Chapter 136
Kara
"I need to shower!" I thrashed harder, my voice going shrill. "I smell like vomit and shame and their fucking perfume! I need to be ALONE for five goddamn minutes!"
"No." Blake's voice was flat, absolute, cold as the arctic wind outside. "Assassins are still out there. You don't get to be alone until we've torn apart every threat within a hundred miles."
"I'll go to the downstairs bathroom!" Desperation clawed at my throat, making me sound pathetic even to my own ears. "The one near my old storage closet! You can stand outside! Please, I just—I need—"
I need to remember who I am before you three rewrote me into someone I don't recognize.
Asher materialized in front of us, blocking the hallway. His pale blue eyes had gone pure black, hispheromone so thick I could barely breathe through it. It wrapped around my throat like hands.
"Since the last attack," he said with terrifying gentleness, "you cannot be alone. Not in a bathroom. Not anywhere. We lost you once, Kara. There won't be a second time."
You didn't lose me. You never HAD me. Not really.
"Ten minutes," I begged, and I hated how small my voice sounded. Hated how the tears were starting again. "Just ten minutes to wash off their words and remember who I am underneath all this... this..."
Luna performance. This pretty lie.
Cole appeared beside Asher, his mint-and-ozone scent wrapping around me in soothing spirals that made me want to scream. "I'll get you clean clothes. Towels. Anything you need."
"I'll stay outside the door," Blake added, finally setting me down but keeping one hand locked around my wrist like I was a flight risk.
I am. I absolutely fucking am.
"Ten minutes," Asher repeated, his eyes searching my face like he could see straight through my skull into the mess of my thoughts. "Then you come out, or we come in."
I nodded because I didn't have the strength to keep fighting. But as Cole headed upstairs and Blake's grip loosened slightly, my gaze caught on the darkened stairwell leading to the third floor.
The north tower.
My tower.
Where I used to hide when the world got too heavy, when I needed to pretend my parents were somewhere looking at the same stars, thinking of me instead of whatever new high they were chasing.
Where no one would think to look for me. Not right away.
Just five minutes. Five minutes to remember I'm Kara—not Luna, not债slave's daughter, not三位Alpha's broken toy. Just... me.
Just me, whoever the hell that is anymore.
Blake's phone buzzed. He pulled it out, frowning at the screen. "Keaton needs us. Something about perimeter sensors."
Asher's jaw tightened, but he nodded. "Make it fast."
They both looked at me. I forced my expression into something soft and compliant—the face I'd perfected over ten years of survival.
"I'll wait for Cole," I lied.
The words tasted like poison on my tongue.
---
I didn't go to the downstairs bathroom.
The second their footsteps faded toward the security wing, I slipped toward the main staircase. My heels clicked too loudly on marble, so I kicked them off, leaving them abandoned by the bannister.
Evidence. Breadcrumbs. Fuck it.
Third floor. The hallway here was narrower, less grand—this was where the old servants' quarters used to be, back whenmanor's had live-in staff. Before people like me became the new servants. Dust motes danced in the dim emergency lighting.
At the far end, almost invisible in shadow, was a door barely wider than a cupboard. The wood was warped from decades of temperature swings. The handle was tarnished brass.
I pulled it open—it groaned in protest—and stared up at the narrow spiral staircase beyond.
Eight years old. Shivering in a too-large nightgown, clutching a snow-wolf plushie and trying not to cry where anyone could hear. Climbing these stairs in bare feet because this was the only place that didn't smell like disappointment.
The memory pulled me forward like a fishhook through my chest.
I had to pass the master bedroom—Marcus and Victoria's old suite, now empty since they'd moved to the west wing. As I crept by, I heard voices filtering through the heavy door.
"—can't keep doing this to her." That was Asher, sounding exhausted in a way I'd never heard. Like he was a human instead of an Alpha god. "The pressure is too much. It's not healthy."
No shit, Sherlock.
"Then what do we do?" Cole, his usual warmth frayed to anxiety. "She's right. We have too many... ghosts."
Ghosts. That's a nice way to say 'we tortured her for a decade.'
"I hate what we did to her." Blake's voice cracked with rare vulnerability, and despite everything, my traitorous heart clenched. "But we can't fix it by running away to another island every time shit gets hard. We have pack responsibilities. Konstantin to deal with. We have—"
"I know." Asher cut him off. "But if we lose her, none of it matters. Nothing matters if she's gone."
I pressed my back against the wall, tears streaming silently down my face.
Stop. Stop caring. Stop making me believe this is real.
They cared. They genuinely, desperately cared.
And it terrified me.
Because caring meant I wasn't just a problem to solve or a mess to clean up. Caring meant they saw me as something precious—and I'd spent so long being worthless that I didn't know how to hold that much weight without shattering.
You're the burden, the alcohol whispered. The complication. The girl who makes everything harder. The tumor they wanted to cut out.
They were right about you all along.
I shoved away from the wall and kept climbing, my feet numb against the cold stone steps.
Fuck them. Fuck all of this. I just need five minutes where I'm not performing.
The door to the north tower was stuck. I had to shoulder it twice before the rusted hinges gave way with a shriek of protest .
Then the cold hit me like being punched in the face by winter itself.
The observation platform was barely ten feet across—a circular balcony enclosed by iron railings thick with ice. The temperature gauge mounted on the wall read -18°F. Wind howled through the gaps in the stonework, carrying snow that stung my bare skin like needles dipped in acid.
I was still wearing the stupid black sequined dress that made me look like a dressed-up whore. Still had Cole's jacket from earlier clutched around my shoulders. It wasn't nearly enough.
But I needed this. Needed the cold to shock the alcohol out of my system. Needed pain sharp enough to cut through the mess of emotions churning in my chest like a goddamn washing machine on spin cycle.
Let it hurt. Let it all hurt.
I stumbled to the railing and looked up.
The aurora borealis stretched across the sky in ribbons of ethereal green, threaded with veins of purple and blue that pulsed like a heartbeat. The polar night turned the stars into diamonds scattered across black velvet. It was so beautiful it hurt.
It was the same sky my parents had left me under.
"Dad," I whispered to the frozen air, my breath pluming white. "Mom. Where the fuck are you?"
Did you ever look up at this sky and think about the daughter you threw away? Or did you just keep running?
Too cold, my wolf whined in the back of my mind. Dangerous. Go back. Go to mates.
But I couldn't. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
They're not my mates. They're my jailers who happen to have magic dick.
Who was so goddamn tired of being afraid all the time.
The cold made mypheromone sharpen—white musk and first snow crystallizing in the thin air, probably drifting all the way down to themanor's courtyard like a beacon.
They'll smell you, my wolf warned.
Good, I thought viciously. Let them panic. Let them realize I'm not some delicate thing that breaks every time life gets hard. Let them realize I survived ten years without them giving a shit, so I can sure as hell survive five minutes alone.
I closed my eyes, letting the wind burn against my face.
Just five minutes.
That's all I needed.
Please. Just five fucking minutes.