Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Raven
I moved out of his room that night.
Not Alpha Damien’s room exactly, but the connecting room joined to his that I’d stayed in during the last six weeks to keep up the pretense of sharing a bed with him in the eyes of his pack.
We are a team, Raven.
That was what he’d said that day he’d cuffed me to his bed, and like a fool, I’d believed it to be true. Like anyone would ever truly be on my team. It hurt a lot. More than I could have ever expected it to.
Maybe it was because I’d opened up to him more than I ever had to anyone else, because I thought we’d come to understand each other.
Because in these past months, the lines between us had blurred to nothing, and I’d become so lost in the fantasy of what we could be that I’d forgotten the reality of us.
It hurt when I thought of him or stepped out of my new room and saw him walking down the hallway. It hurt when I saw him at work, where I’d stubbornly returned, and he made no comment.
But more than that, it hurt whenever I saw him as I did laps around the training court at his city house. Laps I couldn’t miss because I couldn’t afford to skip training, no matter how wrought my emotions were, because I just knew Ivy was eagerly counting down the days till she could kill me.
Feeling a twinge, I paused my jog, my hand going to my throbbing lower back, a small wince escaping my lips. My body thrummed with an undercurrent that halted the breath in my lungs, and even before he touched me, I felt his presence.
“Are you alright?”
I sprang away from him, detesting the way my body hungered for even that small contact.
“I’m fine, Mr. Blackwell.”
If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn I saw a thread of regret in his turbulent golden gaze.
“Raven—”
But I knew better.
I slid my headphones back on, blocking out whatever else he had to say, as I continued my sprint. If I kept up the formality between us, I wouldn’t have any more expectations from him. Expectations like friendship and a true partnership.
If I had no more expectations of him, then he couldn’t hurt me. I felt the heat of his gaze linger on me as I moved, but he made no move to stop me.
In that moment, Alpha Damien could have forced a sparring session. Forced me to endure the exquisite torture of having our bodies pressed together, to take in his scent, and act like none of it got to me. But he chose not to, and somehow that hurt even more.
I missed him. Which was a strange emotion to feel about someone I saw every day, but it was the only word that could adequately quantify my emotions. I missed our little non-arguments. I missed waking up to his movements in the room next to mine and yelling at him to keep the noise down.
I missed moving around in his space and reorganising his space in his absence to mess with him in retaliation for the cuffing incident.
I missed his laughs, as few and far between as they were.
I missed our conversations about the things that worried him.
The mysterious human murders, the council, and the new company he just acquired. I missed listening to his voice.
More than once, I thought of apologizing for overstepping, if that was what it would take to go back to how things had been. I just had to accept the fact that I’d never matter enough to Alpha Damien for him to share anything personal with me.
The fact that I’d actually been desperate enough to consider that option made me angry. So angry. The pain I felt didn’t make sense. The anger. The intense feelings in my chest had nowhere to go, so they just festered within me.
I was so caught up in my thoughts that I didn’t realize my favorite brooding spot in the Shadow Thorn pack house, a tucked away alcove, was already occupied until I sat on the swing and caught sight of a familiar figure sitting on the ground, back to the wall, dark hair falling over his forehead, baby blue eyes shadowed with pain.
Stiffening, I let out a breath.
“Elias.”
I hadn’t seen him since I’d declined his effusive offer to dance at the Silverstone Pack party.
“Go on, gloat.” Elias wasn’t even looking at me, his gaze focused on something abstract I couldn’t see. “I’ve been completely sidelined by my uncle in favor of your child. Your revenge is complete.”
With that declaration, he took a swing directly from the bottle of spirits at his side that I hadn’t even noticed. My lips parted, but I had no words.
As much as Elias had hurt me, I’d never deliberately intended to take his inheritance from him or sunder the fragile relationship between him and his uncle. But it had happened anyway. I stood from my swing, turning to leave to give him his privacy to grieve.
“I’ll get going.”
“You know he isn’t over Rielle, right?”
Elias’s words hit me so hard I couldn’t take even a single step forward. Rielle. There it was again. That name that had caused all this trouble with Alpha Damien to begin with.
“Oh,” Elias’s tone was equal parts smug and insinuating now. “So you do know.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat, forcing my suspicions into words.
“Rielle…she’s his first mate?”
“Was,” Elias corrected with a flat, dead stare.
Of course, she was. It explained why he’d lashed out at me like that. A deadly curiosity sat on my chest. I knew I had no business being drawn in by Elias’s words. I should have walked out like I’d intended to earlier, but…Rielle.
I had to know more about this woman who incited such depth of emotion in Alpha Damien.
My mind unhelpfully reminded me of how Alpha Damien had reacted the last time he’d caught Elias and me talking in private. He’d gone as far as to forbid it. Jaw clenched, I decided I didn’t care very much about Alpha Damien’s wishes right now. I sat next to Elias on the ground.
“She’s really dead, like the rumors say?” The next words were harder to push out. “Did…did he kill her?”
Elias didn’t answer for a beat, his gaze still distant.
“I grew up watching them, you know…Uncle Damien and his mate,” A rough, fractured laugh left him. “Who didn’t?”
Then Elias was speaking freely without any inhibition, as though he needed to exorcise the words from his mind.
“He was hard and ruthless even then, but around her, he was as harmless as a teddy bear. They were the Romeo and Juliet of the werewolf community then.”
I tried to imagine Alpha Damien as a lovesick Romeo. I failed.
“The Shadow Thorn Pack and the Sky Pack had been at war for over a hundred and fifty years, so we didn’t really like each other much, but it didn’t stop them,” Elias explained.
“Mom always said she knew they were fated mates even before the mate bond clicked in at eighteen, they just ‘gravitated towards each other,’ if you can believe it.”
It was unbelievable.
The mate bond that had once been a staple in werewolf packs, or so the stories said, had long since faded into oblivion.
Finding one’s true mate now was an improbable feat that was on par with finding a unicorn. It was something spoken of with varying degrees of disbelief and scorn because it simply didn’t happen.
I’d never met a fated couple before. My parents hadn’t been fated mates but chosen mates. Yet they’d died for each other.
I could only imagine what a real fated soul tie looked like. Felt like. Elias was still speaking.
“Their families didn’t approve, but for the sake of their happiness, the two warring packs finally signed a peace treaty. Uncle Damien and Rielle were mated at twenty and so sweet on each other that it was beyond sickening to watch.”
Elias’s words were one thing, but the wistfulness his tone held meant another. He still remembered that time fondly. I felt a frisson of inexplicable jealousy. The Alpha Damien Elias was describing sounded like an Alpha Damien I’d never met.
“What happened?” I asked when Elias stayed silent.
And I knew something had happened. Or I wouldn’t be here pregnant with Alpha Damien’s baby while Rielle was gone.
“Rielle happened.” The wistfulness in Elias’s tone disappeared, replaced by unbending steel.
“I was fifteen when it happened. For five years, Rielle stayed mated to Uncle Damien, inserted herself into the very fabric of our pack, then at the moment we least expected it, she betrayed our pack to her former pack, the Sky Pack, and blinded by love, he let it happen.”
Elias’s voice broke.
“We lost so many people. I lost my mom.”
I went still, my mind piecing together the information I already knew with what Elias had just told me.
The last war between the Sky Pack and the Shadow Thorn Pack occurred over a decade ago.
It had been one for the books and had even been dubbed the blood war because of the sheer number of wolves that died in a single day.
I’d had no idea it had been triggered by a single female wolf, Alpha Damien’s fated mate. Nor had I known that Elias had lost his mother that way. Sympathetic, I reached out to comfort Elias.
“I’m so sorry.”
He moved before my hand could reach his shoulder.
“I don’t want your sympathy, Raven,” Elias spat out venomously, a sardonic smirk twisting up his face. “You betrayed me for him, but there’s only one woman he’ll ever love, and it’s that snake.”
I stiffened at Elias’s words, but it wasn’t enough. He had to dig the knife deeper.
“To him, they are still mated. Do you know he never touched another woman after she died?” Elias chuckled darkly, his gaze focusing on me with a pitiful glint.
“So you can go ahead and be the mother of his heir. Take whatever scraps of affection he gives you because you’ll always be second fiddle to her. ”
Like an echo, I heard Alpha Damien’s words from that night when he pushed me away callously.
Don’t you dare try to insert yourself into my personal affairs!
Rielle is and will always remain none of your business.
I took in a breath and let it out. And as I let out that breath, the hurt and pain that had threatened to bury me earlier finally left me. I heard myself speak as though I existed outside my body.
“I think I really loved you,” in the only way I’d ever thought was possible. “That’s why I can never forgive your betrayal. But I do hope you learn to forgive yourself, Elias.”
Then without another look at him, I stood from the ground and walked away. It wasn’t until I was in the privacy of my room that I realized my cheeks were slick with tears I couldn’t recall shedding.
My tears weren’t for Elias, who was filled with self-loathing for not being enough to save his mother, despite the fact that he’d been a child. So he fixated on blaming Damien in an attempt to overcompensate and disguise his contempt for himself.
My tears were for Damien and the pain he must have felt when the one person he’d loved and trusted more than anyone had broken him so much that he could never open his heart to anyone again.
My tears were for myself, too, and for the hurt that had nestled deep within me as I accepted the fact that, even now, he was still attached to her.
You’ll never be my Luna.
When we’d made our arrangement, he’d emphasized that statement—because she was his only Luna. And even now, I couldn’t help but wonder if that night we’d spent together, when he’d held on to me, his voice shaky with emotion, if in his drugged haze he’d seen me as her.
…don’t leave me. Please.
The thought that even that impassioned plea might have been for her hurt. It hurt so much it morphed into an all-consuming anger born from an insidious bone-rooted jealousy. An animalistic growl escaped me, and filled with that anger that had absolutely nowhere to go, I punched the wall.
I was so submerged in my anger that it took me a moment to realize the ground was really trembling beneath me, and it wasn’t just me shaking. A rough gasp of disbelief left me as I came face to face with an impossibility. The wall I’d just punched had a dent, a crater, the size of my fist.
But it was impossible. I was wolfless. I was. I knew it. I remembered the confusion in Alpha Damien’s voice from our very first training lesson.
Your wolf’s dominance is on par with mine.
I was…
What the hell was this?