Chapter 4 Shadows of the curse

CHAPTER FOUR

It wasn't quite long after I woke, darkness enveloped me not the calm, comforting kind that comes with a quiet night but a heavy, suffocating darkness that pressed against my chest, making each breath a labor. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. The air reeked of bitter herbs and cold stone. My head throbbed violently, and my limbs felt as if they were stuffed with lead. I tried to move, but pain shot through my ribs so sharply that I gasped, clutching my sides.

When my vision finally adjusted, I realized I was back in the infirmary. But this time, the room was worse somehow. Dimmer. The lanterns flickered lazily, almost as though time itself was dragging, weighed down by some invisible force. My breath came in short, uneven bursts, and when I placed a trembling hand over my chest, I felt it something was wrong. My heartbeat didn’t seem in sync with the rest of me, like it was struggling to keep up, like it was fading.

I tried to remember what had happened, but the memories were shards of pain and confusion until they slammed into me all at once. The shadows I’d glimpsed outside. The silver eyes at the edge of the trees. The sharp, commanding voice in my head saying I was still his. And then… the healer’s words from yesterday resurfaced: Your wolf is too quiet. This isn’t normal rejection pain. Your pulse keeps dropping. You’re under something darker. At the time, they had sounded strange, almost unbelievable. Now, they made sense in the worst possible way.

The Alpha’s curse.

I shivered, not from cold, but from fear. And then another memory struck me, one I had brushed aside as exhaustion. When I had been half-conscious the first time, the healer had whispered to another nurse, thinking I couldn’t hear. She said she had seen symptoms like mine only once before a wolf suffering from a cursed bond rupture. A bond broken by an Alpha. She had explained, her voice low and tight, that the curse eats from the inside. First the wolf side weakens, then the senses dull, the strength fades… and finally, the heart itself begins to fail and i could tell something is operating within me.

My chest tightened painfully at the memory. No wonder I had collapsed twice. No wonder my wolf wouldn’t answer me. No wonder the shadows, the whispers, the visions haunted me. I wasn’t just hurting. I was breaking and it was eating me up inside.

I tried to sit up, but my arms trembled violently, refusing to support me. The effort sent a deep, burning ache down my spine, and an icy cold spread through my body, as if my blood itself were freezing. I gritted my teeth and clenched the sheets until my knuckles ached. This wasn’t just the pain of rejection. This was something deeper. Something designed to punish, to bind.

I closed my eyes and drew slow, trembling breaths, letting the sharp throb of pain mark each inhale. But even in that small reprieve, my thoughts circled back to him. Xander hadn’t come. He hadn’t checked on me, hadn’t even seemed to care. But the curse didn’t need his attention it only needed the public, brutal rejection he had handed me in front of the pack. The wolf inside me whimpered, faint and fragile, like a dying echo. My eyes flew open at the sound. That small noise terrified me more than the oppressive silence surrounding me. She wasn’t just quiet now she was weakening, fading.

I pressed my hand harder against my chest, as though trying to physically hold myself together. My mind raced. How do I stop this? Can it even be stopped?

Footsteps creaked along the infirmary floor, echoing softly behind me. The healer’s door opened slowly. I didn’t turn. I didn’t want anyone to see the brokenness etched into my pale, trembling face, the fear and exhaustion that had hollowed me out. If I collapsed again… I feared I might not wake.

Time stretched in agonizing silence, broken only by the soft flicker of lantern light and my shallow, uneven breaths. My wolf stirred weakly inside, and I tried to reach for her, to whisper words of strength, but my voice caught in my throat. I felt like I was watching myself from outside, powerless, as my body betrayed me. The curse was not subtle it was consuming, relentless.

I remembered the first night I had collapsed. The sharp voice of the Alpha in my head. The terror of feeling my own wolf recoil from me. At the time, I had thought it was just a twisted form of grief, of heartbreak. Now, I knew the truth. My wolf wasn’t just hurting she was dying piece by piece. The rejection had opened the door, but the curse was doing the rest, gnawing at her strength, her senses, her very existence.

The lanterns flickered again, slow and deliberate. Shadows shifted across the walls, dancing in ways that didn’t seem natural. I tried to focus on them, to find something familiar, anything to anchor me, but everything seemed wrong. The air smelled sharper now, like iron and ash. My pulse dropped, my vision swam, and panic rose in my chest like a tide. I was slipping, inch by agonizing inch, toward something I couldn’t name, couldn’t fight.

And then it hit me with brutal clarity: this curse wasn’t just punishment. It was possession. It was binding. And it didn’t care about my cries, my suffering, or my desperate pleas. All it needed was the connection the bond I shared with him and it was taking everything from the inside out.

I pressed my hand over my chest again, my nails digging into the skin, desperate to anchor myself to the world, to something real. My wolf whimpered again, weaker this time, and I wanted to scream, to demand that someone save her, save me but no sound came. My throat was dry. My body was too heavy to lift. The darkness pressed harder, and the cold inside me deepened.

I felt utterly, terrifyingly alone.

The healer stepped closer, and I could hear her breathing, slow and careful, but I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I couldn’t show how fragile I had become. I couldn’t let anyone see how close I was to being consumed entirely. My wolf’s faint whimper echoed in my chest, and tears stung my eyes. I swallowed hard, pressing my forehead to the cool, damp sheets.

If I didn’t fight, if I didn’t find a way to anchor myself… I feared I would disappear into the darkness forever.

And yet… even in the depths of despair, even as the curse clawed at me from the inside, I knew one thing with undeniable clarity: I wouldn’t go quietly. I couldn’t. Because if I let this curse win, I would lose everything not just my wolf, not just myself, but every shred of freedom, every heartbeat that was still mine.

I gritted my teeth and my Jaws gnawing, tightened my hands on the sheets, and willed myself to stay,to breathe, and to survive somehow.

Even if it meant fighting the shadows.

Even if it meant fighting him.