Chapter 28 Chapter 28
Ava’s POV
Darkness. And then, light. I woke up on the couch in the penthouse, a cashmere blanket draped over me, the morning sun streaming through the windows. My head throbbed with a dull,
heavy ache. I remembered the kiss, the raw hunger, the searing pain of Marcus’s rejection. Then, a wave of power, a golden light, a voice that was not my own. I’m free. The curse.
I sat up, my heart hammering. Marcus was standing by the window, his back to me, a phone pressed to his ear. He looked exhausted, his shoulders slumped with a weariness that went beyond lack of sleep.
“I don’t care how you do it, Kael, find out what that curse is,” he was saying, his voice a low, strained whisper. “Search the archives, the old texts, everything. And find out what happened to the Royal Lycan line. I want to know what we’re dealing with.”
He hung up and turned, his gray eyes dark with a mixture of fear and a grim, protective resolve. The Alpha was back, but the raw vulnerability I had seen was still there, lurking just beneath the surface.
“How do you feel?” he asked, his voice soft.
“Like a bomb went off in my head,” I said, my voice hoarse. “What happened? After…”
“The power surge knocked out the electricity for three blocks,” he said, his face grim. “You were unconscious for about an hour. The… entity, whatever it was, it’s gone. For now.” He walked over and knelt in front of me, his eyes searching mine. “Your father was telling the truth. The bond, our bond, it’s the key. I unlocked something inside you, Ava. Something that has been dormant for generations.”
The weight of it all, the Royal blood, the curse, it was too much. “So what do we do?” I whispered, my voice trembling.
“We fight,” he said, his voice a low, steady promise. “We find out what this curse is, and we fight it. Together.” He took my hand, his grip warm and strong. In that moment, our contract, our fake marriage, felt like a distant, flimsy thing. This, the two of us against the darkness, this was real.
The next few days were a blur of research and whispered conversations. While Marcus and his team dug into the ancient, forgotten lore of our kind, I focused on the present. On Nathan. On the war he was waging against us. If I was the prize, the key to his plans, then I needed to understand why.
My phone buzzed. It was a secure message from Rachel. My first instinct was to delete it, to block her number. The image of her holding a gun to Garry’s head was burned into my mind. But a part of me, the strategist Marcus had trained, knew that even a traitor could be a source of intelligence.
I know what you saw. It wasn’t what it looked like. I’m still on your side. Call me.
I didn’t call. I couldn’t trust her. Not yet.
A few hours later, a new alert came in, this time from Kael’s security team. It was a satellite photo, time-stamped just an hour before. A heat signature, two of them, in a desolate, abandoned strip mall on the far outskirts of our territory. Kael’s team was on its way, but they were twenty minutes out.
“It could be a trap,” Marcus warned, his face grim as he studied the photo.
“Or it could be a meeting we need to know about,” I countered. “I’m going.”
“Not without me,” he said, his Alpha command absolute.
We took one of the pack’s unmarked, armored SUVs, driving ourselves to avoid tipping off anyone who might be watching. The strip mall was a ghost of a place, its windows boarded up, its parking lot littered with weeds. We parked a block away, our werewolf senses on high alert.
We moved through the shadows, silent as ghosts. As we neared the back of the derelict buildings, we heard voices. Two people, arguing.
“This wasn’t the deal, Sophia,” a man’s voice snarled. “You were supposed to deliver him, not play games.”
“The deal changed,” a familiar, venomous voice shot back. Sophia Blackwood.
We peered around the corner of a crumbling brick wall. There she was. The spoiled Alpha’s daughter, her red hair a splash of color in the gray, decaying landscape. She looked different. Thinner. And the baby bump she had been flaunting was gone. She wasn't pregnant anymore. Or maybe she never had been.
She was facing off against a man in a sleek, gray suit, the kind I had come to associate with Silvercrest Tech.
“Nathan is losing his patience,” the man said. “He wants the asset.”
“And he’ll get it,” Sophia snapped. “But first, I get what I was promised. Garry is mine. Marcus and his little mud-blood Luna are to be destroyed. And I will be the Luna of this pack, one way or another.”
“You are no longer in a position to make demands,” the man said, taking a threatening step toward her.
“Oh, I think I am,” Sophia said, a cruel, triumphant smile spreading across her face. She pulled a small, velvet bag from her pocket and emptied its contents into her hand.
My blood ran cold. It was a collection of small, personal items. A tarnished silver cufflink with the Stone family crest. A lock of sandy brown hair. And a single, diamond earring that I had last seen on the floor of my bedroom the night I caught her with Garry.
“I have a piece of every Stone man,” she purred, her eyes glittering with madness. “Marcus, Garry, and even the old man, Richard. Enough to let our mutual friend walk in the shadows of their lives whenever he pleases. He can be any of them. He can be all of them.”
She laughed, a high, unhinged sound. “Your boss wants his prize? Fine. But first, he’s going to help me burn Moonvalley to the ground.”
She turned, her eyes scanning the derelict buildings, a strange, calculating look on her face. Her gaze settled on our hiding place, and for a terrifying second, I thought she had seen us. But she was looking past us, at something beyond.
“In fact,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “I think the fun is about to begin.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A news alert from a financial wire service. My heart hammered against my ribs as I read the headline.
STONE-MOON ENTERPRISES STOCK PLUMMETS 50% AFTER CEO MARCUS STONE ISSUES SHOCKING PUBLIC STATEMENT.
I stared at the words, my mind reeling. It was impossible. Marcus was standing right next to me.
I clicked the link. There he was, on a live news feed, standing at a podium bearing the Stone-Moon logo, my fake husband, his face a mask of cold, corporate indifference, announcing to the world that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy.