Chapter 326

I closed my eyes, the weight of fifteen years pressing down on my chest. “It started long before we met in that hotel room, Adella. But not the way Braydon twisted it.”

“Then tell me,” she whispered. “Who are you to my family?”

“I was the boy in the woods.”

I let the memory wash over me, transporting me back to a time when I was nothing but a weapon being forged in the dark.

“Fifteen years ago,” I began, staring at my hands, “my family sent me away. My Lycan blood was volatile. They called it a curse; I called it a prison. They locked me in a training facility bordering the Silver Moon territory — high fences, magical wards, guards with silver bullets.”

Adella shifted, her brow furrowing. She was listening.

“I hated the world,” I continued softly. “But every evening, I would sneak to the perimeter. Through a gap in the ancient pines, I could see your Pack’s clearing. I saw Alpha Alaric training his men. I saw your mother, Luna Elara, tending to her moonflowers.” I looked up, meeting her gaze. “And I saw you. You were just a child — a little girl in a yellow dress, chasing butterflies while the other pups shifted. You were the only bright thing in my grey world.”

“You watched us?”

“I watched a family,” I corrected. “Something I never had.”

I drew a breath, preparing for the part that still haunted my nightmares.

“That winter, my first shift hit me. It wasn’t like the shifts you know. For a Lycan, the first time is a massacre of the body.” I could still feel the phantom crack of my ribs snapping, the searing heat of Ragnar tearing through my skin. “I broke out of the facility, half-mad with pain — half wolf, half boy. I collapsed in an old herb shed on your father’s land. I was trespassing. A monster on their territory. By law, I should have been executed.”

Adella’s breath hitched. She knew the laws. Rogues didn’t get second chances.

“The door opened,” I said, my voice dropping to a hush. “It was Elara.”

Adella’s eyes widened at her mother’s name.

“She didn’t scream. She didn’t call the warriors. She possessed this aura — a calm that silenced the beast tearing me apart from the inside.” I remembered the smell of dried sage and the unnatural warmth of her hand on my bloodied forehead. “She brought me blankets. She healed my bones with a salve that smelled of earth and magic. She looked me in the eye while I was snarling and terrified, and she said, ‘You are not a curse, child. You are a survivor.’ ”

Silence stretched between us, heavy and thick.

“She saved my life, Adella. She hid me until I could control the shift, then helped me return before my absence was noted. I swore a blood oath that night. A debt of life.”

“So that’s what I am?” Adella’s voice cracked, tears welling in her eyes. “A payment? You approached me, married me, bedded me — because you owed my mother a favor?”