Chapter Four

Oh... fuck.

What the hell was I meant to do? No wonder the poor girl was terrified of me, some of those bruises on her body were likely my own doing. I’d just finished reading about how she killed Scarlett in the future and now I was about to get a front row seat to the live action production.

Was I just doomed to accept that fate?

Man, I really was sent to hell.

“Scarlett!” the man yelled again as he reached me. Immediately, he started checking me over as if searching for injuries. “How are you feeling? Are you sore anywhere?”

I was too stunned by everything happening to respond right away, allowing him time to fuss over me. It hadn’t taken much effort to figure out who he was, and I genuinely didn’t know what to say. My situation was now potentially dangerous if I spoke the wrong thing or upset him.

Because in this pack, his word was law.

He was Alpha Liam, leader of the Easthaven Pack.

Just as the book described, he was incredibly handsome. With copper-coloured hair and deep brown eyes, he looked like he belonged in a magazine or on TV. Possessing a strong muscled build with square shoulders and a jaw that could cut glass, he was the picture-perfect image of every hot romance book cover I’d ever seen. Yet somehow, he was only around twenty-two years old, despite clearly looking much older. I guess these kinds of books didn’t care that much about accuracy. He certainly didn’t look like any twenty-two year old I’d ever seen.

“...I’m fine,” I finally replied numbly. “Sorry for worrying you.”

I couldn’t have found myself in a worse situation and I was silently cursing myself for ever picking up one of these trashy books. Reading about the abused slave girl and actually seeing it for myself was something I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for. I knew that sort of thing was wrong, but all of these books were the same – a female protagonist who was abused or humiliated, discarded or unwanted. It made you sympathise with them, becoming invested in their journey as they rose to power. Only... that journey was now going to lead to my own demise.

I wasn’t some magical, Goddess-blessed white wolf girl of prophecy.

I was the one who got in her way.

And my partner in crime, the one who would hurt her most, was the man next to me. He will be her first mate, finding out on her eighteenth birthday, and it will be him who ultimately hurts and degrades her to the lowest point of her life. He becomes the drive she needs to awaken her powers and seek out a better life elsewhere.

The problem was that I’d read so many of these stories that I was doubtful I even remembered all the specifics of this particular novel. There were so many similar themes and tropes in these books that I would generally skim through a lot of it, skipping to the parts that were more action heavy. Or the spicy scenes – I couldn’t forget that. Because what good werewolf romance book didn’t have a strong alpha man claiming a mate as theirs and making her cry out in ecstasy?

I shook my head and tried to quickly clear my thoughts, not wanting to get too lost in the realisation that I was now living in a world filled with magical hot men. I had much bigger problems to solve first.

Like... finding out exactly how long I had left before Aurora’s eighteenth birthday.

“What happened to me?” I asked nervously. “I don’t remember anything.”

His look of concern only deepened. “A few nights ago, you fell into the lake. Luckily someone was walking nearby and heard the splash. They dived in to save you just in time.”

So, I really had been drowning, it wasn’t just a bizarre dream. That feeling of suffocating was real. Thinking back on the book, I tried to place when exactly in the story this occurred, but I came up blank. Either it was barely mentioned or it wasn’t written at all. Could that mean I was just before the book started? I wasn’t certain, but I was pretty sure it began with one week until Aurora’s birthday.

That wasn’t much time at all.

I could still recall the events of the day, at least. How Scarlett and Liam devised a plan to embarrass Aurora in front of the entire pack. But instead, they discovered something else. That Aurora was Liam’s mate. Liam quickly rejected her, too proud to admit he’d been wrong for how he’d treated her all those years, and Aurora accepted it without hesitation. The whole thing created quite a stir right before Aurora began to glow, becoming empowered in her rage as magic swirled around her. With this new strength, she left the pack without looking back, creating the ripples of jealousy and revenge for Scarlett and Liam. They would both go on to hatch plans to hurt Aurora.

Liam, in his despair of losing his first mate and seeing how strong she really was, realises what he truly lost. He becomes obsessed and desperate to get Aurora back, especially once he discovers her second chance mate was none other than the heir to the throne, the Alpha King’s son. Out of his mind with jealousy, he launched an attack on the capital, though it only furthered Aurora’s success in her new life. Whilst he manages to kill the Alpha King with his band of warriors and hired rogues, he ultimately got caught. In the end, his actions resulted only in Victor ascending to the title of Alpha King and Aurora to Queen Luna of the Aeredale Empire.

As for Scarlett... well, her entire life had been dedicated to Liam. As his childhood best friend, she had always assumed that she would become the Luna of Easthaven one day. From what I could remember, Liam and her were basically inseparable. Which only made the revelation that Aurora was Liam’s mate all the worse. Not only did she find herself second to the very slave she despised, but the man she loved entirely, the one she’d planned to help ascend her to the position of Luna, became obsessed with the ghost of another woman. But all of it came back down to that one day – the day of Aurora’s birthday. That was when she started to lose everything.

Whilst I was pretty sure Scarlett didn’t outright attack Aurora’s new pack in the story, just as Liam did, she did make a few sneaky plans to break her and Victor up. Her strategy was more to create a rift of distrust between them, going until she was finally caught and killed by Aurora. That was the point in the story I’d stopped reading.

With all of this now in mind, I looked back down at the shaking girl on the floor, the one who would soon become the most powerful creature in this universe, and realised I had a choice I needed to make. And quickly.

Did I run away and hope that she would forget about me by the time she met her second chance mate, Victor the Alpha King?

...Or did I somehow try to change Scarlett’s fate?