Chapter 107 Does He Know?

Chapter 107 Does He Know?
Cassandra's POV

I had truly embraced the worst as the earth swallowed me whole.

My eyes snapped open and I was still screaming.

I squinted around, trying to understand where I'd landed. The familiar ceiling beams above me. The candlelight. The warmth of an actual bed beneath my back.

"Please, my Alpha, you must wait–"

Mrs. Fernworth's voice. At the door. Strained and pleading.

"Step aside. Was that not Kiara's voice I just heard–"

Liam growled.

I stopped screaming.

I was still cold– bone-deep cold, the kind that didn't match the warmth of the room around me and when I looked down at myself I understood why the room felt strange. I was naked, my skin marked with symbols drawn in something dark, herbs scattered across my collarbone and stomach.

Three women stood around the bed, their voices low and overlapping, chanting something I didn't recognize.

I tried to sit up. My body wouldn't cooperate.

"Stop," I said, or tried to say but my tongue felt thick and slow, the words coming out wrong. "Please, stop, it hurts–"

My mouth felt heavy, as though it had been stitched shut. When I tried to speak, the words stayed trapped somewhere in my chest, never quite making it out.

The pain was everywhere. The weakness was beyond anything I'd known, and only my mind seemed to still be working, screaming uselessly at these women to stop whatever they were doing to me. It hurt that much.

It felt like my bones were being rearranged from the inside.

The door shuddered under another impact.

"Open this door. I just heard Kiara's voice now! I need to see her now."

I wanted to call back to him. I tried. Nothing came out except a weak, cracked sound, and the cold was climbing higher, threatening to take my voice entirely, threatening to take everything.

One of the women leaned close.

"Please relax. It's for your own good," she said, her voice impossibly gentle given the volume of everything else happening. "Almost there. Let it work."

I should have fought it.

I didn't.

Something about the three of them made the fighting feel unnecessary, a trust I hadn't earned and couldn't explain, and as the cold pulled me under I heard, distantly, one of them say:

‘Sleep now, Cassandra.’

I assumed I'd misheard. She can't possibly be calling me Cassandra. No one knows me by that name



When I woke up again, the room was quiet.

The herbs were gone. The cold was gone. I was dressed, warm, my body finally mine again, and when I tested my voice it came out clear.

"You're awake."

I turned my head.

A woman sat in the chair beside the bed, the same dark hair, the same stillness I remembered from before everything had gone strange. I looked at her and managed a small smile, despite everything.

"Where's Liam?" I asked. "Where's Mrs. Fernworth?"

"They stepped away," she said. "Meanwhile, I'm Fiona."

I tried to sit up. My arms shook with the effort and I sank back down almost immediately, startled by how little strength I had left in me.

"Easy." She moved forward, helping me into a sitting position with surprising gentleness, then pressed a cup into my hands. "Drink this first."

I looked at the tea with deep suspicion.

The door opened and another woman came in, same face, nearly, though something about the set of her mouth was different and laughed when she saw my expression.

"She still doesn't trust us," she said to Fiona.

"Can you blame her?"

"Not remotely."

A third woman appeared behind them, drying her hands on a cloth. "My sister is Fauna," she said, nodding at the second woman, then at herself. "And I'm Flora."

"We're triplets," Fiona said. "Try to mark the differences. We certainly don't bother."

"Our mother had very little imagination with names," Fauna added.

I would have laughed if I hadn't still felt like I'd been turned inside out. I looked between the three of them and felt something in my chest loosen slightly, despite everything that had just happened to me.

"Please, where's Liam," I asked again.

"Mrs. Fernworth had to distract him outside the room," Flora said. "He nearly broke the door down. The ritual required absolute stillness, which he was making considerably difficult."

It came back to me in pieces. The screaming. Their chanting. The cold that had nearly torn me apart.

‘I'm just relieved to be alive,’ I thought. ‘Genuinely grateful to them, whatever they did.’

I looked at them and cleared my throat.

"I had a dream," I said slowly. "I was trapped. On a mountain, in the cold, and there were dragons everywhere, circling, and I couldn't get out no matter what I tried." I paused. "I don't know what it means."

The three witches exchanged a glance.

It was brief. But I caught it, the particular look of people who had just heard something they'd been waiting to hear and weren't yet ready to discuss.

"Drink your tea," Fiona said gently. "It will help settle you."

I looked at them nervously and drank.

As I drank, they began asking me questions. About dragons, what I knew, what I'd read, what I'd been told. I almost laughed, assuming it was some strange continuation of whatever ritual had just happened.

They weren't joking.

So I answered honestly. The book Liam had shown me. The bloodline theory. The night of the eclipse, the dragon I'd seen crossing the black moon when I looked through the window, the way it had slammed into me before I lost consciousness.

Fiona reached forward and took my hand.

"Does Liam know," she asked quietly, "that you're not really his wife. That you're not his mate, Kiara?"

I choked on the tea and it came back up in a spray across the blanket.