What?â Itâs like every cell in my body stops as a deathly silence fills the air, shock stilling my thoughts, my lungs ceasing to move, and you can hear a pin drop as his words sink in slowlyâso fucking slow.
Juan executed my family. They didnât die in battle.
Thatâs a lie. It canât be true because they werenât the only pack to never return. The entire Whyte line, among others, all died protecting our kind.
For Godâs sake, it was a war, and we had many casualties. Did Juan kill them all, too?
The doc has to be playing me, lying to mess with my head for some kind of ulterior motive, and Iâm falling for it.
Perhaps I was wrong to trust him, and this is all a ploy to break me down and get the intel he thinks I may have⦠but how would he know her name?
Maybe itâs a test to see if Iâm strong enough to turn, despite being in this isolation tank.
I take a much-needed breath as I begin to suffocate under the pressure of my mounting emotions, realizing I wasnât inhaling or letting it go.
I take a moment to let it sink in, my head spinning as my brain tries to dissect and make sense of each word and how it comes together with what he just said.
I donât know how to react: cry, rage, scream, laugh? I sit here like a numb deadweight staring at him as though he just told me the world is ending and weâre to wait here to die.
Iâm momentarily devoid of feeling as shock fills the void. It has a different effect on my body, though, and I think I might throw up for a second.
I wretch, my body lurching, and as it all spins out of control, I have to lift my heels to the edge of the bed so I can prop my head between my knees to ground myself.
I swallow down the rush of saliva that clogs my throat and breathe through the waves of nausea.
âIâm sorry⦠my memory is not what it was.
âBut the gist is that Juan was eliminating the possibility of a prophecy coming to fruition⦠a white wolf queen rising from the shadows to reign the people in a victorious and united future.
âJuan believed your mother would dethrone him after she proved herself a worthy warrior on the battlefield and led many a victorious attack on your enemy by uniting the packs.
âYour kind was losing the war, and she turned it around⦠your mother. She was gifted, special, and more powerful than he could ever dream of being.
âShe was the kind of specimen I could only dream of being able to study.â
He sounds concerned, regretful, and apologetic all at once, but itâs all meaningless noise, and I just keep coming back to it over and over.
Juan⦠he killed them all. My whole family. All those that mattered to me. My past ten years have been a lie, and I suffered, not because they failed, but because he took them from me.
This canât be true, especially not if she was so powerful.
âThen how did he⦠if she wasâ¦â The words die on my tongue, hastily uttered in a breath as my brain tries to rationalize the details.
Warm salty tears roll down my cheeks, and I sit, absorbing a history I never knew as the pieces are laid out before me.
I am confused by the conflicting statement of what Iâve always been told, and a fire of rage is building inside me slowly to overcome the icy cold that has spread through my nerve endings.
Itâs like a drip, drip as itâs fed and allowed to grow slowly.
It warms my belly and spreads across my pelvis and down my limbs, something growing inside me so all-consuming that I almost welcome its warm, fluid expansion to my cold, empty soul.
My brain just cannot seem to filter and arrange it to make sense.
âYour father was her weak point. Just a peaceful land-dwelling wolf he murdered to get to her.
âYour kindâs devastating ability to kill both mates with one blow, and sadly an uneven pairing as that was her only downfall.
âItâs a rather sad travesty that even your strongest is only as strong as the mate bonded to them in the end, and it highlights the importance of why they shun the impure.
âHe then ordered his sub-pack to hunt down and kill everyone from the pack she was residing with in case they linked in the last moments and knew of his treason.
âHe had to tidy up loose ends, you see. He had to cover his tracks, and only his âloyalâ knew what heâd done and aided him.â
I inhale sharply, my heart constricting as tears bite my eyes and the words wound my soul. Iâm sliced open and ravaged with a more devastating truth than the one I lived for ten years.
None of the Whyte pack returned from war, as they were apparently cursed as warriors and fell at the first battle.
They are not strong enough, fast enough, and able to hold their own because they are weak land workers and not warriors at all.
All lies.
They were all slaughtered by Juan and his trusted sub-pack, his elders, his closestâthose he now wears like a shroud to lead from behind on the mountain.
This meant Sierra saw it all, too, as his luna; she was always by his side and followed him into battle. None of them jumped to defend her because they were just as guilty as her mate.
My mother, father, brother, and grandparents are all gone at Juanâs hand, and I cannot contain the fury growing within me as my mind puts the pieces together, and it all adds up.
The return of the wolves saw everything change, and they ripped children like me away from guardian families who had vowed to care for us and pushed us into that home, except for me.
Vampires slaughtered my guardians, the last of the Whytes, in the middle of the night. I now wonder if that was a lie, too.
We went from being cared for, cherished by wolves who opened their homes to us, all while our families fought, to being almost outlawed, in a way, by Santo wolves.
They spread the word that the war was nearly lost because of our bloodlines.
They told them not to respect us as the remaining legacy of fallen heroes but to leave us to fade out and kill an impure invasion on future generations.
They started the second they returned, pushing all of us into that dark side of the mountain and maintaining we were cursed.
Why didnât he just kill me, too?
Words fail me, and I stare at the doc as I lift my head, catching the wariness in his eye as he sees my expression and hesitates to move away a little.
My heart is pounding, my breathing shallow, and a twisting knife of pain devours me as it sinks in and courses through every cell of my body.
Juan did the most unthinkable thing of all: broke our laws and killed his ownâkilled mine and my own! For what fucking reason?!
A prophecy about a rising wolf? A story? A fable that hadnât even come to fruition. He thought ~he~ could overpower the Fates, take what he wanted, and push things in his way?
Itâs almost as if the doc can feel my questioning, or maybe itâs my silent, deathly manner as I sit up stock straight and lower my chin to glare hatefully across his shoulder at the luna beyond.
Itâs not a look at her; itâs at everything Iâm now finding out and canât control. He betrayed her, just as he betrayed his entire people. My family. He betrayed his own son.
âSierra was meant to be his answerâa hybrid witch and wolf. He thought that searching out this white queen and mating her would assure him the power he longed for.
âSierra is a black wolf, though, something he overlooked as a minor detail, and when their tale did not push them into the path of the story he thought was rightfully his, he took matters into his own hands.
âThe rising of your mother made him insane. Upon returning from the wars, they wiped the books free of any hint of a prophecy, forbidding the shamans from teaching it to the young.
âHe rewrote history to hide it. He pushed all traces of what he did into a coma to silence her for her treason.â
His voice is tight, tension hitching, and I can taste his nervousness as he backs away, shuffling out of my way to give me a clear view of the lifeless soul Iâm fixated on.
My whole being is poised like Iâm on the verge of lashing out and ripping this room to shreds, such is the crazy hate and anger coursing through me, and I clutch the bed viciously to hold myself in check.
I am torn between mounting fury and heartbreaking, crippling devastation. If I could turn, I would already be ripping this facility apart with the intensity of everything I feel inside me.
A storm rages to be set free, yet my heart aches to the point I think it may stop beating under the force of pressure.
Itâs an agony incomparable to anything, and my entire truth crumbles like ash around the ruins of my fire.
âHe knew Sierra was a mixed-breed. He knows he destroyed something decided by the Fates. Does he think he has that power? That worth?â I snarl.
My voice is unrecognizable as this feeds my desire to combust in a tornado of destruction.
I never knew I could harbor so much longing to find one man, hunt him down, and enjoy ripping him limb from limb. Slowly and painfully.
I can almost taste it that want to have it. The bloodlust is coursing through me in hot waves as I visualize that narcissistic asshole and what Iâm going to do to him when he gets within an inch of me.
My body is bristling and goose-bumping, my heart rate is rising, and my lungs quicken to accommodate my rapid breathing.
âYes. It was by design that he sought her out and traveled far to find her, sweeping her off her feet and mating to her so he could possess her for eternity.
âHe thought he could fulfill and control the prophecy and further his desire to rule. She was a relatively isolated wolf, naive, unloved.
âHer pack rejected her because of her roots, and she fell straight into the arms of the first genuine love shown to her.
âShe was known as a witch, and you know theyâre as much a wolfâs enemy as the vampires, which made her a cursed and fearful species.
âShe told me she fell madly in love and didnât find out about his ulterior motive until she had been his for many months and already bound by the mate bond.â
He looks toward her, a sad, distant glaze in his glassy eyes as he remembers their conversations and the regret of not believing her when he should have.
âSo, how did she end up here? If she had powers⦠witches are strong. You said she tried to stop him, so why couldnât she?â I ask.
Iâm devilishly low-toned and controlled, the growl coming through in my voice, leaning to anger to avoid the pain inside me, and I can feel my inner wolf tossing and turning with the frustrating need to be set free.
Itâs sharpening its claws and begging to be uncaged.
âShe betrayed him by sacrificing her own life to protect a child who can regain the balance of things. Sierra is a seer and a witch.
âYes, she has powers unlike any wolf, but they are not strong like a warrior. They are useful for protection on a small scale, and she has abilities to control certain aspects of others.
âSheâs a healer, not a fighter, and she did what she thought could make a difference.â
âMeaning?â I turn to him fully and lock onto him, seeing him swallow hard. His mistrust of my current behavior is written all over him.
At this moment, heâs afraid of me, and heâs nervously spewing words to try to diffuse it or keep me focused on anything other than turning on him.
Even without my wolf sense, I can smell the terror coming in waves from him. Itâs not intentional, but these feelings are bigger than me, and I have no will to reel them in right now.
It is fractured and seeping, and I donât know how to stop it from pouring out and pooling around me like a dense smog.