Chapter 69

Chapter 69
Selena's POV

Three years. Every invitation returned untouched, without even a proper refusal. Every time I approached him myself, all I received was that indifference, so cold it verged on humiliation. As if I were not a living person, but merely an object that had been carelessly placed too near his path.

He would step around it without so much as furrowing his brow. If a man had struck you across the face in front of everyone, the pain might not have been so mortifying. At least a blow proves he saw you. And I — I was not even granted the standing to be seen.

I do not know exactly which moment it began.

Perhaps it was that first year's end, at the Mating Season, when I came to the feast in full array and he would not give me even a single dance.

Perhaps it was some council that had let out, when I waited on purpose at the far end of the corridor, and as he passed me by, his eyes stayed fixed on somewhere else.

Whatever it was, in time that thing inside me slowly curdled.

It turned sour, turned hard, and set into another shape, uglier, and sharper.

It was no longer simply "I want him."

It became —

Whatever I cannot have, no one else may take.

But today, I watched with my own eyes as the very thing I had begged three years for, and never won, fell into someone else's hands.

Into the hands of a woman who has not even awakened her wolf.

After the trial ended, I saw Nicholas rise from his seat.

I thought he was leaving.

But he did not walk toward the center of the camp, nor did he go to the elders. He simply skirted the crowd and made his way toward the direction of Abigail's tent.

He did not go in.

He only circled slowly around its perimeter, lingered a moment, and soon left.

From anyone else's vantage, it was nothing more than an ordinary patrol. No one could have found fault in it.

But I saw it clearly.

His feet had carried him there ahead of his reason.

Even before he himself had made any decision, his body had already chosen the direction one step ahead of him.

It was precisely that which left me barely able to breathe all afternoon.

A man who cannot be commanded, cannot be flattered, cannot be bought, would drift toward her tent in the night, driven by an instinct he himself perhaps had not even noticed.

What did that mean?

I clenched my fists and asked myself, again and again.

What kind of woman does a man do such a thing for?

On what grounds?

Those words ground back and forth against my teeth until they ached.

On the grounds that she pulled the Matriarch back from the edge of a blade?

On the grounds that the King, from his high seat, rewarded her with one gentle, kind word?

What on earth is she?

And what of me?

I was born of one of the great houses, of the purest blood. Beauty, standing, lineage — every one of them presentable enough.

I bled for him for three years, threw away my face for three years, and in the end could not win even a single direct glance from him.

The firelight crept slowly across the canvas.

I stared at that swaying shadow, my eyes dry and aching.

And just then, I suddenly thought of the girl who had been led away a while ago.

Olivia.

Abandoned by her own parents, abandoned by the whole pack, with nothing left in her eyes but hatred for Abigail.

A hatred so pure it was nearly clean, without a single thread of anything else mixed in.

I lifted my hand and touched the corner of my own mouth, and only then realized that, at some point I had not noticed, I had already begun to smile.

---

Somewhere in the Misty Wilds

The second night had not yet passed when the rogues found her.

Five of them.

Gaunt, their eyes clouded, half-mad with the hunger and cold peculiar to wolves without a pack.

They drove Olivia back against a dead tree, her spine pressed to the rough bark, her fists clenched, her rapid breaths turning to clouds of white in the air.

Never in her life had she truly fought to survive. That much, those wolves saw through at a single glance.

One of them lunged suddenly, sweeping her legs out from under her. Olivia crashed hard into the cold mud, rotting leaves spilling down her collar, damp and cold as snakes.

She struggled to rise, but another wolf stamped a paw down on her back, pressing her whole body back into the mire.

Her face lay against the cold, wet ground, mud and water choking into her mouth and nose, forcing her into a wretched fit of coughing.

They laughed among themselves, tearing at the fine, now-unfitting gown upon her. The silk split apart inch by inch beside her ear, the sound as harsh as the utter collapse of some kind of dignity.

One of them seized her hair and wrenched her head sharply upward, forcing her to lift her eyes and look at him, only to savor the terror and the breaking on her face.

The pride she had once been so carefully cosseted with in Crimson Fang keep was now trodden into the mud, and she along with it.

At last, she screamed.

It was a sound she had never allowed herself to make at home.

Shrill, broken, utterly stripped of dignity.

Her nails dug into the frozen, hardened earth, and for the first time she truly understood what it meant to be without any way out.

No mother to smooth the road ahead of her.

No servant to shield her from disaster.

No father to step forward and set the wreckage right.

And no one would ever come to save her again.

Just then, a voice cut through the chaos in the clearing.

"Enough."

The voice was low, yet it carried an authority that brooked no defiance.

Before the rogues could even grasp the weight within that voice, their bodies had already gone rigid a step ahead of them.

Slowly, they turned.

Out of the darkness, a man stepped forward.

He was tall, a black robe falling from his shoulders, a deep hood swallowing his entire face into shadow. The night wind swept across the hem of his robe, yet could not scatter the near-oppressive stillness about him.

He did not raise a hand.

Nor did he bare any fang.

Yet whatever those rogues saw beneath that hood, all five of them, half-mad with hunger, scattered like leaves swept off by a gale, fleeing into the trees in nearly the same instant.

The clearing fell quiet once more.

Only Olivia remained, sprawled in the mud, her chest heaving violently. Her hair clung to a face streaked with filth and tears, her whole body trembling beyond control.

She looked up at the black-robed man, her throat as if stopped up, unable to force out even a single plea.

The man looked down at her for a long while.

Motionless.

Not until Olivia's trembling had all but turned into a soundless begging did he slowly crouch down before her.

His voice dropped low, nearly against her ear.

"They left you here to die."

He paused.

"Your parents, your sister, and every one of those who watched with their own eyes as you were pressed into the mud."

Olivia's breath caught abruptly.

The man extended a hand gloved in black, and held it before her.

"I will not ask whether you want to live."

His voice was terrifyingly calm.

"I only ask you —"

"Do you want revenge?"