Chapter 523 A SECOND CHANCE (BONUS – 2)

EVELYN’S POV

Normally, when one seeks air, one goes out, not down.

I am not one.

By the time I reached the lower levels of Nightfang packhouse—mansion, really—my erratic, tangled emotions had quieted.

They were compressed now, like pressure that sat beneath your ribs and expanded every time you tried not to think about it.

The dungeon corridors were colder than the medical wing. Stone walls swallowed sound and returned only echoes, while old wards hummed beneath the floors like distant insects trapped under ice.

Two guards stationed outside the final room straightened as I approached and gave me an acknowledging nod.

Neither stopped me nor questioned why I was here.

Like the medical wing, my presence here was a regular occurrence.

I pressed my palm against the warded door and felt the layered enchantments—containment wards, sedation wards, suppression arrays—recognize my magic before disengaging one by one beneath my fingertips.

The locks clicked open, and I stepped inside a room that looked nothing like a dungeon cell.

Medical equipment lined one wall beside rows of potions and carefully labeled ingredients.

Enchanted monitoring crystals floated above a small worktable littered with notes written in my own increasingly illegible handwriting.

A portable alchemical station occupied the far corner, while silver containment markings covered nearly every exposed surface.

The bed itself sat in the center of the room.

And on it was Jack.

For a moment, I simply stood there, staring at him. No matter how many times I saw him like this, it still felt so wrong.

Jack had always occupied space aggressively.

He’d lived, laughed, moved—even hated—loudly.

The man lying motionless beneath the blankets felt like a poisoned imitation of him, as if someone had taken my brother and rebuilt him from corrupted blueprints and fractured memories.

Given that Catherine was gone, Sera and Kieran had been kind enough to amend the condition I’d asked for and given me the chance to save Jack, but even after all the work I’d done, the damage lingered.

Dark veins still spiderwebbed beneath his pale skin, faint traces of corruption winding through him like ink spilled through water, retreating deeper whenever I reached for it with my magic.

But I refused to lose the last thing remotely close to a family I had.

“How are you this fine evening?” I muttered as I stepped into the room and the door slid shut behind me.

Jack didn’t answer.

Rude.

I moved automatically after that, setting ingredients onto the table and checking the enchanted monitors near the bed.

His vitals were stable. The corruption activity swirling within him was minimal.

Better than yesterday.

Not as good as two days ago.

Recovery, unfortunately, was rarely linear.

I hated that.

I hated too many things lately.

The mortar rotated beneath my hand.

Clockwise. Three turns.

Add silverroot.

Two drops of tincture.

Wait for the color change. The liquid darkened to a deep blue.

My lips pulled into a rare smile.

Magic obeyed rules. Magic made sense.

I carried the potion to Jack’s bedside and gently tilted his head back enough to pour it between his lips.

His throat moved automatically, his reflexes doing all the work.

“You’re improving,” I said quietly. The words echoed against stone walls.

“The corruption pathways around your nervous system have reduced by almost twelve percent since last week.”

I adjusted the blanket over his shoulders.

“Twelve-point-four percent, actually.”

Precision mattered.

“I know you don’t care about all those numbers, but you’re unconscious, so your standards for exciting conversation are currently quite low.”

Nothing.

I bit back a sigh. I would give anything for one of his irritated glares or one of his spiteful jabs: ‘Seriously, Evie, no one likes to hear all that droning about numbers.’

I sat beside him and rested my elbows against my knees.

Maybe I shouldn’t have put him to sleep, but I’d had no choice.

The first reunion had been a disaster.

After the battle, he’d been weak and terrified and confused and incandescent with rage. When he saw me, he exploded, hurling accusations in a spray of spittle.

Traitor. Enemy. Backstabber.

He screamed until blood vessels burst in his eyes and fought the restraints with such violence that he tore open flesh that had only just begun to heal.

Between demands for Catherine and the rain of insults, he wanted to know why I had chosen the “enemy’s” side.

As though there had ever truly been a choice to make.

As though refusing to become a monster required justification.

In the end, I’d had to put him to sleep.

My hands had trembled while I drew the spell circle, and they had shaken even harder when the time came to activate it.

Jack was no saint. Even before Catherine had sunk her claws into him, he’d been cruel, sadistic—he’d murdered more innocents than he’d been brought to justice for.

Some would say he deserved what Catherine had done to him.

But those someones hadn’t sat across from him at dinner tables and watched milk spurt from his nose as he laughed at a joke.

They hadn’t watched him break a pack member’s nose because they’d sneered at a witch in their midst.

They hadn’t felt the fierceness of his hug when I had to leave at the end of every visit to Silverpine.

Before we were Catherine and Marcus’ victims, we were brother and sister.

“You know,” I said softly, “it’s pretty shitty that everyone I call family is a psychotic, murderous nutcase.”

Jack remained mercifully unconscious.

“I wonder what that says about me, who is capable of loving monsters.”

I stared down at my hands.

“You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, after you, after Catherine, but…”

I closed my eyes, and instantly, Lucian’s face flashed in my mind. His voice echoed in my head.

‘Evelyn…I’m not worth this.’

I opened my eyes, and a small, bitter laugh echoed around the room.

During the day, I sat beside Lucian.

During the night, I sat beside Jack.

My life had become a pendulum swinging endlessly between two hospital beds. Between two unconscious men I wasn’t sure should even be in my life.

“I asked about Zara today.”

I hugged my knees the way I’d done in Lucian’s room, holding myself together when everything inside me felt out of order.

“It was a mistake.”

My throat tightened, but I forced the words out, knowing they would fester the longer I kept them within me.

“He loved her,” I whispered. “Loved her so much that he was willing to accept an imitation of her. So much that he would have died for her the way she died for him.”

I exhaled a shaky breath.

“So much that I don’t think there’s any room left afterward for anyone else.”

Saying it aloud made it feel more real, more solid, and infinitely harder to ignore or argue with.

A quiet laugh escaped me, though there was no humor in the sound.

“Why do I even care?”

I shook my head. “I barely know him as more than a self-destructive werewolf with catastrophic attachment issues and a martyr complex large enough to have its own gravitational pull. This stupid mate thing you werewolves worship is what has me in this dilemma, and I—”

Hate. It.

“I hate that I can’t wake him up,” I continued softly. “I hate that I can’t pull myself away. I hate that I might actually consider going down whatever godforsaken path this leads me on. But most of all, I hate that—”

The words lodged, and pushing them out was like pulling thorns out of my flesh.

“I hate that he might wake up, take one look at me and…apologize.”

The thought would have been ridiculous if it weren’t so horrifyingly plausible.

“’I’m sorry,’ he’ll say,” I muttered, staring at the ceiling. “’Terribly sorry about the involuntary soul connection. Deeply unfortunate situation all around. Entirely understand if you’d prefer a refund.’”

I shrugged. “Or he could just outright reject me and be done with it.”

This laugh was bitter.

“Stupid, huh? What right does he have to do the rejecting? Why do I care about being rejected? Why do I—”

I ran a hand down my face and was mortified to find that my cheeks were wet.

“Oh, if Catherine could see me now.” I shook my head. “She’d call me an embarrassment. Snap at me to get myself together. Then she’d tell me it’s for the best. Her parents, after all, hadn’t worked out—why would I think Lucian and I could?”

A Beta wolf and a witch.

A love story that had ended badly and produced a psychopath.

“Maybe history has already made its opinion on these things abundantly clear. There’s no future for people like us. Witches and werewolves don’t belong together.”

I leaned forward, and my fingers brushed dark hair away from Jack’s forehead.

“You don’t get to die, too,” I told him quietly. “You suck big time, but you’re all I have left, werewolf or not. Hate me if you want, but live, okay?”

Silence.

I adjusted the blanket again.

Checked the monitors again.

Reorganized notes that didn’t need reorganizing.

Eventually, I lowered myself back into the chair beside Jack and pulled a spare blanket over myself.

And then, because I couldn’t bear to dream, couldn’t bear to see anguished navy eyes, I let my own magic draw me into empty, quiet darkness.