Filed to story: Confirming His Luna by Eyes Novel >>
My mother.
I’ll find a way to believe it later. Right now, I need to find a way for us to get out of here in one piece.
Vannesa’s strawberry blonde hair is tattered, and it clings to her to the filth on her face. Her eyes are closed, and she’s not moving. But as my father desperately falls to his knees and reaches for her, relief washes over his features.
Still breathing.
‘How touching,’ Viktor coos, his lips curling back to reveal glinting fangs in a smile that’s more of a snarl on his ferocious features.
I ignore him, reaching for my father’s mind so Viktor won’t hear. ‘Get her out of here.’
There are too many of them, and while we’re still under cover of clouds, the sun has gotten brighter by the hour. I don’t know how long the battle has been going, but we can’t count on the mist. Marco needs to get inside the keep, and he needs to take my mother with him.
Viktor’s voice draws my attention back to him before my father can reply. “Such a moving family reunion,” he taunts.
I look back at my uncle, anger unlike anything I’ve ever known boiling the blood in my veins. I force myself to swallow it down and look at him evenly.
‘I won’t leave you, child,’ Marco says, his voice urgent, but I do not turn to face him when I reply.
‘I’ll be right behind you. Trust me; just go.’
I need him to leave first. He’s injured, but he can use his shadows to carry Vanessa away with him to safety. I just have to distract Viktor long enough for my father to shift and get off this bridge.
‘So, you know who I really am,’ I tell Viktor, and it’s not a question. He knows where I come from, there’s no doubt of that left.
‘Stupid girl. I’ve always known.’
Well… I didn’t see that coming.
My breath catches in my throat as I look at my uncle in horror. How did he know? When did he find out exactly? What was his plan?
‘I realized it the moment you were born. When I saw your eyes, I knew what you were. My sister had brought a half-breed mutt into the world. As you grew older, it only became more obvious. The ethereal pale skin, the unnatural quiet way in which you moved, the way you survived in hunger and darkness. Everything about you was wrong. I thought I’d be rid of you, but when I received reports that you were taken in by the vampires, I knew my time had come to set things right once and for all.’
His villainous monologue is interrupted by a ruffling sound behind me. Viktor’s eyes shift away from me as shadows unfurl around my father like black ink seeping into the air around him. My mother hangs limply in his arms, and suddenly, they’re no longer solid but rather a cloud of bats and blackness.
‘No!’ Viktor yells. He moves to pounce on them as my parents dematerialize into a haze of wings and blackness. The Night King will take Vanessa away from here just as he did with me that fateful night by the lake.
He can get her out. I can save them both.
I leap in between Viktor and my parents, and we topple over one another once again as I knock him off balance. He snarls and snaps at me in a rage, but it’s too late.
They’re already gone.
‘You think you’re so brave, but you’re a fool! Such a noble sacrifice to save your mother, but in the end, it won’t matter. You’ll never get to meet her anyway.
I duck his bite, slipping between his legs to try and put some distance between his teeth and my neck.
‘She’s your sister!’ I cry, my thoughts broken with sorrow. ‘You were supposed to be family. How could you?’
‘My sister died the moment she dirtied herself by sharing her bed with a filthy bloodsucker. She was broken. The only reason I didn’t put her out of her misery is because losing her mind after fucking a vampire was punishment enough. I locked her away to live out the rest of her miserable days in secret. Letting the world think she died of natural causes was a kindness.’
So he doesn’t know everything. He believes my mother actually lost her mind.
Vanessa’s act of insanity may not have allowed her to escape the Banes as she’d hoped, but it kept her alive.
Still, sparing her had not been a mercy. If she was just crazy instead of in love, Viktor must have believed he could still control her. Besides, wolves look after their own. If the pack found out their Alpha had killed his own sister for loving a vampire, it could lead them to question his morality and authority. Locking her up while claiming she went insane and passed away had been the best way to preserve his reputation. The coward couldn’t handle her blood on his hands, and so long as Vanessa acted crazy enough to not be a threat, she wasn’t worth killing.
‘Kindness?’ I scoff. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
Dozens of Banes have gathered around us, watching and waiting for a command from their Alpha. My uncle always loved an audience.
I need to get off this bridge and back to the keep. But Viktor won’t take his eyes on me. The second I lower my guard enough to focus on transforming, he’ll attack.
Panic begins to build as I realize I was barely able to shift into bats the first time. I don’t have control over my powers to escape like my father did, and there’s no one else here to create a distraction to buy me enough time to try. Viktor will kill me before I even leave the ground.
Somewhere in the quiet corners of my soul, something whispers within me. I sense it rather than hear it; not a message but a feeling.
Tristan is coming for me. I don’t know how or when, but I’m sure of it.
But how can I wait for him when time is exactly what I don’t have? I’m completely surrounded, and the only reason Viktor hasn’t killed me yet is that he enjoys the sound of his own voice too much. I have to keep him talking.
My life just might depend on it.
‘I suppose you think that what you did to me was also an act of mercy,’ I tell my uncle, coaxing the conversation out of him. ‘You turned me into your slave and let me think I was nothing!’
‘That’s exactly what you were. Nothing,’ he replies as we circle each other. ‘I should have rid the world of you the minute you were born. But I made a mistake. Vanessa gave birth to an abomination, but perhaps I could shape the mutt into something worthy. You were supposed to be Vanessa’s redemption, but instead, you were just a waste.’
Lies. Foul, disgusting lies. I realize at that moment that he didn’t spare my life out of mercy. He didn’t even do it because he’s above murdering a newborn babe. He wanted to use me. He hated the nightwalkers. He despised the fact that they were different and he was never able to defeat them.
All his disdain and disappointment toward me, it was never about me not manifesting a wolf… I was supposed to be his weapon, a way for him to wield the power of his enemies. I represent everything he hates and envies.
‘You never meant to raise me. You wanted to use me. Instead, you just abused me for being something you didn’t understand.’
Tristan is coming for me, but he’ll never make it across the bridge, and I certainly won’t last long enough to try and meet him halfway.
‘I treated you better than you deserved, you wretch. And look at you now. Wasted to die on the wrong side of history. You could have been my greatest warrior. I made you what you are. I made you strong, and this is how you repay me?’
Wrong. My father’s love and my mother’s choices are the reason I am here today. Lucy, Nico, Amara, and even Mark made me strong. So did Tristan’s patience and protectiveness, his courage and caring. Working in the garden, leaving the door to my room unlocked, washing away my pain, training in the villa… those are the things that shaped me.
‘No. You held me back. You beat me and starved and denied me any sense of self. But I know who I am now. Everything that I am is not because of you; it is in spite of you.’
He lets out a low warning growl, but I ignore it, glancing around at the wolves watching us. Some of them are Banes, and I recognize their faces as they avert their eyes, showing me no pity. Others are foreign to me, presumably soldiers from the other packs that were swayed by Viktor’s ambition and hate.
‘But you’re right, uncle,’ I say, turning back to him. ‘Look at me now. I’m just the scared little girl you beat and locked in the basement, but you brought a whole army to come after me. You didn’t even trust your own pack to be enough, so you had to frighten and bully others into joining you. You couldn’t kill me when I was an infant. What makes you think you can do it now?’
To his credit, Viktor doesn’t come at me then and there. He’s not used to this side of me, and he senses the bait dangling between my words. But as his eyes take in the warriors that surround us, I know I have him. He must kill me himself unless he wants the world to see him for the coward that he truly is.
Just the two of us.
‘Have it your way, mutt. But don’t fret; once I’ve personally disposed of you, I’ll send your parents to join you in the afterlife.’
I try to conceal the triumph on my face when the wolves around us back off, clearing a circle around me as they make room for their leader to prove himself. At least this way, I get to face him one-on-one. At least this way, the odds aren’t so horribly stacked against me. At least this way…
This way, I still have to kill him.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?