Requiem (Blackwater Pack #5)

Chapter 3

3

LULU - PRESENT DAY

I had always shared my soul with a monster.

A living, breathing, writhing entity that craved more. More power, more blood, more life. It would keep me awake for days on end, the hunger of it gnawing my insides raw until my mind fractured and I wondered if tonight was the night.

The night I broke and unleashed what really lived inside of me.

It terrified the hell out of me. My power was like a fathomless, untapped well of raw energy that was waiting for a crack in the dam to break me wide open.

But what I never told anyone was that in my darkest moments, when my blood was full of venom and my chest was tight with need, my resolve would crumble, and I wanted to succumb to the darkness that always lived in me.

It was like living with a bomb strapped to my chest but unable to see the clock counting down. All that echoed in my head was the tick-tock of the timer, slowly winding down to my eventual destruction.

And no one liked to remind me of the Hyde to my Jekyll more than my mother.

Sitting across from her in one of the only restaurants in Narodnaya that welcomed both shifters and elementals, I felt the heavy weight of her judgment pressing on me even as she tried to mask it.

But you couldn’t erase a lifetime of crappy parenting and abandonment with a few lunches and presents.

I stared at the box in my hands, turning it over silently as I felt her eyes bore into me.

“Open it,” she said, probably trying for encouraging but it sounded more like an order. Her smile was tight, and it didn’t reach her dark eyes.

My skin prickled with awareness as I felt the magic of whatever lay inside the box. “It’s not my birthday.” No, that day was still two months away and, if my mother remembered, it would mark the first birthday in ten years that she bothered celebrating with me. Last year she’d sent me a ring and a note asking for a meeting. It had thrown me for a loop that she’d reached out to me—let alone remembered me—and it took me close to two weeks to accept her invitation for coffee.

Yetta Usari had written me off over a decade ago when I’d committed the cardinal sin of tapping into the spirit magic that had lain dormant in my DNA for eleven years. Never mind that I’d done it under duress and to save someone else—it didn’t matter. Spirit magic had been all but eradicated by the elementals of the world because of how volatile and addictive it could be. Not to mention dangerous.

Their combined abilities gave me access to earth and spirit magic abilities, and the coven my mom belonged to in Russia had rescued us. For a little while, people weren’t sure if I should be allowed in the coven because I was half spirit. But ultimately it came down to the fact that the Usari bloodline went back to the start of the Narodnaya pack and coven.

We didn’t have a royal lineage per se, but if we did, my mother, aunt, and I were in the immediate line of succession.

I was regarded warily growing up. My mixed heritage was cause for concern and speculation amongst the majority of the coven.

But whatever redemptive qualities I might’ve had, I blew it all to smithereens when I’d gone and saved the son of the Narodnaya Alpha.

Wariness turned to panic, and the coven demanded the Elders banish me. They had, in a sense. I was still allowed in Narodnaya, but not with the coven. I’d been cast out with the literal clothes on my back and an onyx my mother gave me before she closed the door of our house on my tearful face.

“Lucia.” The censorship in my mom’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

Lifting my head, I met her eyes. I tried not to wince when her jaw tightened and her gaze attempted to drop before she forced it to meet mine.

I knew she hated what she saw when she met my stormy eyes, the color of the winter sky. I had the gray eyes that matched my father.

“Open your gift,” she told me, her tone a bit softer.

I pried the lid off and nestled inside the box was a silver amulet with a flat black stone lodged in the center. The chain was heavy silver with thick links. My fingers traced the curved edge of the stone. “It’s beautiful.” It was actually kind of horrendous, but she was trying.

Mom sat back in her seat, looking pleased. “It’s obsidian. It helps with grounding and anchoring emotions. Put it on, sweetheart.”

Obediently, I withdrew the necklace and fastened the silver chain around my throat. The amulet rested above my heart, and I felt the weight of its power cover me like a thick blanket. I shifted, uncomfortable with the way the magic felt twisting against my own at first.

It had been the same when she’d given me a bracelet a few months ago, and that ring for my twentieth birthday almost a year earlier. She was a full-blooded earth elemental, and that meant her powers were stronger than mine, and the magic infused in the stones she gave me was more potent.

I forced a smile and accepted the gift because, deep down, I was still the little girl who cried herself to sleep when she’d turned her back on me. Some part of my heart still wanted my mother—her acceptance, her love, her understanding.

Even if her gifts sometimes made me physically ill.

Eventually, though, my magic merged with it, almost as though it was soothing my own into resting. The monster was going to sleep.

I blew out a breath and leaned back in my own chair as something that felt a lot like relief settled in my bones. A little dazed, I looked at my mother. “What is this?”

She gave me a soft smile. “Something the elders and I created just for you. I know how you’ve struggled with your nature, and this should help balance it.”

Balance .

That word seemed so foreign. My life was a never ending tangle of chaos and confusion.

“Thank you,” I whispered, meaning it.

She hesitated. “Lucia, there is something else that I wanted to discuss.”

I froze in the middle of reaching for my tea, my hand dangling awkwardly in the air. “Oh?”

She drew in a deep breath, laying her palms flat on the table. “I think it’s time that you came home.”

Unease pierced my heart like a poison-tipped dagger. “Mom?—”

“Please hear me out,” she cut in, her tone pleading. “I was wrong to send you away when you were a child.”

I flinched back. “It wasn’t just you. It was the whole coven. And they didn’t just want to banish me—they wanted to kill me.”

Something flashed in her dark eyes before she quickly smothered it, a frown pulling her lips down. “Can you blame them?”

“Yes, I can,” I retorted, unable to keep the bitterness from my tone. “I was a child. I had no idea what I was doing?—”

“Which made it all the more dangerous,” Mom hissed, leaning forward. Her gaze darted around the room, like she was worried some of the patrons might overhear.

That would be pretty hard to do considering the wide radius around our table and the others. The only other tables occupied this early in the evening were near the door, and our table was toward the back.

It wasn’t the location of that table that mattered; it was who sat there.

I’d long ago accepted my place as an outcast. I was stuck between two worlds, not belonging to either.

Mom let out a long breath. “I don’t wish to quarrel, Lucia.”

“Neither do I,” I replied. “But I can’t just forget the last decade of my life. I was eleven, Mom. I was a little girl who was terrified. I needed you to tell me it was all going to be okay, and you literally threw me to the wolves.”

When I’d been banished from the coven, the Narodnaya pack had taken me in. Their Alpha, Nikolai, and his wife, Natasha, made me feel protected and wanted. They’d become my surrogate parents, and never made me feel like a burden. Like taking in a little girl who had this reckless ‘gift’ wasn’t a big deal.

I mean, stranded in the middle of the Ural Mountains, I likely would’ve frozen to death the first night. But instead I’d found myself in an actual home with people who I wound up loving maybe more than my own mother. Nikolai and Natasha were good people, and I'd never be able to repay their kindness.

Though, they insisted they were still indebted to me because of what happened all those years ago, when I’d saved him.

Dimitri.

Like saving him was ever a choice. It would never be a choice because that implied I might not save him. And I knew I would never not save him. I would die a thousand times before I let him get hurt.

As soon as I thought his name, it was like the first crack in a dam forming. Emotions started to leak out as the pressure built, threatening to bring the whole thing crashing down.

Mom lifted her chin. “I made a decision that I regret, daughter.”

“And it only took you close to ten years to realize that,” I drawled, shaking my head and wondering why I even bothered.

Mom drew in a slow breath, like she was losing her patience with me. She seemed to select her next words very carefully. “Lucia, I know I failed you. But I was young and scared.”

I leaned forward. “You don’t think I was young and scared? I was eleven , Mom. Eleven. You shoved me out into the streets without so much as a ‘good luck, kiddo.’”

Her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. “I don’t wish to quarrel with you, daughter. Neither of us can change the past. I can’t take back my reaction any more than you can give back the lives that you took.”

I gasped and snapped back in my chair, stunned. “Mom.”

She reached for my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I don’t fault you for a moment of weakness, Lucia. I blame your father for that.”

My tainted bloodline left me on the outs with the coven. They feared the magic that dwelled in me, the spirit magic that had been known to decimate nations in the past. It was why the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—had formed an alliance hundreds of years earlier, combining their abilities to destroy as many people that wielded spirit magic as they possibly could.

But there had been a few that escaped their genocide. They’d gone into hiding, living in shadows and darkness. My father had been one of their descendents.

I was one of their descendents.

The Narodnaya coven was one of the oldest in the history of the earth. It had been their magic that created the Narodnaya pack, a race of wolf shifters that changed the course of history by being the first of their kind.

The coven and pack had lived together ever since, but as time wore on, the treaty between the two grew more and more strained.

It had outright fractured ten years ago when Nikolai and Natasha took me in, even if it had only been because I’d saved Dimitri when he’d been kidnapped.

And saved was a loose term. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I’d unleashed a torrent of spirit-magic that slaughtered a dozen shifters and irrevocably changed the trajectory of my life.

I still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened in that cave. I remembered the overwhelming terror singing in my veins, my blood turning to ice as I remembered that grown men had chained up a thirteen-year-old Dimitri and beat him.

He’d been taken by a rival pack that sought to eradicate the Narodnaya pack by kidnapping its heir. Killing Dimitri would have shaken the pack to their core, and could have created enough momentum to shift war with Poland to their favor.

Taking me had been a mistake. I was the girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d been mistaken for a young wolf shifter, and since females were rare in the shifter world, I became collateral in their crimes.

I’d been chained up in the cave, terrorized and horrified at what I’d seen.

But in one desperate moment, I’d unleashed my spirit abilities and murdered them all.

If only the nightmare ended there, but it didn’t.

I’d unleashed a power I had no control over, and then used it to heal Dimitri Dashkov.

And binding us together for the rest of our lives.

I’d passed out after that, only waking up to find myself thrust into a new nightmare where the coven was vicious in their response to my newfound power, and I found myself living with wolves. My mother hadn’t spoken to me, or even looked in my direction, ever since.

Until last year when she approached me in town and asked to speak to me. Since then it had been a painfully slow process of letting her back into my life, even though Natasha thought my mother had no right.

And it was times like this that I thought she might be onto something.

“Lucia.” Mom reached her other hand across the table and squeezed my fingers. “It’s time to come home, where you belong.”

“I don’t belong anywhere,” I answered, pulling away, “but at least Nikolai and Natasha have never made me feel like a burden.”

“Of course they haven’t,” she huffed, looking annoyed. “They have their own little magical slave to do their bidding.”

“Mom!” I gaped at her. “I’m not?—”

“I saw you after the last merge,” she snapped. “You could have died using that much of your magic. And for what? To help them ? Wolf shifters?” She looked utterly disgusted.

“They’re our allies,” I spoke slowly. “The coven and pack have always been friends.”

She scoffed. “Perhaps, but it also may be time to change that.”

“What does that mean?” I demanded, narrowing my eyes.

“I’d love to know the answer to that, too,” a low voice rumbled from behind me.

I gasped, turning to see Dimitri grab the chair between us and drag it out. His dark brows were pulled low over his glittering green eyes, his full lips twisted into an annoyed scowl. His massive frame dwarfed the chair, but it was his presence that sucked all the air from my lungs.

Weird. Usually I felt him when he was nearby, our connection lighting up like an electric wire.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, not bothering to hide the anger in my tone.

Dimitri turned and looked at me, blinking those long, sooty black lashes. His face was a study in sharp angles that gave him an almost cruel sort of beauty. “I was meeting someone for dinner, but I heard Yetta talking about changes and got curious.”

Mom flushed, looking uneasily at the wolf shifter. “I’m having a private talk with my daughter.”

Dimitri let out a low, humorless chuckle. “She doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself. In fact, Lulu seems downright pissed off, which makes me wonder why that might be. Any ideas, Yetta?” He turned his full stare to my mother, pinning her in place with a glare.

“I don’t need your help,” I snapped, unable to tamp down the usual defensiveness that seemed to rear up when Dimitri Dashkov was around.

“And yet you’re getting it anyway,” he replied coolly, still staring at my mother. “Explain what you mean about time to change something?”

My heart fluttered in my chest, thrashing like the wings of a terrified hummingbird, but I wasn’t sure if it was from watching my mother and Dimitri square off, or if it was just because of Dimitri, period.

I hated that I felt this pull to him, even though it was my own damn fault.

My mother’s shoulders drew back as she shot Dimitri a scathing look. “Again I’ll remind you, pup, that I am speaking with my daughter.”

“Who you only seem to remember is your daughter when it’s convenient for you ,” he snapped back, baring his teeth in a feral grimace. “And I haven’t been a pup for years. I’m happy to prove that to you any time you like.”

I opened my mouth to intervene, the urge to diffuse the situation becoming unbearable, until I felt a warm hand land on my thigh.

Stunned, my gaze dropped to see the back of Dimitri’s hand flex around my denim-clad leg, the heat of his palm searing through the thick fabric like a branding iron. My breath caught in my chest, and it took every ounce of self-control not to lean into his touch or, worse yet, spread my thighs in hopes his touch would roam higher.

Electricity zipped between us, a steady stream of sparks that threatened to turn into a raging, untamable blaze if left unchecked.

I went a little lightheaded, the room tilting on its axis as I remembered this being the very reason that we rarely touched. The explosive chemistry we shared was too volatile to risk combusting and incinerating the world around us.

God, even his hand was a work of art. Long, thick fingers with a warm olive-toned complexion. Veins that ran across the back of his hand and roped around his wrist before becoming some seriously sexy forearm porn that made my mouth go dry.

“You overstep, heir,” Mom spat, her tone full of venom. “You’re not yet the Alpha.”

“ Yet being the operative word,” he agreed with a humorless smirk.

Tingles spread across my flesh as I felt the threat behind his words. The air shifted and moved around us in a way that made me pause.

Something wasn’t right. And not just the way Mom and Dimitri were glaring at each other, or the way other patrons had started staring at us.

My chest flared with the impulse to flee, but it was smothered just as fast, leaving me feeling exhausted and dizzy.

Shit, was I getting sick? I was suddenly so tired, my bones aching to the very marrow.

I was about to intervene and end this farce of a mother-daughter dinner, but before I could open my mouth, the world exploded.