Chapter 107

Chapter 107
Sam covered his mouth with both his hands. His sobs echoed in the room as he shook his head. I let my head fall, squeezing my eyes shut. Not that I ever deserved to, but I couldn’t face Nate again. Not after this.

“But…you saved him…”

I looked over at Sam. Tears were streaming down his face, but his eyes were on me. The look of hope in his eyes made me feel sick. Shaking my head, I could barely keep eye contact with him.

“I put him there…I destroyed him…I…”

“You also saved him, Silas.” Sam frowned, and he looked almost angry at himself. “Yes, you fucked up. But after all you’ve told us, your intention was always to keep Nate as your Beta. It was never killing him or removing him. All you wanted was for things to go back the way they were.”

Nodding, I leaned my head against my arm. “I really didn’t. I pushed him away at every step.”

“You marked him and you saved him. In two ways. If he hadn’t taken those pills, Nate would have died anyway without you marking him.”

“Because of our bond.”

He nodded. “So you saved him. Plus, deep down, you felt guilty. If not for that, it was for the shit you said. You helped him get better. You didn’t leave his side at the hospital. Then when he came home, you were his primary caretaker.”

Charles growled next to me. “That’s not a fucking excuse!”

Frowning, Sam nodded. “It’s not. All this time, you’ve done nothing but tear him apart. You didn’t care about him, about his feelings, about anything.”

“I didn’t…the magic solidified that…”

Sam cocked his head to the side. “Magic? What magic? What do you mean?”

“Silas used some magic his father gave him. Something about sealing his soul away. Or removing your emotions. Some load of bullshit about where strength really comes from.” Charles looked up at me for confirmation that he had understood correctly.

I nodded. “I tried to…cheat strength. Removing all weaknesses…like my soul, my emotions, and my bond. Everything. I wanted to be strong enough to protect the pack myself. Be as strong as my sister. I didn’t want to lose again, and I thought magic was the way to do that. I didn’t…I didn’t know what it would take away.”

“You’re a coward.” Charle’s tone was heavy with venom.

Chuckling hollowly, I couldn’t have agreed more. “Aelia said the same thing.”

“Aelia?” Sam asked.

“When the witch dug around in my head…she pulled me into my subconscious. She unlocked the magic that I had used.” I rubbed my chest. The runes disappeared long ago, but I couldn’t forget the pain they brought when I first invoked them. “Aelia was there. She wove some of her fated bond, her own soul, into ours. That’s what she had done when she died. She told me I was a coward. That I went about everything all wrong and that she was disappointed in me. Ultimately, I had turned into my father. Complete with killing my mate, just like my father killed our mother.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Goddess, it all hurt. Every time I thought of it, some memory would pop up, and I could see the sheer amount of pain in Nate’s eyes. I’d had to watch him go from a confident and strong wolf to one who literally didn’t raise his head in front of me. My stomach rolled, but I tried to breathe through the feeling.

Sam finally ruffled his hair after a few minutes and stood up, pacing in front of the back wall. “It doesn’t make sense. If you had sealed away the bond and your emotions, why did you save him? Why did you even bother marking him?”

“The bond itself and Eros had been fighting against truly locking away my entire soul. So I still felt the bond. It just made it easier to ignore it. Except that night. I felt the pain. The pain woke me up. Probably when he took the first pill. I felt him die. I knew I had gone too far with what I had said. Marking him was the only thing I could think of doing that would wake him. The cold water didn’t. So, in my mind, it was a simple medical procedure. I couldn’t lose Nate.”

Sam frowned. “But it wasn’t because you loved him.”

I shook my head slowly. “It was because I needed him. Then, he became my duty. My obligation is to look after him and take care of him. Because that’s what Alphas do.”

Charles shook his head, now sitting like I was on the floor. “You helped him get better. Caring for him, helping him get stronger. You gave him hope. That’s the only reason he stayed around so long.”

“No, never hope. Multiple times I rejected him over the course of his recovery. Nate didn’t take me at my word though, but my actions. He thought there was something good left in me that still wanted him as a mate. That was until the day I nearly killed him.”

“Eros, though…he loves Nate. He felt the bond, didn’t he?” Sam chimed up, now leaning against my dresser.

I sighed and nodded again. “As much as our wolves are a part of us, they are also separate souls. Eros being a wolf as well means that the bond and instinct are much stronger. Locking away my soul didn’t affect his soul or the bond to him. The only thing I could do and did was control him. Shove him back away from everything.”

Tears filled my eyes. That was another relationship I destroyed. My own wolf. I’d tortured him and muzzled him. I’d shoved him back and refused to listen to a word he said. Eros was the other half of my soul. He continued to show me how awful I was being, but I wouldn’t listen.

“But it didn’t always work…mostly when you were drunk.” Sam added with a note of bitterness.

“He would take over when I was weaker. So, if I was exhausted, he could sometimes slip forward as well. But yes, mostly when I blacked out, he would take control. Most of the time, I only realized it because there were small clues that were left. Otherwise, Eros wouldn’t tell me.”

Sam inhaled sharply. “He was looking for Nate this whole time, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. Eros finally threw the night with Nate in my face. The night I was too drunk to stop him during a shifting party…what…four years ago now? Right after the pack house was finished. I didn’t know it even happened until Nate told me. Then, when we realized Nate wasn’t coming back to the territory, Eros gave me the memories of that night.”

“That was when Nate got pregnant with the twins.” Sam frowned.

I pressed my palms into my eyes. “After all my work to shut down the notion of having a family or us being mates, Nate’s pregnancy forced me into a situation that was not what I wanted. I would not love pups. I didn’t want to take care of them. In my mind, they would only impede my being Alpha. Much like…much like my father thought of us. But because refusing to be like him is so ingrained in me…”

Charles finally spoke up. “You sent Nate packing.”

Running my hands down my face, I moved them so that I was holding my shoulders. My elbows rested back on my knees. It hurt to breathe. It was useless to fight the tears now.

“I sent my pregnant mate away. No remorse. No feeling. No thought to what it would do to him. He couldn’t be my Beta anymore, and that made me angry. He ruined our relationship. Not only that, but he brought even more of a weakness into my life. I didn’t expect him to leave the territory. Or to move to a completely different country. I still felt a possessive obligation to protect him.”

Letting out another sigh, Charles wove his fingers through his hair. “Which you told him. That’s why he told me he isn’t an obligation. Or a job. That makes a little more sense.”

“It wasn’t until the day I lost it. The day I killed my father that I realized what I had become. Nate had spirit-linked me. By accident…really. But we fought per usual. For the first time, he called me out, told me I was following my father’s footsteps. That I had fully become him. I don’t know why it hit so hard this time. Maybe the magic had been weakening as of late.”

Sam spoke up this time. “That’s when you killed your father.”

“I didn’t go out there to kill him. I wanted a way to undo what I had done. How to remove the magic. He laughed in my face and said he was proud of me. That I had finally become the Alpha he wanted me to be. I lost it. When I came to, you couldn’t recognize him anymore, and his heart stopped.”

Again, silence fell over the room. Previously, rage had consumed me. I let my anger rule my pack. For a while, it centered on rogues, and that’s who I destroyed. There wasn’t really much harm I had done other than to myself. Of course, Nate also received it, but he took everything despite it all. What I had done now was too far. I’d gone too far.

There was no coming back. Being forced to live was a cruel punishment. Noah was right. I’d now have to live with everything I had done. While I’d have to step forward, and I could try to be better, it didn’t fix everything I had done before. It didn’t fix everything I had destroyed.