Chapter 26: Attack.

His brief speech is disconnected. It floats like a joke in the charged air and blends in with the rustling of wolves and the humming of twigs. Oliva looks between astonishment and commiseration and understands.

She had been blind and arrogant, not seeing the truth before her. The hostility between them was never about her resentment at being exiled from her family, nor about one to envy. Dimitri used these motives as a smokescreen, a subterfuge to conceal a larger and more dangerous link. The clandestine trait in his biography, being a leader of the hunters, returned its synonym of hatred. Behind lies and deception, this is reality.

Now everything makes sense.

Oliva points to Dimitri, but even before he sees any reaction from the wolves beside him, the man raises one hand and signals to his own, and from one second to the next it was as if all the pure air in that valley was desperately draining out of an emergency exit capsule.

And as if in a last gasp even from the half-light tuned to Dimitri's commands, the eyes of the responding wolves glimmered in vivid amber and red sparks. The sounds of transmutation were bounced off the trees making the noise echo louder all around, howls and growls invading even further into the valley. Oliva felt her insides begin to swirl.

The young woman begins to shiver with the icy air that pervades each one of them, she closes her eyelids to block this vision and calm her rapidly beating heart. She couldn't weaken, she had no right to fear, but she needed to admit what she feels. Oliva doesn't want to die for putting up a stupid fight between alphas, she just wanted to organize her new life in an uncomplicated way and live next to the one she loves. She just wants to live in peace. Her parched throat constricts, and she reopens her eyes and stares at the whole situation.

It was going to be a bodily confrontation and no matter what she said to try to stop it. It was going to happen.

"Attack!" Oliva shouts to her own who don't even wait for her to finish completing her speech and go forward in animalistic roars.

Oliva didn't even have time to think about how she would act in front of so many rabid wolves like these, Matteo grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the forest. This was no longer a safe place.

"We don't have that much time" Matteo hisses, "Oliv, listen to me, we have to get out of here!"

She listens to him but does not hear. Her feet were moving, but inside her head only the echoes of the brutal noise resounded like punches, extremely violent roars.

She glances back, seeing the violence taking hold in the middle of that peaceful valley, and faces Dimitri's face in his cynical smile in the middle of the circus he set up for himself and unveils his eyes focused on hers as Matteo pulled her around like a doll made of cloth. She sees the beliefs framed in the hard mask her cousin put on covering his real nature, twisted and selfish.

Not only that, but she senses her body weakening.

'Is this too much for me?'- Her eyes moisten, but she refuses to let this morbid feeling invade her completely. 'I don't want to fail, but do I have the power to win?' This insecurity dances to the blowing sound that buzzes in her ears with the quick steps into the darkness and inside her. It almost blinds his convictions and gags his voice. Almost.

It resurrects within her what she must do, what she must believe, who she is. Failure is a possibility, but you have to remember.

Winning is not the happy ending of brave people, it is the destiny of those who go forward, despite the fear.

Winning is not the reward of the best, it is the sigh of relief of those who falter but persist to the end.

Fear makes us human, but resilience makes us stronger.

And she came to take her place in the darkness and turn her presence into hope for inequality.

Oliva came to use my scars as motivation and build her throne.

"Hey!" the young woman grumbles at Matteo. She couldn't keep up with his running, after all she might have had all the physical fitness, but she wasn't a wolf yet. "Easy there!" She pleaded feeling her throat itch from dehydration, however the alpha who held her wrist tightly wouldn't let her stop.

"Are you crazy to come to the middle of the forest with a bunch of people who don't know you! Do you have any idea how much risk you took?!" Matteo asks hurriedly trying to recognize the path by which he arrived in the valley, however he only sees the fog and the night darkness swallowing all the surrounding space.

"I know they hate me; you don't have to choose your words!" Oliva even though tired and with her inner voices messing up her mind, forced herself to keep her sanity. This was no time for another panic attack like the one she had experienced on that highway. The highway. Oliva felt goosebumps run through her body at the mere mention of a word, and hated the bitchy hot feeling of distress that Matteo made her feel. "What are you doing here? I told you to focus on the bedroom and wait for me!" she asked harshly as Matteo continued to pull unabashedly.

The alpha jumped over a medium log that broke that unremarkable path they were running down, as he pulled the girl, she became unbalanced causing her to trip over the high peak of the wood taking her to the ground in a comical act, if it wasn't tragic.

"I had a bad feeling." He says as if it were possible with a slight degree of sarcasm giving a double meaning to what had just happened when he hears the cold thud of the girl's body crashing to the ground. Matteo stops abruptly and looks at the girl stirring in the dry foliage and breathing raggedly, her nostrils are flared, and her cheeks are as red as a tomato and if she could, smoke would come out of her head. Oliva twisted her face in disgust at just the possibility of being marked by Matteo and raised her face with a deadly look, for falling for his fault and for him implying such nonsense as that. "Don't look at me like that! I know there is no connection of sorts between us. It was just a strong feeling that something was going to happen."

Matteo approaches and looks around checking if the allied wolves were doing a good job giving Oliva Moore the guard she deserved and is relieved when he doesn't sense any wolf tracks on his trail. He reaches out to Oliva to help her, but the girl refuses and stands up quickly turning away from another's touch as if it were an extremely infectious disease.

The young girl definitely could not let her body give way again.

It was not right.

"You followed me and stood waiting behind a tree waiting for the perfect moment to show yourself!" She accuses him in whispered shouts as she cleaned herself up and tried to pull herself together. "Is someone being rude, Oliv?" She mimics Matteo's voice, sounding sillier and stupidly thicker than usual.

Matteo tries to suppress it, but lets out a tasty, nasalized laugh. Oliva sighs as she stares at the alpha with eyes shone by the moonlight that was beginning to enter the forest, highlighting his dark skin and his brown hair that looked golden. In that merely relaxed moment, the girl even felt her nipples stiffen under the thick bra tight on her body.

"I wouldn't do that-" Matteo is interrupted when he hears footsteps creeping close enough to tense up and watch for any movement by the surroundings. The alpha gets close to Oliva in a few seconds and stands in front of her becoming a protective shield on the girl's back, he has taken a defensive pose with his fists alarmed at chin height ready for any surprise.

Oliva gets into a defensive posture as well and takes a step to the side accompanied by Matteo who keeps guarding her back. They surround their own bodies slowly scanning the small space they had, trying to predict where the attack would come from.

"Stay calm..." The husband says in passive whispers to the young woman who rolls her eyes at how much immaturity she has held all afternoon.

"Don't ask me to stay calm! I'm already calm." She replies impassively in the same tone of voice, paying attention to her surroundings.

Oliva didn't have the keenest vision like the alphas, nor the sense of smell or even hearing, but to always be prepared for a personal attack like this he had to study many things. If an Omega was dishonor enough for the Moore family, she would be a complete aberration. Oliva made it a point to learn magic to defend herself against hunters, it was the only way to get the upper hand on wolves.

For what else could she acclaim?

It was how she could control the material world around her, the attractive and inconvenient smells of alphas, the strong inhibitory teas that insured her not going through calamities from her cursed gene, and of course, honing her keen senses in close combat.

She was always honest with herself. She would never match the matter of brute strength with a wolf.

Magic was strictly forbidden in any pack; it was unacceptable for any member to use special resources to benefit in this way. And this applied to everyone without exception. Alphas with aptitude for magic or with the help of wizards long ago waged war upon war to show how powerful and indestructible they were, causing the destruction of several kingdoms and killing thousands of their own kind.

No matter who you were, magic should not be used in any way. You had to be you to be a clean fight. And that's why this matter was hushed, hidden, buried and concealed in many ways by Oliva, it would be dishonorable and shameful even for her to have chosen such a low and dirty system for her origin.

But it was the only way out of her fucked up insecurity problems.

That was, by far, her greatest secret.

She had a good aptitude, the original nature to be a successful witch.

She had never been bold enough to even demonstrate her gifts without being completely alone or in some situation of extreme danger like now, so the young woman couldn't hesitate as she was involved in the dense and dark woods, being chased who knows to what extent by the orders of her rejected cousin and with the support of an

Alpha she wasn't sure she could trust one hundred percent.

Dimitri's orders were surely to kill her.