CHAPTER 7 — THE WARNING

Finn POV

My father returns fuming

He opens the front door with a loud slam, his anger coming out in waves. 

I stick to the top of the stairs and watch him drop his folder on the table in the living room. He stands there for a moment with both hands curled into a tight fist. His shoulders are tight, his breathing audible from where I'm standing.

Then Nova comes in behind him.

If my father is a storm that hasn't broken yet, Nova is a storm that is brewing. She walks through the door with her jaw set and her eyes red with a kind of fury she only wears when something that she cannot control happens. 

My father turns. "What happened?"

"One day," she says in a clipped, precise voice. "They have been here for only one day."

"Nova—"

"One day, and she has managed to get the attention of all three of them." She drops her bag on the chair. 

"Caius sent her a dress that cost a fortune. Ryker dressed her wounds in the gym. And Zane—" She stops. Her nostrils flare. "Zane tied her shoelace. He didn't mind going on his knees for her."

My father stares at her. “Are you certain?”

"Yes dad" Nova says, almost in tears. "She must have done something. She must have told them something to make them interested in her."

My father makes a low guttural sound that fills the entire space the way his anger always fills rooms. 

I press my back against the wall at the top of the stairs and I refuse to move.

"Sit down," he says.

Nova sits.

“I was summoned for a meeting with the three Alphas, and Ayla might be going with them.”

Nova laughs, short and displeased. “Tell me it's a joke.”

“It's not.” My father goes ahead and tells her about the meeting. All of it. 

The five violations. The way the three Alphas sat across from him like judges who had already written the verdict. How he offered her my sister, to buy himself time and protection. And how it worked. 

I scoff unbelievably. Really?

“They will take her at the summit and she will belong to them after that." My father says calmly.

Nova goes quiet for a moment. Then something pass across her features. "What happens before the summit?"

My father's expression changes into a quiet understanding that exists only between them.

"We would make sure that they understand what they are receiving," he says. "We send them an example of how she should be treated. We would make sure she's broken. Unable to stand for herself or speak above a whisper. We will turn her into something that cannot hold its head above its shoulders." He straightens. 

"We will teach her what she is before she leaves this house. An example. And we will make it so bad that they eventually continue from where we stopped when she goes with them."

Nova smiles slowly. "When should we start?"

"Tonight.” He pause. “And tomorrow. We will continue for every hour till the day of the summit."

She nods. Like he has just told her something she has been waiting a long time to hear.

They keep talking but I stop listening.

***

I find myself sitting on the floor of my bedroom for a long time after that. My eyes are fixed on the empty space in front of me and my hand is on my head. 

She is my blood sister. And I have not allowed myself to realize this in a very long time. Mara came into this house and with my father's support, they handed us a story that we took. Word for word because we were grieving. 

I was just fifteen years old, desperate for someone to tell us where to put all the pain and they told us to blame it all on Ayla. 

They told us that she killed our mother, and we believed her.

I believed her.

But a girl who killed her mother does not slide food under bathroom doors when her younger brother is sick. She does not take every punishment in silence to protect the people around her from being used as leverage against her. She does not carry eleven years of someone else's guilt without once trying to make someone else carry it for her.

Her only crime was loving her mother and sticking close to her side till the very end. I can still remember the loving eyes my mother used to look at her as she died in her arms.

It has been bothering me for weeks now, so I started to observe. To really check what has been going on in this household. And what I see does not match the story I was told. It has never matched, yet I chose it because it was easier than the truth.

We had blamed her for years. Punished her for years, for something she didn't do and she is still standing.

I made up my mind to end it. I get up, grab my jacket and leave the house before I can talk myself out of it. 

She is innocent.

***

I see her in the academy library. In the far corner behind the old reference section where nobody goes anymore, sitting on the floor with her back against the shelf and her knees pulled up. She looks tired and hungry. 

She looks up when she hears my footsteps and every muscle in her body tightens immediately. She pulls her knees closer. 

“You have come to drag me home right? I promise I didn't do anything. They just—”

"Ayla," I say. My heart breaks to see her so scared of me. We used to be close when my mother was alive.

"What do you want, Finn."

"I’m not here to drag you home. I'm here to help you escape.” 

She looks at me like I'm insane. "No. Whatever this is, I don't want it."

"Please." I stop a few feet away, I know she needs time. "Please just listen. I'm not here for them. I'm not here because anyone sent me."

She looks up at that. Her eyes move over my face, giving me that untrusting look. 

"What do you want?”

I sit down on the floor across from her and I tell her everything I heard. When I mention the three alphas, her face falls. 

“I knew it.” She says softly. “I knew their kindness was suspicious. They just wanted to own me.”

To say I feel pity is an understatement. She has gone through so much and only God knows what she's going to face there. 

“Father is not happy about it.” I say, making sure that I don't forget the reason why I'm here. “Father is planning to deal with you. He'll do it with the rest of them and they won't stop till you're a broken doll.”

She smiles painfully. “Let them, they've been doing it for the longest.”

It is my turn to look at her like she's crazy. "I don't want you to suffer at their hands anymore. I can get you out tonight. I know people outside the territory. You'd be safe. Please, let me help you."

She looks at me for a long moment.

"No." She says, her mind already made up. 

"Ayla—"

"No, Finn." Her voice is quiet. "I'm not running."

"If you stay they will—"

"I know what they will do." She closes the book in her lap. "They have always done that. It might be worse but it's not new."

"Then why?"

"Because." She looks at me directly. "Being theirs is still a form of deliverance. I've always known that I will be free someday. Mother told me in my dream.”.

I stare at her, my respect level slowly rising. 

“Whatever the Alphas want from me, is still further away from this house and that is all i want."

I marvel at the woman she has become. The one she chose to grow into despite everything we did to break it. For the first time, I see her strength. Her courage. I see what the pain we caused have turned her into.

It didn't make her weaker, no. It only made her stronger. 

"One more day," she says simply. "And after that my suffering will be somewhere else. Somewhere different. I will figure out my survival then."

"You don't know what they'll—"

"Finn." She says my name and there is something in it that stops me completely. Not harshness or bitterness. Just a tiredness so old it has become something else entirely. Something that looks almost like peace. "Go home. I have been living in this house since I was eight years old. I can survive anything."

I want to argue. I want to tell her that she is wrong, that running is smarter, that I can fix this. But looking at her, I already understand that she is not asking me to fix anything.

I nod once and stand. Then she looks at me and tells me “thank you.” the words barely audible. 

I can no longer return home. I shift into my wolf and run into the forest. 

“God, I hope she survives.”