would bury the living. It didn't help that they shared his hole with a rat of all the creatures.

There were a few fresh woods at intervals that had recently been placed. They were laced with silver, to make it obvious that they were prisons for werewolves.

However, the silver on the freshly set up wooden poles, were of a larger quantity, the kind that could put an end to a regular alpha wolf.

Maybe it was a good thing that the two enemies were not regular werewolves then, yeah? on the floor of the hole, were banana leaves and one wool blanket. It was almost like this was a test of who would live and who wouldn't.

'Think, Rania, Think. This is not the time to get panicky,' Rania said to herself once again. If this continued for a little longer, then she was sure to go crazy in three days, because the amount of thinking and monologuing she was doing was crazy.

She wanted to deny her panicked state, but Jihoon not shutting her up about being panicky, was making her feel like shit.

Rania raised her head to see what the hole was covered with and she could see it was all wood, strategically placed, to the point that if anyone walked above them, they wouldn't even know that there was a hole under them.

Honestly, Rania thought that it was smart of their kidnappers to do that. Because otherwise, she would have clawed her way out of this place.

The only question being, would she leave with Jihoon or without Jihoon?