Chapter 146 Hazardous
❀ Maeve ❀
Much like Yara, Gwen locked eyes with me and noted the murderous look on my face. The chilling tension radiating from me.
And what did she do?
She closed the door behind her.
The first thing I noticed was, she hadn’t even aged. My fists clenched.
Gwen, the woman who raised me, who I called mother for most of my life until the past year, was human.
But in the event of losing her ‘daughter’, not even one wrinkle of worry had formed on her forehead.
If possible, she looked even happier. Well-loved and fed.
Her clothes were crisp, pearls adorning her neck. She’d even applied lip stain on her damned lips.
I was still as a naked statue, equal parts enraged and trying to keep the rage in check.
The wrath lashed at me, coaxing sweat from my skin with the sheer effort it took to contain it.
Gwen stood still as well, her palms clasped, her face tight in a fake, pained expression.
“Oh Maeve. You hate me. You hate me so much,” her voice cracked, and she covered her face with her hands.
I turned away from her, facing the floor-length mirror in the corner of Bastian’s chambers.
It was the first time I was seeing what I looked like with a living curse.
My body was healed, pristine. Unmarked.
Though my skin was pallid and dull with hunger, my eyes blazed with hate. No. Something deeper than hate.
My eyes were wholly red. Even redder than Nikolai’s. Redder than the ferals. My fangs were so thick with thirst they pushed my upper lip forward.
I reached up to caress my hair, trying to lose myself in a soothing action before I tore a human apart in IronWolf pack.
The normally luminous sheen of my hair was a muted, ashen silver.
I scowled. I didn’t want to look like my problems. How long would Yara take to return?
A hand met my elbow.
I jerked out of her scorching touch. “Don’t touch me,” I hissed.
Gwen recoiled, her eyes wide.
“Yes. I’m a monster now. So do well to remember it,” I snapped. “Why are you even here? Aren’t you happy with Sorin? Why risk your life?”
“Maeve…” her lips trembled.
“I’m a cursed vampire with a raging thirst. And you’re human! I can smell your blood, hear your heart. You’re a walking snack pack to me. So leave!”
She… hugged me.
I went rigid. Deathly still, my eyes wide.
“I never meant to hurt you!” she cried through tears. “I’d had it on good authority that you would surely find your mate at the ceremony and awaken your wolf. I’m human, and you know how humans are treated in IronWolf. I would have been a burden on you. A crutch in your life.”
My heart thundered wildly in my chest. With excitement. A body ripe with thick, warm blood was pressed against me.
Her neck was directly beneath my jaw.
Throat thick, I croaked, “Let go.”
She pulled back to look in my eyes but didn’t release me. “Everything I did, I did for you. I couldn’t come to IronWolf pack because I feared recognition. You would’ve been in danger just for being associated with me.”
“You plunged me into danger by leaving me.”
“I never thought your mate would be a Lycan! Or that your vampire would force you to Veilmoor!”
I snatched her wrists. Even in my anger, I made sure to keep my claws from scratching her skin.
If she bled here and now, she’d be dead.
I trembled, my chest aching painfully. “You left me.”
“I knew you would have never left if I told you my reasons. And I had never planned to go with Sorin at first. I never chose him over you. That night, I’d planned to journey to the other human kingdoms rumored across the sea. But Sorin intercepted me. He told me those places were more cutthroat and dangerous than even this supernatural plane. So I stayed. But I couldn’t come for you. To protect you.”
“Protect me?” My voice rose. “I’ve been kidnapped, mutilated, had attempts on my life, tortured, cursed—”
Gwen pulled me in again, holding me tightly against her. Zero self-preservation whatsoever.
But I couldn’t even cry. Couldn’t yell. Any intense emotion teased the wrath inside me.
So I let her hold me while I stared at the wall, counting my breaths, studying the rich shade of the drapes.
“You’re my daughter. Mine. What I did was wrong and selfish, I won’t even deny it. I’d raised you to shun your roots and ran away right when it got tough.” She cupped my face, her voice fierce. “But know this, I will never leave you again.”
“You’re not my mother,” I said dryly.
Her expression faltered.
I pinned her with my gaze, even as my heart broke on my next words. “My mother was a vampire queen fabled across the kingdoms. You were just her blood feeder.”
That got her to release me and take a step backward. She looked stunned.
The gall.
After lying to me my whole life, abandoning me to a world I was never equipped for, she demands my pity?
“Speaking of. You were her feeder even before she got cursed, which means you know her enough to have an answer for me.”
Her face paled, eyes darting.
“Who was my father?”
She wrung her hands together. She knew.
I tensed for whatever I was about to discover.
Finally.
I’d never really been concerned about my father’s identity until Drusilla and Vladis had so callously avoided telling me. I wondered why.
Gwen squared her shoulders.
The anticipation was killing me. A necessary distraction from my wrath.
“I can’t tell you that.”
My jaw dropped.
I took a menacing step forward. But she didn’t budge. Instead, she lifted her chin stubbornly, gaze hardened.
“Some things are not meant to be uncovered, Maeve. I’m doing this to protect you.”
A burst of laughter escaped me. “Like you protected me by hiding my true identity? By raising me in squalor while I had a whole queendom to my name?”
“I did what I had to!” she snapped. Bold.
The wrath bubbled under the surface.
“Leave,” I sneered.
“I won’t leave you now. I was wrong to—”
“I said leave!” I screamed, heartbeat thundering in my ears.
Power rippled through my veins, looking for an outlet.
She must have recognized the danger. She turned to go.
And in my fragile, insecure heart, I pined for her to stay.
“And Gwen,” I hissed through throbbing fangs. She paused but didn’t look back. “Tell anyone of my identity as the Queen of Veilmoor, and I really will kill you.”
She was so good at keeping secrets anyway.
She slipped out without a sound. Her footsteps pattered off into the distance as she fled from me. For the second time.
My body sagged, chest heaving.
But I bottled it up, all the ugly feelings. The loneliness, the fear.
My mates were at odds with each other, and with me.
Nikolai was wary. Bastian was angry. My mother dead, her stand-in a liar and opportunistic human woman.
I ached to trace away from here, but to where?
I wasn’t ready to face my queendom yet. I needed space.
And I couldn’t force Nikolai to give me an audience when it was so painfully obvious he was keeping his distance.
I fell backward into the bed, curling up as thirst, rage, and self-pity tangled and twisted in my chest.
As proven time without number, I had a way of walking into answers. Gwen had kept me from my fate, but my decisions had led me straight to my destiny.
I clenched my fist.
The road to freedom and happiness wasn’t that far off anymore. I’d suffered the worst of it.
All I had to do now was rid myself of this curse, fix my relationships, and return to my queendom capable and worthy.
Just as the intoxicating scent of succulent, spiced meat assailed me, a knock rapped on the door.
I was upon Yara and the tray like a bloodhound.
I might have scratched her a little in the process.
Occupational hazard.