Chapter 4

The guards seized my arms without gentleness and dragged me away. I didn’t fight them. My body felt hollow and drained. They marched me through familiar corridors that now felt alien and hostile, until we reached my father’s private chambers.

They pushed me into his room and the heavy door slammed shut behind me. I heard the bolt slide into place and the guards took up position outside.

I was now alone in my dead father’s room.

The room still smelled like him and the faint trace of strength that had defined my father.

His great bed, his heavy oak desk, the fur rugs… everything was exactly as he had left it, now stained with the ghost of violence. A dark smear of blood near the doorway made my stomach twist.

I sank to my knees in the center of the room, the coarse linen shift pooling around me like a sack and everything crashed down at once, the massacre, the public declaration, the endless mockery and the loss of everything I had ever known.

A broken sob tore from my throat. Then another. I curled in on myself, forehead pressed to the cold floorboards as I cried harder than I had since the attack. Great, heaving sobs shook my entire body as I remembered everything. My father was gone. My pack was shattered. And Darren… the boy I had once loved, the man who now owned me… had become my tormentor.

“Why?” I whispered through the tears. “Why like this?”

I cried until my throat was raw and my eyes burned. In the silence that followed, something shifted beneath my knee. A floorboard. It felt… loose.

Still sniffling, I wiped my face with the back of my hand and pressed down on it. The board lifted with a soft creak. Heart pounding, I pulled it up completely, revealing a small, hidden compartment carved into the floor.

Inside lay a folded letter, sealed with my father’s personal wax crest. My hands shook as I broke the seal and opened it. The handwriting was unmistakably my father’s hasty, written in the hours before the attack.

Lyra,

If you are reading this, then the worst has happened. I have little time.

I never told you the full truth about why I forbade your bond with Darren. It was never simply because of his exile or his temper. I have been researching his bloodline for years. His family carries the old blood, an ancient Alpha lineage the Council tried to wipe from existence generations ago. A line of wolves said to hold power that could upend the entire balance.

Your rejection of him… it was the only way I knew to protect you. If you two ever formally bond, the Council will see you both as a threat. They will not stop until you are both destroyed. Darren does not know the full extent of what he carries. I fear what he has become in exile, but I fear the Council’s shadow even more.

Keep this hidden. Trust no one. If I fall, you must survive. The truth may be your only weapon.

Forgive me, daughter.

Haralson

I stared and read the letter, shock freezing the tears on my cheeks. My breath caught in my throat and the room seemed to tilt around me.

Darren’s bloodline… ancient. Dangerous. A threat to the Alpha Council itself.

All this time, my father had pushed me away from Darren not out of cruelty or pride, but to shield me from something far larger and deadlier. My rejection, the thing that had led to his exile, to all this bloodshed had been my father’s desperate attempt at protection.

And now I was Darren’s prisoner. His war prize.

I clutched the letter to my chest, heart hammering wildly as new questions flooded my mind. Did Darren know any of this? Was this why the Council had allowed or even encouraged his return as a weapon?

The weight of the discovery pressed down on me heavier than any chain. I was no longer just a broken princess crying in her father’s room.

I was sitting on a secret that could destroy everything.

The sudden scrape of the bolt sliding open made me jolt.

Panic exploded through me and I scrambled, shoving the letter beneath the loose floorboard just as the heavy door swung inward. I tried to push the board back into place, but it was too late.

Darren stepped into the room, his massive frame filling the doorway. His cold ocean-blue eyes immediately locked onto me kneeling on the floor, one hand still hovering guiltily over the slightly raised floorboard.

“What are you doing down there?” His voice was low, dangerously quiet. He took a slow step forward. “What are you hiding, Lyra?”

“Nothing,” I breathed, my voice shaky as I quickly sat back on my heels, trying to block the compartment with my body. Tears still clung to my lashes, and I knew I looked wrecked filthy and now caught.

Darren’s gaze narrowed. He closed the door behind him with and stalked closer, his boots silent on the fur rugs. The air in the room grew thick with his presence.

“Is that fear I smell?” he asked, tilting his head as he loomed over me. “Or guilt?” He added.

“Both,” I admitted instantly. “Why would you feel guilty?” He asked confused.

“Because I lied in front of the pack,” I whispered, dropping my gaze. “Because you are my mate, and we both knew it. The pack knew the truth, Darren. I rejected you because I was trying to protect you from my father.” I lied, trying to hide the truth I read.

“You were protecting yourself, you selfish bitch. You were always good at protecting yourself from everyone, weren’t you? You pretend to be so selfless, and the moment you fear repercussion, you go into self-preservation mode. I just failed to see that truth when I let you past my shields and showed you who I was. The first moment you got a deeper look into the fucking mess that was me, you ran. When you saw inside my soul and glimpsed my pain, you abandoned me because you are nothing more than a self-serving bitch.” He murmured angrily.

“No that’s not.....”, I started but he cut me off in mid sentence.

“You were always running from anything that made you choose between your father and us. You and me we were written on a dying star that was burning out before we’d ever etched our names onto it. Now fucking collect yourself and tell me where my cousin brother is. I won’t let you ruin him as you did me”

“He is with Nyra but what you have said about us is wrong, I didn’t want my father to send you out of the pack”, I tried to explain.

“Shut up, you don’t know any thing about the world beyond these walls and past this mountain.” He growled.

“And tomorrow, I want you to wake up early and do the pack chores”, He added and before I could add any word, he walked out.