Chapter 64 Vivienne's Letter (Vivienne POV)
The pen felt heavy in my hand, like it knew the weight of what I was about to write.
Dear Father,
I crossed it out. Started again.
Edmund,
Too cold. Too distant. Even now, even after everything, I couldn't quite reduce him to just a name.
Dad,
My hand shook. I set the pen down, stared at the blank page, and wondered why I was doing this. He'd never read it. I'd never send it. This letter existed only for me, a way to organize thoughts that had been churning in my head for three weeks.
I picked up the pen again.
Dad,
I'm writing this knowing you'll never read it. I'll burn it before the words can reach you. But I need to say these things, even if only to myself, even if the only witness is paper that will turn to ash.
I remember being five years old and asking why I didn't have a mother like the other children. You told me she died protecting me from something dangerous, that she loved me so much she gave her life for mine. I believed that story for thirteen years. I built an entire mythology around a mother I never knew… imagining her brave and selfless and everything good that I wanted to be.
You never corrected me. You let me worship a fiction while you carried the truth: that you killed her. That the danger she died protecting me from was you.
My vision blurred. I wiped my eyes roughly, kept writing.
Do you remember teaching me to read? I was four, sitting in your lap in the library, sounding out words in that picture book about wolves. You were so patient. So kind. You made learning feel like an adventure we were taking together.
I loved those afternoons. Just you and me and stories about animals that seemed magical. I didn't know you were studying me, documenting my reactions, checking for signs that the wolf was waking. I thought you were being my father. You were being my warden.
The memories flooded back, hundreds of moments I'd treasured, now recontextualized by knowledge of his true purpose.
Age seven: You took me hiking in the Lake District. We climbed Scafell Pike together. You let me lead even though I was small and slow. At the summit, you said you were proud of me for not giving up. I glowed from that praise for weeks.
I didn't know you were testing my endurance, checking if I exhibited supernatural stamina. The hike wasn't father-daughter bonding. It was data collection.
Age ten: I broke my arm falling from a tree. You held my hand in the emergency room, told me I was brave while they set the bone. The doctor said I was lucky it wasn't worse. You watched me heal with an intensity I mistook for concern. I know now you were monitoring regeneration rates, documenting whether accelerated healing would manifest.
It didn't. The suppression held. Your experiment succeeded.
I had to stop, hand cramping from how tightly I gripped the pen. Deep breath. Keep going.
Age fourteen: You let me help with your research for the first time. I was so excited. My father, the brilliant scientist, trusting me with real work. We mapped migration patterns of wildlife across Yorkshire. You taught me terrain analysis, data organization, how to think tactically about animal behavior.
I didn't realize we were mapping pack territories. That the "wildlife" we tracked were werewolves you planned to kill. I helped you hunt them, Dad. I was fourteen years old and I helped you plan genocide because I thought we were tracking deer.
How do I forgive that? How do I forgive you for turning your daughter into an accessory to murder before she was old enough to understand what she was doing?
The question hung there, unanswerable. I kept writing anyway.
I found your research files three weeks ago. The ones you thought were hidden well enough that I'd never discover them. Eighteen years of documentation. My entire life reduced to data points and experimental observations.
"Subject exhibits no supernatural characteristics at age 3, 4, 5..." Year after year, tracking the success of your suppression. Celebrating every birthday I remained human. Every injection that kept the wolf dormant. Every spell that locked away what I was meant to be.
There's a note in the file from when I was sixteen. I'd just started having nightmares… remembering fragments of a woman with silver eyes. You wrote: "Subject showing signs of breakthrough. Increase suppression dosage. Cannot risk awakening before protocol complete."
I was having nightmares about my own mother. You responded by poisoning me more thoroughly.
I was crying now, tears blotting the page. I didn't stop writing.
I want to hate you. It would be easier if I could just hate you completely. But I remember your hands braiding my hair when I was six. I remember you reading to me every night until I was twelve… even when you were exhausted from work, you never skipped our bedtime stories. I remember you teaching me to ride a bike, to swim, to navigate by stars.
Were those moments real? Or were they just more data collection disguised as fatherhood?
I don't know. I'll never know. That's what you took from me… not just my mother, not just my nature, but the certainty that any moment we shared was genuine.
My hand moved across the page almost automatically now, ancestral memories mixing with personal ones.
I've been accessing genetic knowledge from my mother's bloodline. Silvermane memories going back thousands of years. And you know what I found? I found her.
Not literal memories of Lyanna… I was too young when she died to remember her clearly. But I found memories of Silvermane women who loved their children, who taught them to shift, who passed down knowledge with patience and joy. I found the kind of mother she would have been if you hadn't killed her.
She would have taught me the ancient tongue. Would have shown me how to transform without pain, how to access ancestral power, how to be both human and wolf without conflict. She would have prepared me for this… for being Silvermane in a world that fears what we are.
Instead, you prepared me to fear myself. To see the wolf as disease instead of identity. To view my own nature as corruption that needed to be cut away.
Do you understand what that did to me? When the suppression broke and I started transforming, I thought I was becoming a monster. I thought the nightmares and the strange instincts and the enhanced senses meant I was losing my humanity. I thought I was dying.
I was actually being born. But you'd conditioned me so thoroughly that awakening felt like destruction.
I paused, remembering those first terrifying weeks. Sophie witnessing my partial transformation. Declan explaining what I was. The slow, painful process of accepting that I wasn't broken… just finally becoming myself.
I met my mate three weeks ago. Declan Hartley. Greyfang Pack Alpha. The son of Marcus Hartley, who you killed two years ago during a coordinated strike you classified as "wildlife management."
You murdered his father. You spent eighteen years manipulating me. And somehow, despite that, we found each other. The mate bond broke through your suppression like it was nothing. All your careful planning, all your magical barriers, all your chemical controls… none of it mattered against a supernatural connection you didn't know existed.
That must infuriate you. Your perfect experiment, derailed by biology you couldn't account for.
Declan's pack has become my family. They've taught me what pack actually means… not the academic definition you gave me, but the lived reality. They've protected me when I was vulnerable, trained me when I was untested, accepted me despite knowing I'm your daughter.
Gabriel found me three weeks ago. My brother. The son you tried to kill when he was four years old because he witnessed what you are.
He's been alive this entire time, leading a pack of survivors from your previous hunts. Eight wolves who escaped your genocide campaigns. He's taught me Silvermane abilities you spent eighteen years suppressing. He's given me the heritage you tried to erase.
Did you know he was alive? Did you spend seventeen years wondering if your son survived your attempt to murder him? Or did you convince yourself you'd succeeded, that four-year-old Gabriel died in whatever corner he ran to after watching you kill our mother?
I hope the uncertainty haunted you. I hope every year on his birthday you wondered.
The anger felt good, hot and clean. I let it flow through the pen.
In three days, you'll spring your trap. You'll seal the underground facility, activate UV lights, deploy silver gas, and attempt to massacre every werewolf at The Culling. Including me.
You've made contingency plans in case I'm killed. I found those files too. "Acceptable collateral damage if operation succeeds." That's how you classified your daughter's death. Acceptable.
Did it hurt to write that? Or had you already convinced yourself I wasn't your daughter anymore… just a werewolf wearing her face?
That said: some of us will die. Even with preparation, even with coordination, some wolves won't survive your attack. Maybe I'll be among them. Maybe you'll succeed in killing the daughter you spent eighteen years controlling.
If that happens… if your hunters manage to shoot me before I can defend myself… I want you to know something.
I forgive you for killing my mother.
I stopped, staring at the words I'd just written. Did I mean that? Could I possibly mean that?
I kept writing, working it through.
I don't forgive you for the eighteen years of torture disguised as protection. I don't forgive you for using me as unwitting accomplice in genocide. I don't forgive you for trying to kill Gabriel, for planning to kill me, for building a career on werewolf extermination.
But I forgive you for killing Lyanna.
You were human. She transformed during childbirth… probably from pain and fear and the sheer trauma of bringing life into the world while her body tried to shift. You panicked. You saw teeth and claws and a creature you didn't understand, and you reacted from terror.
In that single moment, you weren't a calculating scientist or a professional hunter. You were just a terrified man who thought his wife was attacking his newborn daughter. You made a terrible choice from a place of fear.
I understand that. I don't excuse it. I don't think it justifies what came after. But I understand the moment itself.
What I can't forgive… what I'll never forgive… is that you didn't stop there. You could have grieved. Could have sought therapy. Could have tried to understand what happened and made peace with the tragedy.
Instead, you built a career on it. You transformed one moment of panic into eighteen years of systematic murder. You convinced yourself you were protecting humanity when really you were just trying to make your wife's death mean something.
It doesn't mean something, Dad. All those werewolves you killed… they didn't die for a righteous cause. They died because you needed to believe killing Lyanna was justified. Because if her death was necessary to protect me, then killing others like her must be necessary too.
It's circular logic born from guilt you refuse to process.
I wiped my eyes again. The page was blotched with tears and ink, barely legible. Didn't matter. This was for me.
I've cried so much these past three weeks. For the mother I never knew. For the childhood that was really captivity. For the father who died the same night as my mother… because the man who killed her isn't the same man who braided my hair and read me stories.
That father died when Lyanna did. The man who replaced him is a stranger wearing his face.
So I'm grieving you too. Grieving the father I thought I had, who never existed. Grieving the relationship we might have built if you'd chosen healing over hunting. Grieving the family we could have been… you, me, Gabriel, and the memory of a woman we all loved.
I don't know if I'll survive. Don't know if you'll survive. Don't know if either of us will walk away from The Culling.
But I needed to say this: I loved you. Past tense, because I can't love the man you've become. But I loved the father I thought you were. I loved the man who taught me to read, who climbed mountains with me, who made me feel safe even while systematically poisoning me.
That love was real even if the man wasn't.
I'm burning this letter after I finish writing. You'll never read these words. But saying them matters anyway. Processing this matters. Making peace with the fact that you're my enemy matters.
So I need to accept that. Need to burn away the hope that you'll choose me over your crusade. Need to stand in Greyfang Hollow and watch these words turn to ash and understand that the father I loved is gone.
Maybe he never existed. Maybe I invented him from fragments of genuine affection mixed with manipulation. Maybe every moment I treasured was calculated to keep me compliant while you suppressed what I am.
I don't know.
I'll never know.
And I need to be okay with that.
I finished the letter, hands shaking, face wet with tears. Read it through once—barely legible through the blotches and smears. Folded it carefully.
Stood.
Walked through the safe house to the woods beyond. Found Greyfang Hollow quiet in the pre-dawn darkness. The clearing where we trained, where I'd accidentally compelled submission from three Alphas, where forty-seven wolves had learned to fight as an army.
I knelt in the center, pulled out matches.
The letter caught quickly, paper curling as flames consumed words I'd never send.
Do you remember teaching me to read? I was four, sitting in your lap...
Ash.
I forgive you for killing my mother...
Ash.
The wind caught the remnants, scattered them across Greyfang Hollow. Words dissolving into nothing, carried away by air that didn't care about eighteen years of manipulation or the daughter learning to accept her father's enmity.
I sat there, watching ashes drift, feeling hollow and raw and somehow lighter. The grief wasn't gone. The anger wasn't resolved. But I'd said what needed saying, acknowledged what needed acknowledging.
Edmund Ashford was my enemy.
Edmund Ashford was my father.
Both could be true. Both were true.
I stood, brushing ash from my hands. The letter was gone. The words I'd needed to say had been said and burned and released to the wind.