Chapter 158

“What kind of black smoke?” She whispered softly.

“Black magic. My parents were killed by it. The car rolled over and slammed into the trees at the side of the road and crashed. The driver, my brother, and I were injured, but it didn’t kill us. My parents, however…” The anger in his voice was unmistakable now as he continued.

“I saw my mother, who had been smiling at me only a moment before, covered in blood. Her skull had been split in two and her body had been severed at the middle. And my father…” Sebastian couldn’t bring himself to describe it fully, for the grotesque image was already replaying itself behind his eyes with brutal clarity.

“My father’s head was lying right in my lap, and his body had been thrown out through the side of the half-torn car.” His throat bobbed and his heart was beating so frantically that Viola raised her hand and placed it gently against his face without even thinking, moved by an understanding of his pain that needed no words.

He didn’t look at her, but he turned his cheek slowly into the palm she had pressed against his face and rubbed against it, grounding himself there as he continued.

“When it was investigated, it was determined almost immediately to be the work of a witch. The spell had struck our car and left its mark behind, a mark that was traced back to a witch from Moonwillow. I wanted to avenge my parents’ deaths. I couldn’t accept it. How could I?

“It was grotesque. I couldn’t forget it afterwards, I kept seeing them both that way, over and over again, until their smiling faces faded from my memory entirely and were replaced by only that. My father’s head. My mother’s broken skull and severed body. I couldn’t let it go. And so the night we were taken to stay in a hotel while waiting for the elders to arrive at the scene, I ran away and slipped into Moonwillow on my own. I wanted to find who had killed my parents…

“I wanted their heads as well. I took my father’s gun and a kitchen knife. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted a death for a death. I would kill anyone if it would make me feel better, if it meant I would find peace knowing I had killed the culprit. But when I got into the pack, I realized the only witch they had there lived in the Alpha’s quarters, and I decided then that the Alpha had to have been behind my parents’ deaths.

“I wanted to kill him and the witch he kept in his quarters, but when I got there, I didn’t know how to use the gun properly. I was apprehended and locked away like a criminal.”

Viola felt a surge of anger rise inside her. She recalled that Moonwillow once held a law stating that anyone who attempted to take the Alpha’s life, whether an adult or a child, would face the same punishment without exception. A year of torture and then a death sentence before all the pack members.

She had witnessed the kind of punishment dealt out to criminals in that pack, and imagining a ten year old boy being subjected to it made her chest burn with fury. Had he been stripped naked and whipped in the pack center? Had his head been forced underwater with a bag over it? Had he endured the disgrace of being spat on by pack members?

Viola had watched such things happen many times in Moonwillow, it had long since stopped being something new or shocking to witness a criminal being put through such humiliation and torture. But thinking about a ten year old Sebastian standing in that same place sent her stomach rolling and her heart throbbing with a pain she hadn’t expected, for it was far too brutal to sit with.

“Didn’t they know who you were?” She asked quietly, searching his face as he continued to stare away from her.

“To them, it didn’t matter enough to investigate my identity when they captured me. To them, I was simply a criminal. During that time, the werewolf world had not yet discovered phones or the internet where one could keep track of the people of the Silver Pack, they had never laid eyes on me or my siblings before.

“They held me captive and tortured me the way they would torture a fully grown adult, all while claiming they hadn’t known I was the late supreme Alpha’s son. I was very nearly considered dead within my own pack, until the elders finally decided to send a search team to Moonwillow, to find anything of me, even remains that would at least confirm I was gone.

“The Moonwillow Alpha would never have released me had my pack members not come into their territory to look for me. They were let off with the excuse that they hadn’t known who I was, that I had gone against their rules and attempted to kill their Alpha…”

Sebastian then told her how, after he was finally found, he was informed that the witch responsible for killing his parents had been located and executed, and that she had been acting entirely alone, not under anyone’s orders, and that the Alpha of Moonwillow had had nothing to do with it. He had never believed a single word of that.

To him, Moonwillow had been responsible for his parents’ deaths, and he would never forgive them for the torture they had put him through, nor for the parents he had lost because of them.

The only reason Sebastian had never been able to take their lives was that there had never been any concrete evidence pointing directly to them as the ones behind it, which was why, when he rose to become the supreme Alpha, he had withheld every benefit and resource from their pack without mercy or exception.

After that, he had banished everything and anything that had to do with witches and other creatures who were not werewolves from the werewolf world entirely. This world would no longer take in any outsider who was not one of them.

When Sebastian finished speaking, silence settled between them and Viola turned everything over quietly in her mind while he grew still, his expression blank and his gaze fixed somewhere far away in the distance.

She couldn’t help but think about how deeply insensitive her former pack had been, brushing off their own crimes by dismissing everything that had happened as nothing more than a petty incident from years ago. A young boy had lost both of his parents in the most horrific way imaginable, and rather than showing even a trace of remorse, they had captured and tortured him in the depths of his grief.

Viola felt her heart squeeze painfully and she gently stroked her thumb across his cheek. “I am sorry…” She whispered, her throat tightening with emotions she hadn’t expected to feel so deeply. “I am sorry that you had to go through something like that at such a young age.”