Chapter 75 Chapter 75: The Risk of Verity
Senna’s POV
When I woke up the next morning, I stretched my arms over my head and looked beside me. But Kalev wasn’t in bed.
He was sitting, in the corner of the room, his eyes locked on me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “Come back to bed.”
He shook his head. My smile dropped. There was a concerned look on his face.
“I have something to show you,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to give it to you. Then I’m going to go and stand right outside the door and wait for you.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, a sense of foreboding settling over me. He had papers in his hand. Old papers. An entire stack of them.
“Just…read these,” he said, handing me the papers. “I’m going to give you space to read these in private. But I’ll be just outside the door. Waiting for you when you’re ready.”
He bent down and kissed the top of my head. Then he flashed me a sad smile.
“I’m so sorry, Senna,” he said. But before I could ask what for, he turned and left the room.
“Well that was odd,” I said to myself. Then I looked at the papers on my lap.
The first line was enough to stop me. Flora Purge. The word hit something deep in my chest. Verity stirred immediately. Her fur bristled and her ears peeled back.
“What is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
But I was already reading.
The room narrowed around me as I read the words. Flora wolves. Dangerous. A real threat to our autonomy and privilege.
“They once ruled,” I said quietly. “The flora wolves. A very long time ago.”
Verity pressed closer. My hands tightened on the page. I moved on to the next section.
The purge.
It happened sixty years ago. It named the houses involved. Moren. Marrow. Others. They all agreed to purge the capital and the sectors of flora wolves. Together.
“They…they slaughtered them?” I whispered out loud, horrified by what I was reading.
The methodical way it was described made it worse. It was so…procedural.
“They wiped them out,” I said.
Every single one of them. Every trace. Every person.
The thought was almost too awful to bear. I imagined them, in my mind’s eye. People being hunted down. They were discreet about it, taking people from their homes. It was all described. They invented accidents that people died in. They invented stories about run-aways.
My throat squeezed. Some of them had been children. Some had been babies. Some of them didn’t have their wolves yet, but they were still taken because of their lineage and the probability that they had a flora wolf.
Verity whined. She covered her face with her paws. She was crying for her kind. My heart broke for her.
How was I flora wolf then, if the blood line had been killed? My mind flashed to my mother. To her lovely, silver wolf with fur a greenish tinge.
She’d left when I was young. She went missing during a hike. That’s what my father told me. Had she though? Or had she left the sectors, afraid that they would find her.
Had she become a rogue? Was she still alive?
And had my father known what I was?
“Oh my god,” I whispered. “The medicine.”
Every night, my father gave me medicine. He claimed it was because I had a rare disease. I could still taste the bitter pill. But he’d never actually told me what the disease was. I taken it, even after I didn’t live with my father anymore.
“It was wolf suppressant,” I said out loud. I was sure of it. He’d been feeding me wolf suppressant because he was worried I was a flora wolf and the capital would find out.
That’s why Verity hadn’t come to me when I was eighteen. That’s why everyone thought I was an empty shell. It wasn’t the matebond that had woken up Verity. The wolf suppressant had worn off, on the island.
My stomach twisted. My hands shook. Tears came to my eyes. The next line explained the Games.
The games weren’t entertainment. They were control. They were a net, cast out to find flora wolves. The games were a system designed to draw out any remaining bloodline.
So the houses in control could find them and kill them. The Games were a safety measure.
I felt something shift in my chest. I read the file again, slower this time. I took in every line, every detail.
When I finished, I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I just sat there, the paper resting in my hands.
What did this mean? It meant that Viktor wasn’t the only one who wanted me dead. Other houses did too. They all knew I was a flora wolf. They saw me as a threat. Not only had I won the games, but the wolf that lived inside of me was dangerous. That’s how they saw it.
They weren’t going to let me live in Sector 3, at that estate. They weren’t going to let me live at all.
They were going to hunt me down and kill me. Just like they had killed all the other flora wolves. The games hadn’t worked. I hadn’t touched the siphon. I’d lived. I wasn’t supposed to. So now they would find a way to end me. Outside of the games.
The gravity hit me hard. Kalev was right. I wasn’t safe. It didn’t matter how good I was with a bow. The cards were stacked against me.
Standing up, I crossed the room and opened the door. Kalev was exactly where he said he would be, waiting for me, right outside the door. I still had the papers clutched in my hands.
“Kalev,” I whispered.
He turned to me, his face flooded with grief. His jaw was tight. His scent wrapped around me. I found comfort in that.
“Come here,” was all he said. Then he gathered me into his arms and held me while I still held the papers in my hands.
The papers that changed everything.