Chapter 117 117

Chapter 117 117
"We were both lost in our worlds," Adrian continued, his voice straining under the effort to remain steady. "Fighting our way out in confusion and fear. We were surrounded by illusions and manipulations, and I let myself be blinded by them. But we are here now. If you refuse to forgive me, I won't force you. I won't demand anything from you. But I will try to earn your trust over and over until I draw my last breath."

A single tear slid down my face at this point. It felt hot against my skin, a stark contrast to the numbness that had been trying to settle in since I woke up. As I looked at his face, something shifted deep inside me. The layers of armor I had built up over the last year didn't vanish, but they started to thin. I ceased to see only the Adrian who had hurt me, the man who had stood by and let my world fall apart. Instead, another face began to emerge from the depths of my memory.

I saw the Adrian who had been my childhood friend. My mind traveled back to a time when I was just a girl living on the fringes of the Iron Claw pack. Back then, the rumors were the only thing that followed me. Some said I had no parents, that I was a stray found in the woods. Others whispered that they had died when I was little, leaving me behind like an unwanted relic. There were even those who said I didn't have parents at all—that Iron Claw had just seen a child and taken me in out of some misguided sense of duty.

The pack had treated me badly. I was an outsider, a girl with no lineage and no standing. But Adrian had been different. Before he was an Alpha, before he was a leader with the weight of a thousand expectations on his shoulders, he was just a boy who made friends with me. We used to spend hours in the woods, running through the trees and pretending to be great warriors. We fought imaginary battles and promised to protect each other from the monsters under the bed.

The memories flashed one after the other, vivid and haunting. I remembered the way his younger face used to smile at me, a genuine, wide grin that reached his eyes. I remembered him handing me his toys when I had none, sharing his lunch when the other kids pushed me away. He was my anchor then.

But then he grew up. He inherited responsibilities that he wasn't ready for, and the world began to change him. I had watched that transformation with a breaking heart. I had longed for that old smile, for the boy who played in the dirt with me, but all I saw as the years went by was a straight, emotionless face. He became a stranger, a man who prioritized the pack over the person who had been his shadow for years.
Until now.

Looking at him kneeling on the floor, I didn't see an Alpha. I saw a man who was desperate, a man who was filled with a regret so deep it seemed to be consuming him from the inside out. He wasn't hiding behind his rank or his power anymore. He was just Adrian, and he was broken.
I couldn't take it anymore. The anger that had sustained me, the fury that had driven me to hit him in the hallway earlier, it all began to melt into something else. It wasn't that the pain was gone, but the desire to keep fighting him was. My mind went back to the way I had struck his chest, the way he had just stood there and taken it, and I realized that we had both been bleeding for a very long time.

My feet moved before the command even registered in my head. I didn't try to stop myself. If anything, I found myself walking faster, the distance between us shrinking until I was standing right over him.
I knelt beside him on the hard floor, the fabric of my dress pooling around us. Without a word, I threw my hands around him, pulling him into a fierce, desperate embrace.

At first, his body went still. He seemed shocked, as if he hadn't expected me to ever touch him with kindness again. For a second, he was like a statue, frozen in place by the suddenness of it. But then, he reacted. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me in so tight that it was hard to breathe. He hugged me like he was drowning and I was the only thing keeping him afloat, like if he let go for even a second, I would disappear into the shadows again.

We stayed like that, two broken people trying to find a way back to the start. The hall was silent, but for the first time, the silence didn't feel heavy. It felt like a beginning.