Chapter 4: The Silent Howl

Aurelia 

I spun around. She was clutching her stomach, sobbing loudly as the china and soufflé lay scattered across the floor.

"You tried to poison me!" she yelled. "You're jealous that I have a pup and you wanted to kill him!"

Travis, my mother, and Jordan rushed in as if they had been waiting behind the door.

"I did no such thing!" The accusation hit like a fist.

Jordan lifted the bowl and sniffed it. "The food is laced with wolfsbane. The scent is obvious," he stated flatly, giving me a murderous glare.

"I didn't do it!" I was being framed, and it was so obvious. Travis was already gathering the sobbing Thalia into his arms.

"You were the only one who touched the food. The guards are witnesses," Travis barked.

Then the realization landed. Thalia had poisoned it herself, the moment I turned my back.

"It was Thalia! She's framing me!"

Travis looked at me, and if a glance could kill, I would already be dead. He passed the sobbing Thalia to my mother and rose to his feet. In a flash he was in front of me. He slapped me so hard my head lolled to the side. I lost my balance and dropped to my knees.

"Not only did you try to kill your sister and my pup, but now you're lying? You think Thalia would harm her own child just to frame you? You are a pathetic disgrace," he spat.

I forced myself up. "Check the camera footage! I didn't—"

"Still lying!" Travis struck me again. Copper flooded my mouth, and I spat blood onto the floor.

"Travis, please..." I pleaded.

"Take her to the dungeon. Three days in a cell without food or water," Travis instructed the warriors. "That will teach you not to go after my heir."

As the warriors closed in, I knew pleading was useless. I had no allies here. So I gathered the last of my strength, looked him dead in the eye, and let the words ring clear.

"I, Aurelia Richards, Luna of the Glowing Moon Pack, reject you, Travis Richards, as my mate and Alpha."

A flicker of triumph lit Thalia's eyes.

"I reject your rejection," Travis boomed, his Alpha authority crushing my words back down my throat like a stone.

The warriors threw me onto the cold, moldy floor of the dungeon. I curled around myself, shivering. I was alone, discarded, a shadow of the Luna I used to be. But I pressed both hands to my stomach, where a new life still beat, and whispered into the dark, "I will protect you, baby. I won't let them break me."

The first day was only the biting cold and the silence pressing on my ears. By the second, the hunger had me dizzy, my thoughts thinning to smoke.

"I am sorry, Aurelia. I am too weak. I cannot help you heal." Coco's voice came faint and frayed, and I felt our bond thinning with it, like a thread worn down to its last fiber.

A guard passed my cell. "Please... I need water. I'm pregnant," I begged, my voice a dry thread.

He sneered without slowing. "We were warned you'd try to buy pity with your lies." His footsteps faded down the hall.

That was when the first one went off.

A low boom rolled through the stone, and pale light stuttered through the bars high above me. Then another. Gold, then red, then gold again. Out in the courtyard the whole pack was cheering, their joy pouring straight down the mate bond and into my chest — Travis, radiant, overflowing with a happiness that had nothing to do with me. Somewhere up there he had just announced it to the world. Thalia was carrying the pack heir.

His rightful Luna rotted in a cell, and he was setting the sky on fire for his mistress.

I should have wept. Instead a laugh tore loose from me — a wild, jagged thing, the kind that comes only when the tears have finally given up.

The cell door creaked open.

Three warriors stepped in, and I knew their faces — Thalia's little circle of admirers. For a heartbeat they hesitated, thrown by the broken, laughing thing on the floor.

"She's lost her mind," one muttered.

"Doesn't matter. We're here to do a job." The second crouched close. "A message from Thalia. Never cross her again."

A heavy boot drove into my lower belly.

"Stop! I'm pregnant—" Another slap cut the scream in half.

"Shut up!" He struck me again.

Then the boots came down without counting. Above us the fireworks kept booming, and with every burst the light flashed through the bars and lit the cell — gold, red, gold — flickering over the spreading warmth beneath me. They were celebrating one pup in the very minute they killed another, and the whole pack was cheering, and not one of them could hear me.

The pain crested and then, mercifully, began to dull, my mind drifting up and away from my body.

"Enough — we were meant to teach her a lesson, not kill her!"

Through swollen eyes I watched their faces turn to horror, watched them scramble for the door. I looked down. The warmth told me everything before my mind would agree to it. A smaller, quieter knowing than the pain — and it was the one that broke me.

My pup was gone.

I pressed my hand flat to the place where she had been, and from somewhere beneath the wreckage I made the only vow I had left to give. "You will not have died for nothing. I swear it. I will walk out of this place, and one day I will burn every smile off their faces."

Then Coco stirred, for the last time.

"I loved you, Aurelia." Her voice was almost nothing now. "Survive. Make them pay."

She gave me that — not grief, but a purpose — and then I felt it: a final, horrific snap, like a tendon torn from the bone. The bond to my wolf went dark.

Coco was dead.

In that moment I begged for death to take me too. But the dark reached me first.

***

I woke days later in the hospital. The healer stood by my bed, his eyes cast down.

"Luna, I don't know how to say this gently, but—"

"My pup and my wolf are dead," I said, and my voice did not shake.

His eyes went wide. To a werewolf there is no greater horror. Our pups are our future; our wolf is our very self. I had lost both, and I had said it the way another woman might read the weather. He could not understand how I was so calm.

Travis swept into the room and crossed to my side. "Love, I am so sorry for what happened. Those warriors acted on their own. I've already banished them."

He took my hand and stroked my hair. I felt nothing — no warmth, no comfort. I didn't bother telling him Thalia had sent them. He wouldn't have believed me anyway.

"Once you're discharged, I'll take you away," he whispered. "Somewhere by the water. Coco can run through the fields as much as she likes, and we'll make love day and night until you're swollen with my pup."

I really looked at him then. The handsome face I had loved for years, the lips I had kissed a thousand times. A stranger. So hollow he couldn't even feel that my wolf was gone — that Coco would never run through any field again, that she was a ghost, that our child had been murdered while he lit the sky for someone else.

I wanted to scream it at him. I didn't. I searched that beautiful, empty face one last time for a spark of the man I'd loved.

There was nothing there.

"Travis, if you still care for me even a little," I said, not a flicker on my face, "spare me this. Reject me. Let me go."

He brushed my cheek with one finger. "Aurelia, I will never reject you. Even though you almost killed my heir and your sister, I've forgiven you. We'll make amends. As long as you don't cause trouble for Thalia and the pup, everything will stay as it was."

An Omega edged in, stammering. "Alpha... Miss Thalia is asking for you. She says she doesn't feel well and wants only you to feed her."

Thalia could have used the mind-link. She chose this instead — one more reminder that she was the queen and I was nothing.

"Aurelia, I'll be back shortly," Travis said, kissing my forehead before he left.

For the first time in my life, I felt no pain as he turned his back on me. Once, even a small quarrel would have torn me apart. Now there was only a clean, cold quiet. My love for him, my hunger for my parents' approval — all of it had died in that cell, alongside my pup and my wolf. Whatever walked out of this place would not be Aurelia.

I would break this bond that chained me to this rotten place, even if the breaking cost me my life. And if I lived — Moon Goddess help them — I would come back as something they had no name for.