Chapter 28 The Crushing Truth
twenty-eight
The Crushing Truth
*GWENDOLYN*
Now I know why Liam started with me and said it would be simple and not take long, because both he and Elden spend a lot of time with Marina. They carefully approach her, making sure to sit down and not to hover above her. Marina doesn’t even wince.
“I don’t feel her getting scared,” Liam mutters.
Elden nods. “That’s bad.”
“Why?” I ask quietly.
“Because obviously, she is heavily traumatized. A tall, strong alpha, actually two of them, approaching her should at least do something to her. But it doesn’t…” Elden pauses. “I wonder how deeply her emotions are buried.”
“It would be a lot easier to handle fear or anger,” Liam explains to me.
“Or any other trauma response. Because if Marina showed any emotions, it means they would be there, on the surface. Fear and anger are reactions to a trauma, and we could work with them. We could hire a therapist and help her through it, but this…” he pauses, not finishing his sentence, and I don’t have the heart to push for an answer.
The two men don’t say any more, instead start to do what we came for.
I can only sit on a sofa chair in the room, watching them without truly knowing what’s going on.
I notice the look of highest concentration on their faces, and the flashes of emotions they allow to appear before they lock them down.
Worry. Shock. Worry.
I wish I had one of my pets with me to cuddle and to hold on to.
While I am still sitting there, waiting anxiously, Titan jumps through the open window.
He doesn’t pay anyone else attention, just comes stalking towards me.
The demon cat. It makes so much sense now that I know for sure he isn’t a real cat.
Titan circles me before jumping onto my lap, lying down there and just looking at me, before poking my leg with his paw. I reach out my hand, gently petting his head, surprised by how soft yet sturdy his fur is. “Thank you,” I whisper.
Titan looks up at me, the expression in his eyes almost human. He looks like he is gauging me, like he wants to talk, but can’t… or doesn’t want to.
Can demon pets talk?
I don’t know how much time passes. The nurse, Cindy, returns, then leaves again, and returns once more.
All the while, Titan stays with me, preventing me from paying too much attention to Elden and Liam and the expressions on their faces.
That is, until Liam draws back and moves to sit down on the second sofa chair, sighing deeply.
Elden follows him briefly. Neither of them says anything, and I don’t have the heart to ask. Eventually, Cindy returns once more.
“I have met them,” she says. “They will return soon.”
“She is talking about Faye and her nanny,” Elden tells me briefly, before nodding at the woman. “Thank you, Cindy.”
I watch how Cindy brings Marina something to eat. It’s her usual time for an afternoon snack, but to my shock, Marina doesn’t reach out for the food. Cindy casts a gaze at Elden. “I will try again later,” she says. “But…she needs to eat. This is not good.”
“Did she have breakfast?” Elden asks.
“A bit, but it took a long time for her to eat. She skipped lunch already. She will need to go to the infirmary if she won’t eat.”
“Yes, it’s too much of a risk,” Elden says. “Let’s wait until tomorrow before we make a decision.”
She nods. “Yes, Alpha.”
Elden turns to look at me. “Let’s go to my office,” he says.
We leave the room, walking to Elden’s office completely in silence. Titan is right behind me, following us all the way. Once in his office, I finally can’t keep it inside anymore. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” I blurt out. “If it were good, you would have said something.”
Elden’s eyes flash over. “One of the maids will bring us something to drink,” he tells me.
Again, we wait in silence until our beverages arrive. It’s sweet tea, surprisingly sweet. “We need the energy boost from the sugar,” Liam tells me when he notices my curious gaze. “And I think you could use an energy boost, too.”
“So, it is bad,” I conclude.
“Yes,” Elden answers. “Listen, Gwen. I don’t know how to tell you, but I couldn’t reach out to her wolf.”
“Neither could I,” Liam says, his voice trailing off.
“What are you not telling me?” I ask quietly.
“The reason why we couldn’t reach it,” Elden says, “is because there is no wolf.”
“But…but she always had one! I saw her shift before she left the pack!”
“Yes, that’s what makes it so bad,” Liam says. “Remember how easy it was to reach your wolf spirit, despite it being different than usual ones?”
I nod, biting on my lips as slowly realization settles in. She has lost her wolf, Marina has lost her wolf! “How can that happen? How can someone lose their wolf spirit?”
“It’s impossible to lose it,” Elden explains. “If anything, a wolf spirit can be buried to heal, it can retreat to deal with trauma, but it never disappears fully. It doesn’t just happen, unless the wolf spirit dies.”
My mouth drops open in horror. “That can happen?!”
“It’s very rare,” Liam mutters. “The council in Paris can do it as a punishment for heinous crimes, but they only do it in the worst cases, and even then, the whole council has to agree with it. It happens very, very rarely. In the last ten years, they only did it once.” There is a hint of bitterness in his voice.
It seems like there is a story behind this, but I have more urgent things to ask.
“But Faye does feel a bond?” I blurt out. “Right? She always wants to be with her mother!”
“Gwen,” Elden says quietly, taking my hand into his and holding it like I am one of his children.
“Faye went through something deeply traumatic. We don’t know what it is, we don’t even know if she was directly involved, but if her mother’s wolf was killed, then something terrible had to happen, and chances are high that Faye has seen some of it. ”
“The mind does peculiar things for us when we are in danger,” Liam adds. “Some people forget traumatic pasts in their childhood because their brains prevent them from remembering. It’s a coping mechanism.”
Elden nods. “I can only guess now, but I believe Faye doesn’t feel a bond.
It’s impossible as her mother’s wolf has passed on.
If anything, there is only a hint of it remaining.
Instead, Faye might instinctively cling to her mother and pretend everything is fine, because it’s her mind’s way of protecting her.
It’s the only way she can cope with it.”
Liam rubs his face in exhaustion. “The poor child,” he mutters. “We must do something for her. If at one point the coping mechanism doesn’t work anymore, it will make her spiral.”
“What does all of this mean?” I say quietly. “What does it mean for Marina not to have her wolf spirit anymore?”
Elden massages his temples.
“Please be honest with me. I promise, I can handle it.”
“She can’t survive,” he says. “It’s impossible. She made it a year or longer in this state, but she is deteriorating, as we have heard today. It’s the first sign. She will die, Gwen, sooner rather than later.”
It feels like someone just punched me in my stomach. My blood runs cold, and my stomach seems to churn, making me feel sick. “Can we prevent it?” I ask, my voice shaky even to my own ears.
“We can prolong it for a while,” Liam says, surprisingly evasively. “She will soon need to be in the infirmary, then I guess we could try and keep her alive for a couple of more months.”
I let his words sink in while trying to hear what he is truly saying. “We should let her go,” I say quietly. “Is that what you are implying?”
“Marina died already,” Elden tells me. “This is literally just her shell. Her wolf spirit died, her mind completely shut off, she can only go through the motions because it’s a very old routine she has learned.
She can’t feel anyone’s presence, she has no bonds to anyone anymore, she doesn’t feel the warmth of her child’s touch, she doesn’t even hear her voice.
Maybe she did at the beginning, but then started to fade more and more. ”
My lips quiver. “I don’t want her to suffer. I never wanted her to… Why did no one help her?”
“That’s the most urgent question right now,” Elden says, his eyes dark in anger. “What happened to her is inhuman beyond words. We’ll get to the bottom of this and catch whoever did it.”
“She was full of life,” I mutter. “She was always smiling and always had a friendly word for everyone. This is not fair. I…how am I going to tell Faye? Should I even tell her?”
“You don’t need to tell her alone,” Elden says quietly.
“However, while I am not a therapist, I think it would be important to prepare Faye, so that she can say her goodbye properly. She needs to know her mother is ill and won’t recover.
” He pauses. “I was a child, a couple of years older than Faye, when my mom committed suicide. Nothing prepared me for it. Instinctively, I knew how ill she was, but no one prepared me for it, no one explained anything. For years, I felt responsible, like I should have done more to help her or save her. The best we can do for Faye is take her seriously, talk to her and make sure she knows her feelings are valid, and that she is allowed to feel angry, sad and scared.”
I clench my hands into fists to will down my boiling emotions. “I think I understand it a bit better now,” I say, thankful that he shared something so private with me. “I… I want her to receive help.”
“Definitely,” Elden agrees. “Flora will look for someone immediately. I think it would be important to have someone accompany her through her grief, but also someone who can help find the right words to tell her the truth.”
“When should we tell her?”
“The sooner the better,” Elden says. “I suspect, deep inside, she is already aware that something is terribly off. It must pull at her constantly, even though she always smiles at everyone. She needs to learn the truth soon.”