Chapter 7 Rhys
RHYS
The hospital waiting room looked like someone had painted sterility all over the walls.
White on white on soul-crushing white—whoever designed this place clearly believed suffering should come with matching décor.
I was already planning which wall I’d hit first with a massive coat of green paint when we remodeled this hellscape.
Logan vibrated beside me like a bomb counting down to zero. His wolf pressed so close to the surface that the air around us practically sizzled with barely contained violence. Through our bond, I felt his fear, his rage, his desperate need to fix something that might be fundamentally broken.
My foot hammered against the floor in a rhythm that probably made everyone within fifty yards want to strangle me. Good. If I had to sit in this antiseptic nightmare, everyone else could suffer too.
Pregnant.
The word kept ricocheting around my skull like a bullet looking for vital organs.
Six years since we’d heard a baby’s cry in Orion territory.
Six fucking years of empty nurseries and shattered dreams, of pack members staring at their mates like they’d never be able to start a family, of hope dying a little more each month.
Once upon a time, the Orions didn’t just lead a pack—we commanded an empire.
Multiple sub-packs spread across territories that stretched from mountain peaks to coastal shores, each with its own alpha who answered to our Great Alpha.
We were the heart that pumped life through all the Shadow Moon packs, the law that kept order, the strength that protected the weak.
Other packs sent tribute. Begged for alliances. Traveled hundreds of miles just to petition for our wisdom.
Now we were a cautionary tale whispered around distant campfires.
The Great Separation had gutted us. Within a few generations, it had carved out everything that made us legendary and left us scrambling to hold on to scraps.
Logan’s victory over Grayson should have been our resurrection story—the moment the mighty Orions reclaimed their birthright.
Instead, it had felt like winning a single battle while the real war continued to rage on around us.
Yesterday’s brawl between pack members had put Blair in the hospital three doors down, proof we were still bleeding internally. Heraclids and Orions trying to coexist, old grudges simmering beneath forced smiles. Peace held together with duct tape and bandages.
The other Shadow Moon packs weren’t exactly lining up to kiss our rings. Hard to command respect when you could barely keep your own wolves from tearing each other’s throats out.
We’d tried everything short of sacrificing goats to the Shadow Moon Goddess. Rituals that left us drained and disappointed, offerings that vanished into smoke without delivering miracles—precious metals, first hunts, even blood from our own veins poured onto ancient stones.
Some desperate souls had crawled to witches, trading pride for promises that turned to nothing the moment coins changed hands. I’d watched grown men return from those encounters looking hollow, knowing they’d been played.
The whispers had started in earnest a few years after the Great Separation, but had gotten worse when our parents were killed. The Goddess has truly abandoned us. Like we’re cursed. Pack members would stop talking when Logan entered a room, their conversations dying like snuffed candles.
Turned out, the whispers were right about the cursed part. Leave it to that cryptic bitch Mariyah to give us a name for our slow extinction. Curse. Our bloodline was withering on the vine, every generation producing fewer pups. Bonds that should have been unbreakable snapped like overloaded cables.
The Great Separation hadn’t just shattered pack alliances—it had ripped something essential out of our DNA.
Alphas dying young or losing their minds to the kind of feral madness that left them nothing but monsters wearing familiar faces.
Everything our ancestors built, crumbling to dust while we watched, helpless as children.
Then the curse that made Orion wither to an almost forgotten and lost pack.
But if Eve had conceived…
“Why didn’t you tell me?” It sounded more accusing than I meant it to be.
Logan kept his face buried in his hands as if he could hide from reality. “Because I didn’t know. Neither of us did.”
“How did you not know—” I stopped myself.
Even if the human didn’t want to accept that a pregnancy had a occurred, the wolf always knew.
Logan and Eve were our alphas—more than anyone, they’d have known almost from the moment of conception.
That’s the way it had always been. Though I shouldn’t have been surprised, since nothing about our situation followed normal rules anymore.
“She said it felt like someone whispering a secret into her visions, a sense that the child was there, then it was snatched back before she could understand the words.” His voice cracked like breaking glass. “Like the pregnancy was there and then gone.”
Something crashed, the sound echoing down the hallway. We both went rigid, predator instincts flaring, but silence swallowed the sound. Just us, trapped in this whitewashed purgatory while the most important person in my brother’s world fought battles we couldn’t reach.
I studied Logan’s profile, noting the new lines around his eyes, the way his shoulders carried a weight that hadn’t been there six months ago.
Being alpha had always been Logan’s destiny, but he’d inherited a broken crown and a dying kingdom.
Every day was a balancing act between holding together what remained and somehow building toward a future that seemed increasingly impossible.
And now this. Eve, his fated mate, his anchor in the storm—experiencing something none of us understood.
If we lost her…
I shoved the thought away before it could take root. Logan needed me, his beta, to be strong, not spiraling into catastrophic scenarios.
The door opened, cutting through my thoughts.
Anwen drifted in like an ancient oracle, all jingling jewelry and layered fabrics that seemed to contain stories from a dozen different eras.
Raina followed, her practical energy so different from Anwen’s mystical vibe that they might have been from different species entirely.
Logan exploded out of his chair before they’d crossed the threshold.
“How is she?” The words detonated from his chest. “Tell me everything, and don’t you dare cushion it with pretty lies.”
Anwen blinked at the raw desperation bleeding through his alpha mask, but she didn’t retreat. Good for her. Lesser wolves had cowered when faced with Logan at full intensity, but this Heraclid elder held her ground.
Raina radiated her particular brand of elder authority that could make grown wolves sit and behave. “She’s stable,” she said. “Logan, she wasn’t pregnant. Not in any conventional sense.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Logan’s hands fisted in his hair like he could physically tear the confusion out of his skull. “Are you calling her a liar?”
I rose to my feet, one hand clamping down on his shoulder. My wolf recognized the warning signs—his control shredding, his alpha instincts screaming at him to tear apart whatever threatened his mate. The problem was, you couldn’t fight phantom pregnancies with teeth and claws.
“Easy, brother.” I kept my voice low, steady. “Let them explain before you demolish the building.”
For a heartbeat, I thought he might take a swing at me. His wolf was right there, pressing against his skin, demanding action when there was no clear target. Instead, he spun and drove his fist through the wall with enough force to send splinters flying.
Anwen jumped backward, her hands flying to her chest. Raina just sighed—she’d seen alpha meltdowns before.
“Outstanding.” I surveyed the fresh hole in the drywall. “Add renovation to our ever-growing list of responsibilities. At this rate, we should just build the new settlement out of reinforced steel.”
Through our bond, I pushed what little calm I could scrape together into the chaos of his emotions.
You’re losing it, and that’s not helping Eve.
She needs her alpha in control, not having a breakdown in a hospital waiting room.
Whatever is going on, we’ll figure it out. You and me. Like we always do.
His shoulders dropped fractionally, the immediate violence ebbing. I hate when you’re the voice of reason.
Yeah, well, someone has to keep you from punching your way through the entire hospital. Save some walls for the rest of us to destroy.
That earned me a grunt that almost qualified as amusement.
“My apologies,” Logan said to the elders, though his voice was gravelly enough to pave a road. “Anwen, you’ve been nothing but helpful since joining us, and I’m acting like a rabid animal. That’s not who I usually am.”
“You’re acting like a terrified mate,” Anwen corrected gently, her weathered face creasing with understanding. “Which, given what we’ve discovered, seems entirely appropriate.”
The tension in the room eased from imminent violence to merely simmering disaster. Progress, of sorts.
“There’s magic at work in Eve,” Anwen continued. “Something that reaches deeper than flesh, deeper than pack bonds. Ancient magic I’ve only read about in texts that predate the Great Separation.”
“Define ancient,” Logan demanded.
The look that passed between Anwen and Raina made my wolf pace restlessly in my chest. Whatever they’d discovered had rattled them—two of the most experienced healers in our territory—and that was saying something.
“Oracle magic,” Anwen said finally. “Not the diluted version we’ve seen in recent generations. This connects directly to the first wolves, the bloodlines that existed before the Great Separation fractured everything.”
My blood turned to ice water. There was only one bloodline that old, only one pack that predated the others under the Shadow Moon.
“You’re talking about Crux.”
“Crux wolves died out centuries ago,” Logan said, but the words carried about as much conviction as a prayer in a hurricane.
“Did they?” Anwen’s eyes glittered with a knowledge that made my skin crawl. “Or did they simply learn survival meant invisibility?”
I felt the exact moment understanding hit Logan. His face went white.
The pieces slammed together with the subtlety of a freight train. Eve’s impossible visions that came true with terrifying accuracy. Her connection to magic that defied every rule we knew. The way she’d always seemed slightly other, even when we’d believed she was nothing more than Grayson’s oracle.
“She’s Crux,” I repeated.
“The ancient Crux magic awakened when she bonded with you,” Raina confirmed to Logan.
“Her blood recognizes an alpha powerful enough to be trusted with its secrets.” She paused, glancing at Anwen before continuing.
“When I touched her during the examination, the magic threw me against the wall hard enough to crack the stone.”
So that was the crash we’d heard earlier.
Logan went statue-still, and through our bond, I felt his world reorganizing itself around this new reality. “And the curse Mariyah spoke of, the one on Orion?”
“… is fighting her,” Anwen finished. “Her body wanted to conceive, but something is actively preventing Orion bloodlines from continuing. The curse recognized the threat a Crux-Orion child would represent and struck back.”
The room seemed to contract around us, squeezing the air from my lungs. Six years of failed pregnancies in the pack suddenly made horrifying sense. We weren’t just unlucky—we were under deliberate attack.
“How do we break it?” Logan’s question came out flat, deadly.
“The same way all curses are broken,” Raina said quietly. “By confronting the source.”
I watched understanding dawn across Logan’s face like sunlight breaking through storm clouds, and my wolf began to howl before my conscious mind caught up.
“Mariyah,” Logan breathed. “At the bonfire. She said there would be no peace for Orion until the lost threads were woven back together.”
My chest tightened. “The twins.”
“Nash and Wyatt.” Logan’s voice carried new steel. “We find them, we break the curse.”
The certainty in his words should have been comforting.
Instead, all I could think about was her.
The mysterious woman who’d invaded my dreams with visions of my brothers, chained and broken.
Who’d claimed knowledge she had no right to possess.
Who’d disappeared like smoke before I could demand answers, leaving me with nightmares and a hunger that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Sable. Even thinking her name made my wolf pace restlessly, torn between desire and suspicion.
“We gather at dawn—the inner circle,” Logan said. “We figure out our next steps and we make this happen.”
I looked at my brother, hoping he couldn’t see the torment going on between my wolf and I. “I know where to start.”