Chapter 4: Something Shiny

The girls woke almost instantly from their awkward positions on the sofas where they had fallen asleep. The electronic clock on the wall gave a ghoulish red glow around the room and in the groggy eyesight of Artemis, it read 3:06 am. She wanted to punch whoever stood outside their hotel room right now. Iris and Rosalind ignored the insistent knocks and were almost already asleep with soft breaths coming out of their mouths. Artemis forced herself up from being sprawled on the floor to walk up to the door. Her mind was spinning through all the possibilities of how to murder someone and hide the body within the space of a few minutes.

Biting down on her teeth, she unlocked the numerous locks on their door to reveal a girl standing there with several suitcases. Artemis understood that this was their new and replaced competitor.

"Hi! I'm-"

"Whatever," Artemis cut her short of her introduction because frankly, she was in no mood to care right now and her sleep was much more important than knowing her name. Without another glance Artemis left the door open for her to open before resuming her position on the carpeted floor and beckoning her to sleep.

The next morning Artemis awoke with a jolt under her head. Before her laziness had a chance to drag her back to sleep she stood straight up and wiped her eyes. She let out very sexual sounds as she stretched upwards and felt her bones click into place. To wake her up further she did a few lunges followed by a few push-ups before getting ready for her morning run.

Her new sportswear was mainly filled with Nike, Victoria Secret Sport, Adidas and Puma. She splashed her face with water before pulling her brown hair into a tight ponytail. She was about to reach out for her moisturizer that sat on her new dresser when she noticed the new girl sprawled across the bed that Artemis had claimed to be her own. It wasn't her fault because Artemis had neglected to tell her and she felt a little guilty for being so mean to the poor girl.

She tucked her in further into her bed by pulling the girl's blanket up before applying her moisturizer and pulling on her sports gear. She had to rummage through more of her luggage to find her Nike sports jacket as well as her trainers.

She left the hotel room silently after attaching a key to the room that had been placed on the counter to her key ring. All she had taken was her phone, the key and an average bottle of water before setting down the stairs. It was another way to wake her legs up and she remembered that this was the way that her guard had fled last night after abruptly finding his mate.

Artemis worried about finding her own mate and imprinting without warning, she sighed. Those things couldn't ever be planned and would always be spontaneous. She would be lucky if she ever even found her mate, not everyone gets a chance to imprint and only 500 mates ever find each other in a decade. Her parents and her sister were one of the lucky few.

500 perfect pairs in 10 years... 500 girls in the competition.

Artemis stopped on the last stair of the building. Was it a lucky coincidence or was this Alpha's cruel way of showing the girls how many centuries he'd been cursed to live without a mate. Eliminating girls one by one until the last got to see him; was it a cruel trick of fate or a twisted mind game? She decided it was a topic to share with the others after her run.

When she descended, the lobby looked like a ghost town after the activity she saw last night. Not one person was out and about, it was only 6:30. Artemis cringed at the thought of her being one of those preppy morning people. Here she may have been a morning person but back home she was normal.

Artemis broke out in a jog in the bricked lane outside her building, the circular architecture of the five buildings looking relatively less intimidating in the early morning fog. Everything was completely deserted as she began to leave down the driveway she had entered yesterday.

The guards situated around the perimeter only gave her a minuscule glance before standing straight back into their position. She watched their rigid posture in an assurance that she was in fact allowed to go for a morning run.

She took small sips of water after jogging down the path for a while. Her breaths became shallower as she thought about Liza back home. They always went for a run together and whenever Phoenix was home to visit Liza, he would tag along too. Liza thought it was because it was just part of his routine every morning but Artemis knew that he only came for her. As much as he denied the connection between them, he still felt it and he yearned for Liza. Age was the only restriction that stopped him from claiming her; that and her innocence.

Her thoughts had distracted her from her run but she noticed her surroundings got positively lighter from the fog as the path suddenly stretched out into a meadow surrounded by trees every few metres. What surprised her, even more, was the fact that there was no road leading into it, just the path she had come from and the lush grass surrounding the area. If there was no way to maneuver through the trees, how had the cars made it into the path in the first place?

As the bricks led way to the grass on the ground, Artemis stopped in her tracks and inspected the way. The way that the sun was glinting in the distance at something shiny, she knew there was definitely something out there and jogged out to see what it was. Perhaps she would find some sort of souvenir she could send home back to Liza; her little sister always collected random things she found in places as odd memorabilia.