Chapter 84 – Same Past, Another Present

SEBASTIAN.

It had been several hours since I had this painful and strange feeling that Teresa was in danger. I had left with Liam from the company and was on my way home when a sharp pain pierced my entire body as if a strong venom was passing through my veins.

“Alpha, are you okay?” Liam asked worriedly, looking at me. “Do you want me to drive?”

“No, it’s okay. I can handle it. I just feel different things, like changes in my body. And it hurts on the inside. Something is happening to Teresa!”

Now that I knew who our enemy was, it was time to confront my mother, and what was most important, to tell me why she had my grandmother’s diary in her drawer. I wonder how much she knew and didn’t tell us. “Liam, we need to find Luana ... or Lettice ... her name is Lettice. God, we had her under our eyes for so long and we didn’t realize it. She hurt us deliberately, and I had no eyes to see and no ears to hear!”

Regrets were late now. At this point, we knew who our enemy was, and we also knew that both she and Teresa were missing. Too big of a coincidence to be just that, a coincidence.

“Don’t blame yourself, Bash. It is clear that none of us realized. Now, if I make connections with the days when I almost caught her doing something else in the lab, I wonder what serum she had made and for what purpose?”

“It’s easy to guess, Liam. Teresa’s blood is precious. That’s why she kidnapped her. The serum she created is the perfect combination to blow everything up, starting with Teresa. If it works, she won’t stop until Teresa’s last drop of blood drains. We need to find her urgently.’’ I screamed, parking in front of the house. I entered, slamming the door against the wall, which caused my mother to head out of the office.

“Bash, son, what happened?” she asked in astonishment, widening her eyes.

“That’s what I hope you will tell me, mother, because things are happening and I don’t want to think you have anything to do with them!” I almost screamed, making her take a step back and enter the office. In fact, I kind of pushed her in there.

“Calm down, Bash!” Liam urged behind me.

As he entered the office, she took my mother’s side, seeing her severely affected by my sudden bursts. “Bash, you are scaring your mother. I’m going to ask you to calm down so we can have a civilized talk!”

“Okay, we’ll talk as civilized as you want, but first, mother, explain to me who Lettice Duncan is and how are you related to her?” I screamed, pulling the famous diary out of the locked drawer and tossing it on the desk.

The resulting noise made her close her eyes. My question froze her instantly, unable to move. She was leaning heavily on Liam’s arms, her face turned white and it was becoming more and more obvious to me she knew much more than that woman’s name. She took a deep breath twice and sat down.

“Son, since you found that diary, you’ve only been in trouble. I wish I could have avoided this, but it is beyond my comprehension. I read those pages many years ago because I thought your great-grandmother, Lettice Duncan, was no longer alive. Maybe she doesn’t even live for so many years. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have read it. It was her intimacy. I got horrified by what she wrote there and I know you were too. But all that happened many years ago. Believing that everything was forgotten, and it was just a shabby and forgotten diary, I kept quiet. I never thought that this day would come. “

“But it did. So, what do you know about this woman? Because I will tell you something that will alarm you. She has returned and does not stand idly by. She seems to seek revenge!”

“Oh, my God! If so, it’s understandable, my son. If you read the diary, you saw how many injustices they did and how they brought against her so many false accusations. They separated her from her son, who was very young at that time. I didn’t know her. I had never seen her. When I came in contact with her mother, she had already been exiled!”

My grandmother’s strange story may have been sad, but that didn’t give her any right to go against her flesh and blood.

“Exiled? For what reason?”

“Bash, in the past of your ancestors, they did marriages inside the pack. So, it would not endanger our species, and that was how we lasted so many hundreds of years. Both you and Victoria descended from the royal line. You have blue blood, as they say, on the line of your great-grandmother. But returning to what I was telling you when I arrived in Northumberland, I was not married and I had come to visit my best friend, Lettice’s mother, Aurora. She was happily married, with a daughter, a little rebellious. When it was her turn to marry a powerful Alpha from the royal pack, Lettice objected. Remember that I am not telling you from the diary now. I discussed these things with her mother, the queen. Lettice was still young, but she was at the right age to start a family and carry on the legacy. That’s how she married Conrad Hewitson, an honest werewolf who, despite her rebellious nature, loved her enormously. Maybe she did love him too, in her own way. I don’t know. They lived together for ten years and had a son, Noah. Destiny took Conrad away in the fight and Lettice found herself alone with a child, but free. Still young, she occasionally left the castle and went for long walks through the dark forests of Northumberland. Aurora always told her that the forests were dangerous, that there were hunters who hunt werewolves without mercy. But she didn’t care. For the first time in ten years, she really felt alive. In her travels, she met Edgar Duncan, whose name she now bears. He was also a skilled hunter. Love quickly blossomed between the two. But Lettice hid the truth from him. She was a daughter of the moon, a werewolf. Of course, Lettice’s parents did not agree with this man-beast connection and drove her away. That’s the time they separated her from Noah and I got to the castle. Everything I told you I know from Queen Aurora, she told me with tears in her eyes how she had to give up her only daughter. Then time passed quickly and ruthlessly. I didn’t stay at the castle much longer because I met Ben, your father, and we got married. After a while, I returned to the royal court in Northumberland to visit Aurora, but there was no one left. Just a ruin to witness all the sins and the tumultuous past of a family decimated by time and critical decisions. While walking through those ruins, I found the diary, simply thrown or forgotten on the ground, covered in dust. I took it and put it where you found it after Bella’s death. “My mother had finished the story, but there were many unanswered questions. So many loose ends.

“Mother, I will ask you one more time. I asked you before and you answered me sideways. I didn’t believe you then. What makes you believe I’ll give you another chance now?”

Just had to try again. I felt like she wasn’t telling me everything, and that was driving me crazy. Expecting what I was going to ask, she resigned herself and answered me first.

“I know what you are going to ask me, son, and I will answer you. There is no legend. The hellhounds existed and certainly still exist. Creatures from hell, with sharp fangs and a look of horror, with a fire burning everywhere they stepped on and made life impossible for many. Your father held them as much as he could. He never let them reach you and defended the village as best he could. Hence his harshness. He wanted to train you to defend yourself from these demons when the time came and they would ruthlessly attack. What I never knew, but I suspected was how they were born and where they came from and I’m already thinking that you realized it too! Your great-grandmother has a great deal to do with this!”

This entire story was making sense now. All her resentment and revenge had their origins in our past. But her rage has not healed to this day.

Maybe she still lived in the past, and that made her ruthless and unforgiving. Someone will have to open her eyes and remind her that the past remained behind and will stay there.

Maybe she didn’t believe in the present and even less in the future, but we can’t just pay for her parents’ mistakes or who else was to blame for all her transformation.

Anyway, I strongly believed that her story did not end when she came out of the castle gates. In fact, that’s where it all started. That’s what I’m going to have to find out and fight.

“Unfortunately, Mother has everything to do with it. Lettice not only lives but has kidnapped Teresa!”