CHAPTER 36

Helena's pov

The air down here tasted like rust and antiseptic.

I shouldn't have been behind that glass. Council protocol said family is a liability. But Jarrett pulled rank. Or maybe he broke it. With him, the difference had always been thin.

In the room below, Vanessa sat at a steel table. Silver cuffs locked her wrists to the bolts. They were already working. Her skin was red and blistered where the metal touched her. Blood ran in thin lines down her forearms and dripped onto the concrete.

She looked small and nothing like the woman who had smiled at my baby shower and told me the cramps were normal.

“Start talking,” the Elder said. His voice was flat. He wasn’t asking.

Vanessa’s eyes darted to the camera. To me. She knew I was there. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Jarrett said beside me. His voice didn’t shake. That was worse. “Or we let the silver do the rest.”

A sob broke out of her. It was ugly. Real. “Okay! Okay, please. Take them off.”

The Elder didn’t move. “Talk.”

And she did. Words spilled out like she’d been holding them behind her teeth for years.

I gripped the edge of the console until my knuckles went white. Jarrett didn’t touch me. I thought he was afraid that if he did, I would shatter.

“Twins can have two fated mates,” Vanessa gasped between breaths. “It’s rare. One in ten thousand. It makes the hybrid unstable.”

My blood went cold.

She meant me and Maya.

Maya had died six years ago in a car crash. “Hit and run,” the police had said. We never found the driver.

Vanessa kept going. “Your bloodline was engineered that way by the council decades ago. They wanted a hybrid that could bond to two alphas. Double the strength. Double the control.”

The Elder leaned forward. “Who authorized it?”

“My family,” she choked. “We were paid for generations to watch her. To make sure she never triggered. The full moon after her 18th birthday, we were supposed to dose her water. Sedatives. Keep her human.”

I made a sound. Jarrett finally looked at me.

“But she triggered anyway,” Vanessa cried. “They said if she bonded to one mate and rejected the other, she’d die. If she bonded to both without training, the shifts would tear her apart from the inside.”

“So you did what?” I heard myself say. The mic picked it up. Her head snapped up.

Vanessa’s face crumpled. “The fake pregnancy. God, Helena, I’m sorry. It was to keep you distracted. To keep you human and scared and tied to Brent. While they decided if you lived or if you were too dangerous to let them walk around.”

Jarrett hadn’t blinked in thirty seconds.

The Elder flipped a file on the table and there were old photos. “And then there’s him.”

Vanessa followed his gaze and started shaking harder. “Brent has diluted wolf blood too, from a cheating ancestor three generations back. A wolf who ran and married a human. The blood was supposed to be dormant.”

“No,” Jarrett said quietly.

“It’s why he was drawn to you,” Vanessa whispered. “It’s why the Council let him marry you. You were supposed to bond to him first. He was their monitor. Their report. Every time you had a nightmare, every time you got sick around the full moon, he called it in.”

Eight years.

Eight years of “you’re the only one, H.”

Eight years of him kissing my forehead when I woke up screaming.

Eight years of me thinking I was crazy for feeling two pulls in my chest whenever the moon was full. One toward Jarrett. One toward Brent. I had told myself it was grief for Maya.

Jarrett went completely still. The kind of still that came before a storm. Or a kill.

“Did you know?” I asked him. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

He didn’t look at me. “No.”

The Elder snorted. “Liar or not, it doesn’t matter. She’s unstable now. The bond is waking up because the lie is gone.”

The Elder stood. “Here’s what happens next, girl. Rejecting a fated mate kills a hybrid. Your body will shut down, your organs will deteriorate first, slowly for two or three weeks.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“If you bond to one and deny the other, you die,” he continued. “If you bond to both, the shifts will tear you apart unless you’re trained. Properly. Daily. Painfully.”

Jarrett stepped forward to the glass. “Then we train her.”

The Elder laughed. It wasn’t a kind sound. “Not in a human hospital, boy. Not with human doctors. You think I’m going to let an unstable double-bond hybrid run around Port Harcourt with no control? She could level a city block on a bad night.”

“Then what?” I asked. My voice cracked.

“She"ll be taken to the facility up north with no contact with the outside for six months. We will break you down and build you back up. Or we put you down now, before you become a problem.”

Jarrett turned to me finally. His eyes were gold at the edges. His wolf was close to the surface. “We don’t have to do what they say.”

“They’ll kill me,” I said. “Or you. If I run.”

“If you stay, they own you,” he said.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t know which was worse. Then my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I shouldn’t have had it down here, it was council rules. But Jarrett had slipped it to me before we came in. “In case,” he’d said.

I pulled it out with shaking hands, it was from an unknown number but the context made me realize who the person was.

It was Brent and he was asking to see me. Hr said they were lying to me about Maya.

I didn't know why but I quickly hid the screen from Jarrett when he tried to look.