Chapter 12

~ ROSELLE ~

Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

The word tears through my throat so violently, as the fire won't stop and keeps expanding from the lantern. I had expected it to be like the usual time, just the way it always caught when I lit it every night before Father would pull me onto his lap and tell me stories until my eyes grew heavy with sleep.

Instead, this time, it's expanding through the curtains, climbing the walls, and I'm standing in the middle of Father's study watching it happen, and my legs won't move and my voice is...

Dad.

I'm screaming. I can hear myself screaming, my voice as loud as a quake, bouncing off walls that are already beginning to blacken at the edges. I reach for him — he's at his desk, slumped forward, and when he lifts his head, his eyes are wrong, bloodshot as though he is ill.

"Dad. Dad. DAD."

I keep screaming his name. My hands are shaking so badly I can barely see them through the smoke and the heat and the way my vision keeps blurring at the edges because I'm crying, I'm crying and screaming and reaching and he's right there.

He's right there and he won't move and he won't...

The door suddenly bursts open behind me. Beta Noah, Warren's father, his face masked with panic, grabs me tightly.

"No!"

I fight him, kicking and thrashing. My arms stretch forward, reaching for Father, who is finally moving now, finally, finally pushing himself up from the desk, trying to stand, trying to get to the door, his legs barely holding him.

"Dad... DAD..."

Noah drags me backward through the doorway and the heat follows us out. My fingers grasp at empty burning air.

Father's eyes find mine for a second across the smoke and the flames. His bloodshot eyes lock onto my face and something moves through them, and suddenly the explosion swallows everything.

The force of it throws us backward, Noah's grip the only thing keeping me upright, and the sound of it is enormous and total, and then there is nothing.

"No!!!!" My voice screams his name into a silence that gives nothing back.

'I didn't mean to. I didn't know. I didn't know what the fire would do. I just lit the lantern. I always lit the lantern. That's all I did. That's all I did. I didn't mean...'

Noah's hand comes to my shoulder, and when I look up at him, tear-blinded, smoke-choked, six years old and completely destroyed, he looks down at me with those sober looks that tell me I'm finally an orphan.

No. I shake my head. I refuse to believe that he's dead. I refuse... no, he's not. No, this isn't happening. He's going to tell me my bedtime story again. It's just one of those fictional stories he tells me, and I wish for a good ending instead of a sad one. No!!

My voice breaks on his name one final time.

"Dad—"

My eyes fly open, and Ronan's face is the first thing I see. My chest is heaving, my hands are clenched around the blanket, and the room is dark and completely without fire, and I'm here, I'm here, I'm...

It's a dream, it's my usual dream. I sign before I'm even fully conscious.

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

It's instinct. It's my survival mode. I'm trying to prevent the slashes of the whip that would accompany the fact that I was being woken up. And the fact that I'm a murderer and I had killed my parent. Mom died at birth after giving birth to me, and Dad, I killed him. I can barely remember some other things, but the dream has lived with me, has fed on me, haunting me as a daily reminder with Warren's constant reminders.

When I'm fully back to reality, when it finally dawns on me that he has no problem with me dreaming, then it suddenly hits me that I might have screamed loud enough to bring his attention.

Is he going to send me back? I know he's been nice... which is actually suspicious because all I can think right now is that he's not to be trusted either. As much as he's been nice and all... all his brides end up dead, which means there's something.

Or maybe I'm overthinking, and since I'm not new to this, I'm just...

He had stood up for me when Warren was hitting me. He called his best pack doctor to attend to me. I've been given food. His hospital room has been more than warm.

There's enough reason to trust him.

After urging me to sleep, with him promising to watch over me, I can only think... has he always been this nice? Or is this all a fake cover? What did he want from me? Why is he being so overly nice to me? Why did he even agree for a mute like me to be his bride?

Several questions keep filling my head as I finally drift off to sleep.

I wake up to the strange sensation of someone watching me. My eyes prop open and right in my room is someone who is not Ronan.

A girl.

Black hair whipping down her side, she's seated right on the chair Ronan was sitting on last night. My eyes take in the full bright morning. I blink my blurry eyes. Once. Twice.

She's still sitting there, her eyes narrowing on mine, legs crossed, her hands folded against her chest.

"Hey, there," she greets, all teeth, flipping her hair to her side.

I wave, forcing a smile as I sit up, pushing the blanket away, wondering who she is. If there's any female I was expecting, it should be Celeste or one of the nurses. But she isn't. She's not a face I recognize.

"You must be Ronan's new bride-to-be, I see." She's walking to the bed now.

I nod once, even though the position scares me to the bone.

"I'm Mara, Alpha Ronan's closest mistress," she boasts of her title, and I know I'm already meeting another Nova.

"But oh well, I like you. You look so innocent, fragile, and..." She squats close to me, grabbing my chin like she'll do to a child, and pokes at my head. "Mute? Dumb." she cackles, leaning back. Her spine straightens.

"You must be brave, because I don't know why you think you're different. You're his seventh bride, seventh fucking bride, and you know where the rest are? They're six feet under, which means you're likely going to be there in a few. Let's say most of his brides were very strong. We've gotten hybrids, vampires, Alpha bloodlines, Beta bloodlines, the strongest, and even humans, but they're all dead and barely survived a year. And the rumors say you're wolfless, which means you'll barely survive a week."

Fear seeps through me. Her words ring through me like a death bell, cold shivers racing down my spine as I freeze, processing every single syllable she just handed me like a gift wrapped in poison.

You'll barely survive a week. Would I die? Would I?

The question sits in my chest and just stays there. The truth is I've been asking myself the same thing since the moment Warren signed that contract. Since the moment I heard the name Alpha of Death.

"I'm going to offer you a solution, which is to leave this pack and run, or else stay and die and be buried anyway. Either way, I'll still have Ronan for myself."