Chapter 16: Calm Before the storm
Mikalya’s P.O.V
I remembered those days, those dreadful nights like it was yesterday. An everlasting nightmare. A wolf, whose cruelty and dread had, shook the Earth to the very core. Destroyed all bonds of Kinship. Tore every fabric of nature.
"Mouri had been a hidden village for over 400 years. No one knows when that hidden village came into existence but it became the safe haven for the warriors of the BloodPledge pack. Almost all of the male warrior's born there were viciously strong and ruthless in battle. It helped them conquer the whole of the Gulf of Kutch by killing any other packs that lived there and slowly, they had killed all other wolf pack in India, becoming the sole pack that had the strongest of warriors from all over India."
Beside me Rhys was silent. The calm before the storm. His expressions were neural but his eyes held lighting. Lightning that promised to destroy.
So I continued."But then, Rafael became the pack Alpha and their downfall started. Rafael wasn't satisfied with just the Gulf of Kutch or India, he wanted to become the strongest pack of Asia, but to acquire that position he did something unthinkable. He turned every woman in the pack into sex slaves."
I heard him take in a sharp intake of breath, felt his blood boiling. But my tale was far from over.
"It became a ritual. Every time a girl came of age, she would be hounded upon by the entire pack. It didn't matter that the person fucking her was her own father, her own brother...or her own son. Rafael would be the first one to have her. The births of men were celebrated and the women were cursed, even though whenever a girl was born, everyone waited for her to come of age so they could have her. Sometimes, if there were more than three girls born in the pack, the child would be drowned in a colander of milk to kill her."
A deep breath. Centuries of pain. Centuries of torture.
"But then... one child was born whose birth was sure to cause a rift among the pack members. A child with pure white fur. That was why my mother hid me right after I was born and my father kept it a secret, telling everyone that the child had died during childbirth and had been disposed of. I remained hidden for almost my entire life, never seeing the light of day. Ever the rest of the villagers didn’t know of my existence…until one day, at fourteen years old, Rafael scented the scent of another Alpha.”
I could never forget that day…that day when Rafael had broken down our house and dragged my parents and me out to the centre of the village. My chest constricted as I remembered the wolves clawing at my parents, tearing through skin, drawing blood. They had considered them traitors for keeping me hidden. And after they had been torn apart and beaten bloody…they had been set aflame right in front of my eyes.
"Jala dena sabko! Kisi ko mat chorna!"
Those had been my mother’s last words to me as her skin bubbled and burned from the fire, as her body slowly turned to ash. She’d told me to kill them all, burn them to dust like she had been burned. No one in that village had deserved to survive. No one had stood up for the wrongs that had been done to them and their women; everyone had simply shut their mouths and turned their heads. So I had done exactly as my mother had commanded…I’d burned every single one of those horrible people to the ground.
“MINK!”
I came back to reality, to the arms of the man who was my mate.
I blinked several times till Rhys’s face came into view. His face was all hard lines, skin pulled taunt over his cheekbones in anger, in worry. He pulled me against him in a tight embrace, his strong arms wrapped around me like steel bands. He thought I needed the comfort, but I didn’t. I’ve lived in that nightmare for over a century and I’ll probably take that nightmare to my grave.
“Did he hurt you?” It was a question asked through gritted teeth, his mind probably working up the worst possible ways in which I could have been hurt or violated.
“No.” I spared him the agony. “Rafael never got around to hurting me.”
But before I could say any more, Rhys’s lips were on mine. Strong, demanding and real.
Passion unbound, ran through my veins, the connection pulsed through the mating bond. There was something about it that made it special...like Rhys too was savoring it like it was something new. Maybe it was, I was his first mate after all.
I was glad he had been next to me to pull me out of that endless circle of nightmare and also that he had protected Aya even by going against his own packmate, his second.
And for now that was enough.
I'd tell him the rest of my story; I'll reveal all my secrets to him, because he deserved to know and because I wanted him to know. But right here, right now, I just wanted to feel him closer to me as his lips moved on top of mine.