Chapter 31 Where It All Began #2
The screen flashed to life with a number I didn’t recognize. My hands shook as I swiped to answer, but instead, it was a text, an image already waiting for me. The world narrowed to a single rectangle of light, the rest of the kitchen receding into a tunnel of static and fear.
It was a photo.
I told myself I wouldn’t look, that whatever was on the screen could only be worse than the dread already chewing at my insides. But my thumb moved anyway, and the image resolved.
Mateo, limp and crumpled on his side, eyes closed, face slack with exhaustion or worse.
His hoodie, the one with the wolf silhouette he refused to replace, was torn at the elbow.
There was a dark patch at the corner of his mouth, a bruise or a shadow, I couldn’t tell which.
He lay in the center of a rustic-looking stone floor, vines and wildflowers curled around the edges, their vibrant greens and delicate petals suggesting a forgotten garden overtaken by nature. The tranquility of his slumber felt wrong. It sent a chill racing down my spine.
I didn’t recognize the place, but the language around him was unmistakable: the glowing script, identical to what I’d seen on the walls. It spiderwebbed outward, a nest of runes and sigils, each one pulsing with that same spectral energy.
I hadn’t realized I was making noise until I felt Aiden’s hand clamp around my wrist, grounding me, reminding me to breathe.
A second message followed instantly, like a knife pressed to my throat.
The child is safe, for now.
Meet at the place where it all began.
Come alone, or he dies.
The words burned themselves onto my retinas, monochrome and merciless. I read them again, and again, as if repetition could change their meaning, as if there was a secret sequence that would unravel the threat, undo the certainty behind it.
“The place where it all began,” I whispered.
It wasn’t a riddle, not really.
The old woods.
The place where I’d first met Kyle, all those years ago.
The place where I’d lived the nightmare of my past, and apparently, where my future was now being held ransom.
My knees buckled, and I braced myself against the edge of the counter, the cold bite of granite the only thing stopping me from collapsing on the spot.
Aiden scanned the screen over my shoulder, his body pressed close, and I could feel the urgency building behind the steady clench of his jaw.
Even Ulysses, who never looked rattled, seemed to stand a fraction straighter, his eyes flicking from the phone to my face with a calculating sharpness that suggested he’d already skipped ten moves ahead.
“You’re not going alone.” Aiden’s hand tightened on my arm, his other one already fishing for his own phone, probably prepping for violence.
“I don’t have a choice,” I said, voice cracking. I shook my head, the words of the threat drowning out any rational thought he tried to offer, “If they hurt him…” My voice threatened to splinter, but I bit it down, forced my lungs to keep moving.
“They’ll hurt him whether you go alone or not,” Aiden cut in. “At least let me be there to stop it.”
Ulysses advanced, his tone was smooth yet laced with an undercurrent of menace.
“If you’re walking into a trap, you’ll need more than just a wolf at your side.
You’ll need someone who knows how these people think.
Someone like me.” He paused, a sly smile creeping across his lips. “Of course… my help isn’t free.”
I shot him a glare, my eyes narrowing. “Of course it’s not.”
His smile deepened, revealing the sharpness behind his charm. “We all have debts, Josephine. You’ll simply be adding another to your ledger.”
Aiden stepped in front of me without a word, shoulders squared like he’d been waiting years for this standoff. His body was a wall, solid and warm, a deliberate barrier between Ulysses and me.
“You don’t get to leverage her fear,” he said, his voice cold enough to freeze breath in the air.
Ulysses arched one perfect brow; his smile was razor-thin. “I’m offering survival. A commodity you’ve historically undervalued, Aiden. You might consider the value of that before your pride gets Mateo killed.”
Tension crackled in the air, thick enough to cut. Each man’s resolve was palpable, like the room itself knew these two didn’t just dislike each other; they carried decades of unfinished business.
Aiden didn’t flinch. “That’s funny,” Aiden said, his tone cool but edged. “I’ve heard you offer ‘survival’ before. To Sylara.”
The name slid into the room like a blade unsheathed, sharp and sudden. Who was this Sylara person? I hadn’t the faintest clue. The sound of it echoed in my mind, a ghostly whisper that left me grappling for context.
A flicker of uncertainty crossed Ulysses’s face, his confident facade momentarily fracturing like glass under pressure.
The corners of his smile twitched, revealing a hint of vulnerability beneath his carefully crafted charm.
Even I felt the shift, like someone had turned down all the lights just to let her shadow stretch across us.
“Careful, pup,” he said, his voice sharp, each syllable dripping with an unspoken challenge.
“Oh, I’m just getting started.” Aiden’s eyes locked on him, unblinking.
His tone was almost casual, but the tension in his stance gave him away.
“You had her wrapped around your finger, parading her through your clubs like she was some ornament in your collection.” His voice was loaded with an unspoken emotion, “she used to tell me how you’d watch her walk into a room, like you owned the place the second her hair caught the light.
That long, chestnut wave… God, you knew exactly what it did to people.
” Then his tone turned accusing, “All while she was neck-deep in your Obsidian Circle dealings.”
Ulysses’s eyes narrowed. “And yet, she was still seeing me while you were parading her through your shallow little Wall Street soirees.”
“She was playing you,” Aiden said flatly. “Both of us, maybe. But you…” He jabbed a finger toward Ulysses. “You let her crawl deeper into the Obsidian Circle until she was drowning. And when she asked you to pull her out…”
“I didn’t put her there,” Ulysses said.
“You didn’t have to. You gave her the key, pointed her toward the door, and told her she could handle it.” Aiden accused.
Ulysses’s lips curved in a humorless smile. “Funny. She told me you said the same thing. That she was clever enough. And she was… gods, the way her eyes would spark when she had the upper hand…” His voice softened, then snapped back to steel. “Until she wasn’t.”
“She died because you saw her as a pawn.” Aiden snapped.
“She died because someone,” Ulysses said, his voice dipping into a growl, “abandoned her when things got complicated. Someone didn’t have the backbone to stand with her when the Council came knocking.”
“That’s not what happened.” Aiden’s tone was dangerous now. “She was running from you. And the night she died, she realized too late which one of us would have actually kept her alive.”
Ulysses’s eyes glinted, the way a predator’s might before the strike. “Then tell me, Aiden, when they pulled her body from the wreckage of that lab, which of us was still there?”
For a moment, the room felt like it might ignite from the force of their mutual hatred. Neither of them moved. The silence was heavy with the weight of decades’ worth of unshed blood. I didn’t know who Sylara really was, but she was in the room with us now, standing right in the middle.
Her presence was in the narrowing space between two men who clearly hated each other almost as much as they hated themselves.
I didn’t have the luxury of letting decades of bad blood run its course. “Enough.” My voice cut through the air harder than I intended, but I didn’t soften it. “I don’t know who Sylara was and what she had to do with the Obsidian Circle. This isn’t about her. This is about Mateo.”
I stood between them in the silence that followed, my pulse hammering.
This was an open wound that had never scabbed over, and now it was bleeding all over the kitchen floor; it was one that still bled every time they spoke her name.
They didn’t look at me. They only kept staring at each other, as if I’d walked into the middle of a duel that had started decades ago.
Ulysses shifted his attention to me, slow and deliberate, like a predator refocusing on easier prey.
“On the contrary,” he said, his voice rich with implication, “it’s exactly about Sylara. She was one of the first to sniff out the truth about the Source… and the experiments to harness it.”
Aiden’s jaw flexed. “You mean Project Moonlight.”
“A collaboration between certain… ambitious factions. The Obsidian Circle being one. And yes, some elements of the Council.”
My stomach dropped. “You’re telling me that Mateo…”
“…is a statistical impossibility,” Ulysses interrupted. “A convergence of bloodlines so rare that when the Circle realized his existence, they saw potential no one else has ever come close to.”
Aiden’s hands curled into fists. “Potential for what?”
Ulysses’s smile was almost gentle, and that terrified me more than his smirk ever could. “To unlock the Source. Permanently. Not in fleeting glimpses or stolen moments. We’re talking a direct vein into the heart of its power. Imagine what that could mean for the one who controls it.”
“No one is controlling my son,” I snapped.
“You think I want to control him?” Ulysses’s tone shifted, quieter now. “I want to keep him alive. Which, given who’s involved, is no small task.”
“Forgive me if I don’t take parenting advice from someone who sees people as bargaining chips,” Aiden said, the venom in his voice still carrying Sylara’s name even when he didn’t say it aloud.
Ulysses’s gaze flicked to him. “Better a bargaining chip than a sacrificial lamb. At least a chip can be moved out of harm’s way if the board changes.”
“Enough, both of you!” I interjected, my voice slicing through the tension like a knife.
Aiden’s gaze shifted to me, his jaw set, and the determination etched on his face was unmistakable. “I’m coming with you,” he stated firmly.
“You can’t,” I whispered. “If they see you…”
“They’ll kill him anyway if you go alone,” Ulysses said smoothly. “Which is why I’ll go with you.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” Aiden muttered. “The man who’d trade his own mother for leverage suddenly wants to play hero?”
Ulysses’s smile was thin. “And the boy who let Sylara bleed out thinks he gets to judge my motives?”
The old wound flared again, sharp enough to make Aiden flinch.
I couldn’t do this, not now. “Stop. Both of you.” My voice cracked, but it was enough to silence them. “I don’t have time for your history. This is my son.”
The room went still.
Ulysses took a slow step toward me, his voice dropping to that dangerous, silken register. “They’re expecting you’ll bring company,” he murmured. “But if you keep them at bay, even for a little while, it might buy us time.”
I scrolled back to the photo, drinking in every detail. The last rays of sunlight struggled to break through the thickening shadows, merging with the ethereal glow of the symbols in a disconcerting dance that sent chills racing down my spine.
The memory of that dreadful night flickered to life in my mind, igniting a vivid picture of the old mill.
Flames from the bonfire flickered and danced, casting a warm light that danced against the trees, their shadows stretching like dark fingers across the ground.
The air was alive with the pulse of music, notes ricocheting off the trunks, mingling with laughter and shouts that seemed to echo through the night.
Suddenly, the cacophony faded, replaced by an eerie stillness as the revelry slipped away, leaving only the sharp, cold moonlight to pierce the darkness.
The trees stood sentinel, their leaves rustling softly, murmuring secrets meant for those who dared to listen.
This was where my journey had begun, where innocence had been stripped away.
I grasped at that memory, holding it tight, a jagged shard of the past that became my shield against the encroaching dread of the present.
“I need to go,” I said again, more to myself than anyone else. “Now.”
Aiden moved to intercept, but I slipped past him, already halfway to the door. Aiden’s eyes burned into mine, fierce and unyielding. “Don’t go with him alone.”
I could feel them both at my back, one a storm about to break, the other a shadow with secrets to spare. Two sets of eyes, one wolf, one vampire, waiting for me to choose which side of hell I’d walk into.
The only thing that mattered now was Mateo. Nothing else. My heart was a live wire, sparking and burning me from the inside out.
I paused at the threshold, let the weight of the moment settle. The woods waited for me, ancient and hungry. I didn’t know what was waiting inside them, only that I would tear the world apart before I let it take my son.
“Time’s running out, Josie,” Ulysses warned, his eyes glowing with supernatural intensity. “What’s it going to be?” he said, “Your son’s life… or your trust in us?”
The words pressed on me like a physical weight.
And somewhere outside, the night felt suddenly too quiet.