Chapter 27 Consequences of Naivety
Consequences of Naivety
It felt like coming home.
The warmth of his lips, the rough feel of his dark-red bristles under my palms, the pressing of his hands against my hips . . . It felt as though I’d returned to a place I had never even visited.
A place to finally call home.
And when he immediately opened his mouth and flicked his tongue against mine, making every part of my body fill with unbidden desire, as if he couldn’t hold himself back anymore, it was everything.
His hands left my hips, and he enveloped me in his arms, crushing me to him, taking me over, controlling me like a marionette and leaving me breathless, unable to do anything but succumb to his passionate touch.
And when he suddenly flipped us so my back pressed against the window, and his thigh nudged my legs apart, causing me to half sit on his lap as he devoured my mouth with hunger that left me dizzy, all I could do was hold on to him and kiss him back with everything I had.
I drowned in the madness of his touch, of his kiss, of everything Lucien.
And it almost felt like he was drowning, too, and I was his breath of air.
I clung on to his shoulders, desperately kissing him back, entangling my tongue with his, pressing so hard against him, moving my fingers through his soft auburn curls, wishing I could touch him everywhere. That he would touch me too.
At that moment, I couldn’t give a flying fuck if it was mind control or not.
I just knew I wanted him with every fiber of my being.
And for the first time, I could feel him wanting me too.
A slamming noise caused Lucien to break the kiss and release me, stepping away as he turned to look at the entrance door.
The same entrance door Thayer had readjusted before he retreated to his room was now barely holding on to its hinges, thanks to a large, stunning inky-black wolf who was now padding toward Lucien.
Light spilled into the room, indicating the arrival of the sun.
The wolf shifted, the sound hissing, and faintly, I realized Thayer had exited his bedroom due to the noise again.
The wolf shifted into Blaise, eyes on Lucien. “Ana?s,” the Beta now said, face stricken. “Wildlight.”
Lucien stared at Blaise for a moment as he processed the words.
And the next moment he was a blur of bronze and auburn as he shifted into his wolf form midway through running out the door.
Disoriented from the kiss with Lucien, and trying to process myself what Blaise had just said, I had to lean back against the wall and watch as Thayer strode toward the Beta. “Take me to her,” he said, face dark.
Blaise’s eyes studied Thayer for a short moment before he nodded curtly. “I’ll take you by car,” he said in his heavy accent.
“I’m coming with you,” I hastily said, heart beating loud in my chest now that understanding finally settled inside me.
Minutes later, Blaise was racing through the forest in his Jeep, with Thayer and me in the back seat, until we reached the beautiful plaza that was the pack’s Heart. Then Blaise led us at almost a run inside the Concordian Ward.
The first bed in the row was occupied by a petite human woman with curly dark hair and eyes that had gone completely black, until not even the whites were present.
She was growling loud enough to wake the dead, her teeth unnaturally sharp as she tried to bite the people surrounding the bed the rest of her body was shackled to.
Next to her bed, Remi and Enoch were staring at Anais with dark expressions.
Lucien, in his human form and dressed this time, had blood around his mouth.
“You got her in time,” Blaise murmured as he came to stand next to Lucien.
Lucien nodded shortly. “I managed to restrain her before she killed Layla.”
Blaise nodded, wiping sweat from his forehead.
Thayer walked to the other side of Anais’s bed, his face devoid of emotion. He might’ve disliked Anais for whatever reason, but seeing her in this state, her humanity gone from her human body, wasn’t an easy sight for anyone.
My chest ached as I watched her. She was such a composed woman. Seeing her like this was absolutely devastating.
“What should we do now, Alpha?” Remi now asked, his voice soft, as he stared at Anais with unhidden sadness.
Lucien didn’t reply. Instead, he kept on staring at Anais, looking almost haunted.
Remi tugged at Lucien’s hands. “Alpha?”
Lucien whipped his head at Remi and snapped in a menacing growl, “Don’t touch me!”
Immediately, Remi let him go and raised his hands in surrender, eyes wide in shock, his lips clamped shut.
Blaise murmured something in French I didn’t quite hear, and Remi paled as he nodded and walked away toward another occupied bed, hidden by the curtains.
“You have to find a cure.”
I whipped my head toward my brother, whose voice was strained. His face was as white as a sheet, and his eyes were staring at Anais unblinkingly.
Enoch, who’d been watching Anais silently, said quietly, “There is no cure for Wildlight, Thayer.”
“There has to be,” Thayer snapped, lips trembling, as he grabbed Anais’s shackled hand. Her nails had curled into claws, and she dug them into Thayer’s palm deep enough to draw blood, but Thayer didn’t seem to notice. Or care. “You have to do something!”
Lucien stepped back from the bed, his face so haunted, gaze far away, and said nothing.
I didn’t know what to do. My heart was hammering in my chest, especially from the constant inhuman growls coming from Anais. But also because Lucien seemed as if he had just seen his worst nightmare come to life.
Thinking of Kate, I shivered.
When no one responded to Thayer’s plea, he suddenly turned to glare at Lucien. “Right before the full moon rose,” he now said, trying to catch Lucien’s gaze, “we found a solution for the thing on your back. The Spellscript.”
At once, Lucien’s gaze became focused and landed on Thayer, eyes wide. “What?”
Thayer pursed his lips and nodded. “She said she now knew how to neutralize the Spellscript’s effects,” he said, both urgent and cajoling. “She’s the only one who knows how.”
Despair filled Lucien’s face. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said hollowly. “Wildlight is incurable, Thayer.”
A cleared throat made us all turn to Enoch. He seemed paler than before. “I . . . ,” he started, swallowed hard, and turned to look at Lucien. “There might be a way . . . temporarily . . .”
Lucien looked back at him, and they seemed to have a silent conversation, which caused Lucien to tense and Enoch to become distraught, yet determined, too, at the same time.
I held my breath as I watched the wordless exchange until Lucien, face grave, bitterly said, “Fine.” Without another word, he turned and walked out of the cabin.
I glanced, confused, at Enoch, who seemed just as grim faced, and Thayer, whose face lit up with hope, before I followed Lucien outside.
He was almost at one of the other cabins in the plaza when I grabbed his arm and made him stop. “Lucien,” I said, heartbeat so loud, I wondered if he could hear it. “What just happened?”
Lucien whirled around to face me, his face stormy. “Enoch is going to do something he shouldn’t,” he snapped harshly, but I knew his anger wasn’t aimed at me. “Something that will do far more harm than good.”
I searched his gaze. “What is he going to do?”
He laughed humorlessly, the sound scraping my ears like sandpaper. “He’s going to use forbidden magic. The kind that comes at a cost. All so he can neutralize the Spellscript on my back.”
Lucien’s eyes were filled with misery, begging me to understand, almost, when he hissed, “I’m sick and tired of people sacrificing themselves to protect me as if I’m not an Alpha who’s naturally, genetically capable of enduring far more than the average werewolf, or any other Otherborne.”
Belatedly, I realized he was talking about something else. Something about Anais catching Wildlight brought something else to the surface, something Lucien was obviously struggling with.
“Lucien,” I murmured as calmly as I could, before I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him close. “Talk to me.” I closed my eyes. “Please.”
For a moment, I thought Lucien would push me away.
He was so tense, his body was like a hard mass of skin and muscles.
But to my utter relief, he put his arms around me and pulled me close, burying his head in my throat.
“Do you know why I joined the Imperative for Transparency and Symbiosis? The organization that believes in revealing our existence to the human world?”
While I knew it was a rhetorical question, I still shook my head. I’d never really questioned his motive behind why he wanted the supernatural to be exposed. I’d simply accepted it as it was.
But nothing was ever so simple.
“I used to be an Alpha of a werewolf pack in Paris,” he suddenly said, voice hoarse, as he tightened his hold on me. “The Montvoilé werewolf pack, it was called. ‘The veiled mountain.’ It was named that way to put an emphasis on our secrecy. Our hidden existence.”
I felt his hands fisting on my shirt. “I was born with the Alpha Marker. It’s a genetic marker that makes me different from regular werewolves.
It makes me stronger, faster, and deadlier than any werewolf.
It also gives me a strategic mindset, and an analytical one.
All for the sake of protecting my pack to the fullest.” He almost spat the last words.
“I was appointed Alpha officially at fifteen,” he continued, voice growing darker, and impossibly, even more bitter.
“Too young an age for this position, especially in a pack that had been one of the top largest packs in Europe. But only a werewolf bearing the Alpha Marker can become an Alpha, and the Alpha before me was already old, and so he passed away. Thus I became the next Alpha, as the only Alpha Marked werewolf in the pack.”
I took it all in silently, listening closely, smoothing my hands over his back, trying to calm him down. Because I could feel his distress. I could feel him recalling the memories. And I knew the ending was not going to be good.