CHAPTER 8 — DELIVERANCE

Ayla POV

I walk home slowly.

Not because I am tired, not because my body is protesting every step, though it is. I walk slowly because I know what awaits me at home and I chose it. 

Finally, it's happening. I only have to suffer for one more day. I only need to endure one more round of this and then face something different.

It might not be safe, it might not be kind. I know it because being handed to three Alpha heirs is the same as being free. 

But it means that I will no longer be here among people who call themselves my family but turns me into a punching bag that everyone reaches for when they need somewhere to put their anger. I will no longer be among the people who they wrongfully accused of killing her mother and punished me for it. 

I can survive different. I have survived everything else.

I push open the front door and brace myself for what comes next. 

---

The house feels wrong immediately. Charged with hatred and venom. 

Mara is in the kitchen but she is not cooking. She is standing at the counter with her arms folded and her eyes on the door when I walk in, like she has been waiting for me to.come home.

Dax is in the living room. Rex is on the stairs and Nova is nowhere which is the worst sign.

My eyes settles on my father sitting at the head of the table.

"You're late," he says.

"I was at the academy."

"Sit down."

I sit.

He looks at me for a long moment with the knowing behind his eyes. 

"You've been offered to the three alphas and you will be leaving at the summit is this weekend," he says, then eye me. "But don't rejoice yet. Bfore you leave this house, we are going to make sure that you understand what you are. And that you pass the message over across to them."

My face remains still and my father frowns, at my lack of reaction.

"We will make sure that we brand the words worthless on your forehead before passing you across to them," he says. "We will kill you before you ever become something more than just worthless." 

I say nothing. My gaze is steady and unflinching. I don't need a soothsayer to know that he means every word. 

He nods at Dax who drags me to the dungeons. The place where the most extreme form of torture happens to wolves who are being brutalized. 

I gulp. I'll survive this and it will be all over. 

---

The cellar is cold.

It is always cold. Stone floor, stone walls, one hanging light that flickers at irregular intervals like even it cannot commit to being here.

They chain my wrists above my head. The metal bites into my skin immediately, familiar and merciless.

My father stands in front of me.

"One more lesson," he says. "For old times sake."

What happens next I will not give full space to. Some things do not deserve the dignity of being described in detail. Some things only deserve to be survived.

I count.

It is the only thing I know how to do in here. I count the links in the chain above me. I count the cracks in the far wall. I count my own breaths when I can still find them. I go somewhere inside myself that they have never been able to reach — the small quiet room at the back of my chest where my mother's voice still lives.

*You are more than this world knows yet, little love.*

I hold onto that.

I hold onto it through everything.

I pass out twice. Both times they pour water over me to bring me back. Both times I surface gasping, confused, the cellar swimming back into focus around me like a bad dream that refuses to release you.

The third time I go under I am not sure I come back.

---

**Finn POV**

I see her through the small window.

The one at ground level on the east side of the cellar — the one I used to press my face against when we were children and she was being punished and I did nothing.

I press my face against it now.

What I see breaks something in me that I am not sure has a name.

I hit the door. Once. Twice. Three times with everything I have. It doesn't move. The chains on the other side are thick and deliberate and my father put them there specifically to keep out exactly this kind of interference.

I cannot get in.

I cannot get in and she is in there and I can see her and I cannot get in.

I slam my palm against the door one last time and then I lean my forehead against the cold wood and I breathe and I think.

*One more day*, she told me. *And after that my suffering is somewhere else.*

It has to be now. It has to be tonight.

I turn and run.

---

The summit is in the main hall.

Formal. Loud. The kind of event my father knows how to perform for — standing near the centre of the room looking like a respectable mid-tier Alpha hosting important guests, laughing at the right moments, refilling glasses that don't need refilling, performing capability with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing it for years.

I stand near the wall and I watch the three of them.

They are not here for the event. They are present in the way predators are present — still on the surface, tracking everything underneath. Caius has not touched his drink. Zane is watching my father with the expression he wears when he has already decided something. Ryker is scanning the room with the slow precision of someone looking for a specific thing.

My father moves toward them. Nova beside him, positioned and ready.

"The evening is going well," he says expansively. "Please, eat. Drink. Whatever you need—"

"Where is she?" Caius says.

The question lands flat and immediate. No preamble. No social coating.

My father blinks. "I'm sorry?"

"Your daughter. Ayla." Caius looks at him steadily. "Where is she?"

Nova steps forward. "I'm right here—"

"Not you." Ryker doesn't look at her.

My father clears his throat. "She is — she'll join us shortly. Please, in the meantime, Nova would love to—"

I don't hear the rest of it.

Because at that exact moment, through the mind-link I share with the household — the one I have never been able to fully close off — I feel it.

Water. Cold. A gasp.

She is conscious.

And then something else happens. Something I have never felt before and have no framework for. A snap — invisible, enormous, like a door slamming open that has been sealed for years. A connection igniting between four points simultaneously, crackling through the link so powerfully it makes my ears ring.

I look at the three of them.

All three of them have gone completely still at the same moment.

Caius's hand is flat on the table. Zane's drink is frozen halfway to his mouth. Ryker has turned from the room entirely, facing the direction of the cellar, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

I cross the room in eight steps.

"I know where she is," I say quietly. "I can take you to her."

Ryker stands.

Before I finish the sentence Ryker is already standing. Then Caius. Then Zane. Rising together like something coordinated by a signal none of them had to send.

My father takes one step forward. "Now wait just a—"

Nobody looks at him.

Ryker is already moving. I lead them through the service corridor, down the east passage, out through the side entrance into the night air. My hands are shaking. I don't try to stop them.

We reach the cellar door.

Ryker doesn't slow down.

He hits it once — his shoulder, his full weight, the full force of the strongest Alpha in five territories — and the chains on the other side don't hold. The door comes off its frame entirely and falls inward with a sound like a verdict.

The three of them step inside.

The silence that follows is the specific silence of men who are looking at something that has taken every instinct they have and snapped it beyond the point of restraint.

Then one voice. Low. Absolute. Carrying the weight of three packs and three bloodlines and something older than any of them.

"Who dares to touch what belongs to us?”