Chapter 204 Get Out
Fennigan and Jax stood there by their mother's side. They were trying to process what Veda had said. They kept looking toward their mother and when she would feel them looking at her they would look away. They had each tried to hold her hand but she waved them away.
Elana didn't want their comfort. She couldn't stomach the pity swimming in the bright silver eyes of her powerful sons. The sheer, terrifying reality of Veda's diagnosis was crushing the breath out of her lungs, and she needed space to let her iron-clad armor finally crack.
"Get out," Elana rasped, her voice trembling but hard. She pointed a shaking finger toward the heavy double doors. "All of you. Get out of this room and leave me alone."
Jax hesitated, his heart breaking for her. "Mom, we shouldn't—"
"I said get OUT!" Elana snarled, the raw, commanding edge of the former Luna bleeding through her panic.
Fennigan placed a heavy hand on Jax's shoulder, giving his brother a slow, grim nod. They knew better than to push her when she was cornered. Together, the brothers ushered Veda out.
The heavy door clicked shut, leaving Elana entirely, suffocatingly alone in the stark silence of the infirmary.
She stared down at the crisp white sheet covering her lap. For a woman who had spent decades commanding a fiercely loyal pack, expecting and receiving absolute obedience, the betrayal of her own body was incomprehensible. She focused all of her formidable willpower on her toes.
Move, she commanded her body.
Nothing.
Move, damn you! she screamed in her head, her hands clenching into fists in the sheets. But the legs beneath the fabric remained perfectly, terrifyingly still. They completely disobeyed her every command, entirely severed from her will.
"How?" Elana whispered to the empty room, her chest heaving. "Why?"
Her hands shook violently as she reached for the bedside table, her fingers closing around the heavy glass of water a nurse had left for her. She brought it to her lips, desperate for a sip to clear the thick, choking lump of panic in her throat.
But as the cool rim of the glass touched her mouth, her mind betrayed her again.
She thought of the man who had done this to her. She thought of Damon.
Thirty years. She had loved him fiercely for three decades. She had stood by his side, bled for his vision, raised his children, and believed with her entire soul that he loved her back. Every kiss, every whispered promise in the dark, every moment of comfort—it all rushed through her mind, rapidly turning from warm memories into toxic, rotting poison.
He hadn't loved her. He hadn't loved any of them. To Damon, the sacred mate bond was nothing more than a biological chain, and his family was just a collection of test subjects for his twisted, psychopathic vision of the future. He had used her body, her bloodline, and her trust as nothing more than a laboratory.
The sheer magnitude of the betrayal ignited a blinding, feral rage in her chest.
"FUCK YOU, DAMON!" Elana screamed at the top of her lungs, the sound tearing violently at her throat.
With all the strength she had left in her upper body, she hurled the heavy glass across the room. It slammed into the opposite wall, exploding into a hundred glittering shards that rained down onto the linoleum floor like jagged ice.
The violent crash was deafening. Instantly, the heavy double doors flew open.
Jax and Fennigan stood in the doorway, their faces pale with panic, their Alpha and Beta instincts fully triggered by the sound of shattering glass. "Mom?!" Jax yelled, stepping into the room.
"GET OUT!" Elana shrieked, her face flushed red with absolute agony. "LEAVE ME ALONE FOR A MINUTE!"
Fennigan caught Jax's arm, his own eyes shining with unshed tears, and pulled his brother back into the hall, pulling the door tightly shut once more to give her the privacy she was begging for.
Left alone in the quiet wreckage, the last of Elana's formidable armor finally shattered, mirroring the broken glass on the floor. She collapsed back against her pillows and wept. It was a deep, ugly, gut-wrenching wail that tore from the very bottom of her soul.
She laid there and cried. She cried for her legs, mourning the loss of her physical strength and independence. She cried for her family, fractured and traumatized by the patriarch who was supposed to protect them. She cried for her wolf, trapped in a broken body and mourning the catastrophic severing of a mate bond. And she cried for her heart, utterly shattered by the realization that the love of her life had just been a scientist, and she had been nothing but a lab rat from the very moment he walked into her life.
As the jagged, agonizing sobs tore through Elana's chest, echoing in the sterile silence of the infirmary, a deep, resonant presence stirred within her mind.
Calm down, her inner wolf urged. The ancient beast’s voice was a heavy, grounding rumble in the back of her consciousness, lacking the complicated nuance of human heartbreak but rich with primal pragmatism. Yes, our mate is gone. The bond is severed and the den is fractured. But it is good that he is gone. Look at what he has done to us. He was a poison, Elana.
But Elana aggressively pushed the beast's logic away, throwing up a mental wall to silence the practical, survival-driven voice.
She didn't want to calm down. She didn't want to be pragmatic, and she certainly didn't want to look at the silver lining of her own paralyzation or her fractured family. For just this one moment in her long, difficult life, she didn't want to listen to reason.
She just wanted to feel sorry for herself.
For thirty years, she had been the unyielding bedrock of the pack. While Damon played the charming, visionary Alpha—secretly hiding his psychopathic, scientific obsessions behind a mask of progress—Elana had been forced to be the rigid one. She had been the strict disciplinarian, the uncompromising enforcer of the old laws, the cold and calculating Luna who made the hard, unpopular choices to keep everyone safe. She had held her posture perfectly straight for three decades, never allowing herself a single moment of weakness, always compensating for the subtle, terrifying darkness she had sensed but willfully ignored in her mate.
She was so incredibly tired of being strong.
Elana curled her upper body inward, burying her face into her shaking hands, and let the ugly, ungraceful tears flow freely. She shut her wolf out completely. She wanted to break down. She needed to break down. She wanted to wallow in the absolute misery of it all—mourning the phantom feeling in her legs, the thirty-year lie of her marriage, and the sheer, overwhelming exhaustion of surviving a monster who slept in her own bed.
For the first time in her life, the unbreakable Elana allowed herself to completely and utterly shatter, crying into the quiet room without trying to fix a single thing.