003: The Man I Never Knew

The Man I Never Knew

Talia’s POV

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

I turned slowly.

The man standing beside me was not the man I had just married.

It wasn’t something I could point to exactly. His face and, his whole body was the same. But something behind his eyes had shifted, the way a light shifts when someone adjusts it from another room. The warmth was gone. In its place was something settled and cold. His shoulders had squared without him trying. His chin had lifted. He stood like a man who had never once in his life needed anyone to stand beside him.

I asked myself if I had spent months sleeping beside a stranger?

“Valik.” My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. “What is this? Why are they bowing to you? Why are they calling you Alpha?”

He looked at me. Not unkindly, which somehow made it worse.

“I lost my memories,” he said. “When rival Alphas attacked me, something in my mind broke. I didn’t know who I was when I wandered into this territory.”

My mouth felt dry. “When did they come back? Your memories… when did you remember who you were?”

He was quiet for just a moment. Then he smirked.

“The night we were together… at the garden.” He leaned slightly closer, dropping his voice just low enough for my ears. “Would you like me to say it louder?”

The floor tilted beneath me.

I staggered back half a step, my palms pressing into the sides of my dress. Everything I had built over the past months… every quiet morning, gentle word, and moment I had let myself believe that something good had finally come to me… I felt it come apart all at once. Like a thing that had never been real to begin with.

Behind me, the whispers spread fast and ugly through the villagers who had come out from their hiding places.

“How could we have lived beside a wolf all this time…”

“We brought him into our home. We fed him at our table…”

“We’re going to die for this. We’re all going to die for this…”

A woman’s voice broke into a sob somewhere in the middle of the crowd, and it seemed to open something in the rest of them because they all started crying, frightened and ashamed.

“There is no need for panic.” Valik’s voice came out calm and absolute, filling the room without effort, the voice of someone who expected to be listened to. “She is my wife. I take responsibility for her. Every person in this hall is under my protection now.”

“I will never go with you.”

The words left my mouth before I had finished deciding to say them. My hands were shaking. My voice was shaking. But I held his gaze and I did not look away.

“Do you understand me?” I said. “I would rather die on this floor than follow a man who looked me in the eyes every single day and said nothing. I curse the moment I saved you. I should have left you in that forest to die and walked away.”

My tears were falling and I couldn’t stop them. I didn’t even try to.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he straightened his neck and laughed. Short and quiet and completely unbothered, like I was a child making noise that would settle on its own shortly.

Then his expression changed.

The amusement faded, and what replaced it was something hard to read. He took one step closer, and lowered his voice so that what he said next was only for me.

“This territory has rogues,” he said. “Packs with no loyalty and no mercy. They pass through here regularly, and the only reason your village has survived this long is because it sits on the edge of my land.” He paused, letting that settle. “Without my protection… they will come when they feel like it, and there will be nothing left when they do.”

I stared at him.

“You have two choices,” he continued. “Either you come to my pack with me, and your people stay under my protection. Or you stay, and I take my soldiers and leave tonight, and whatever happens after that is not my concern.”

The hall had gone very still around us. Even the whispers had dropped to near silence.

I looked at the faces of my people. The elderly woman standing near the front, Mateo near the side wall, and the children pressed against their mothers, watching me with their wet eyes from across the room.

These were the last of us. The ones who had survived everything, scraped, hidden and gone hungry and kept going because we had each other.

Old Harv turned her head and looked at me.

She was smiling.

She was genuinely, quietly smiling, the way people smile when they have made peace with something the rest of the world is still fighting against.

“Talia.” Her voice was soft and steady. “I have lived long enough.” She held my gaze and didn’t waver. “From the time you were twelve years old, dragging yourself through this broken world, you have never once stopped carrying your people. Don’t kneel to them.” The smile didn’t leave her face. “Don’t you dare kneel to the ones who destroyed us, they are not to be trusted.”

I could not gamble with their lives. I had no way of knowing if what he said was true. But I had also been surviving in this world long enough to know that the threats he was describing were very, very real.

My jaw tightened.

“If I go with you,” I said slowly, “you give me your word. Every person in this hall stays safe. No one will get harmed and no one will be taken.”

He looked at me steadily. “You have my word.”

“My trust in you has completely shattered, but if you are giving me this assurance to protect my people, what can I…”

“Talia, don’t listen to them, they are evil and manipulative. Protection? Do you really think a man who has deceived you all this while will keep to his words?” Mateo said, his voice filled with rage.

I didn’t trust him. I wanted to make that very clear to whatever part of me was considering this. I did not trust him. But trust had nothing to do with it because this was not about him, it was about the people behind me, and I had never once in my life been able to turn my back on them.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

“Fine,” I said quietly. “I’ll go.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​