Chapter 4

DYLAN

I didn't sleep that night. I lay in bed telling myself again and again that choosing to walk away from Aurora and staying with Ivy had been the right call, and any future Alpha in my position would have done the same. 

But it didn't feel right. It felt like something I was going to regret for the rest of my life, and no amount of repeating the words "it was the smart choice" made that feeling go away.

Every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing Aurora's face, and the way she'd looked at me like she still believed I'd fix everything even after she'd heard those damning words from my mouth, like some part of her hadn't given up on me yet.

***

The days passed slowly. Then the official word came down from my father, delivered to the whole pack like any other piece of news. Aurora hadn't made it. Her injuries had been too severe. She was dead.

I thought about that for a long time, even longer than I expected. At night, when the house went quiet and there was nobody around to perform for, guilt crept into my heart.

I thought about the baby. I thought about her shaky voice, while she poured her heart out to me, telling me I could still choose her and the baby. 

I told myself it was easier this way. It was easier to grieve her now that she was gone, than to sit here and face what I actually did; walking away from her while she was dying because my father told me to. 

The guilt faded faster than it should have. And that scared me more than the guilt itself did, if I was being honest with myself, which I mostly wasn't.

Ivy never brought it up again after the first day. Neither did my father. Within a week, the engagement was announced anyway, like nothing had happened at all.

More than once, I caught myself standing outside Aurora's old room without meaning to even walk there. It was empty now, her scent fading a little more each day, and every time I passed it, I felt something twist deep in my gut. I never went inside. I just told myself there was no point.

AURORA

What nobody in Silverlake Pack knew was that I hadn't died.

A patrol from the north had found me collapsed in that hallway, barely breathing, and gotten me stable enough to move. They were trying to get me somewhere safe before anyone else from my pack could reach me, but that part never happened.

We were ambushed before we even made it out of Silverlake Pack. I wasn’t awake for most of it. I only had fragments of the whole thing; the sound of fighting, someone's hands dragging me through the dark, my wolf completely silent, too weak to do anything but lie there and let it happen.

Traffickers took me that night, along with a handful of others who'd been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I drifted in and out for what felt like days, sometimes weeks, my body slowly healing just enough to survive, never enough to fight back.

Weeks later, those same traffickers hauled their prisoners north to settle a debt, all of us chained and ordered to stay quiet. But it wasn’t just any debt. This one was owed to a man most people were too scared to even say the name of out loud, like saying it might summon him straight out of the shadows.

Alpha Roman, The Kingslayer.

I'd heard the stories growing up just like everyone else. He'd killed an Alpha King with his bare hands. He didn't answer to the Main Council, didn't answer to anyone. Nobody who crossed him ever lived to talk about it. 

I used to think those stories were exaggerated, just some nonsense meant to scare pups into behaving. Now I was being carted straight to him, one name on a long list of prisoners being handed over to settle somebody else's debt, and there wasn't a single thing I could do about it.

The truck rattled and shook the whole way north, the roads getting rougher and colder, the trees taller and darker than anything I'd ever seen back home. Nobody spoke much. An older woman across from me, with a long scar down one arm, quietly told me that people who went into Ravenwood Pack usually never made it out. 

But I didn't have the energy to be scared of that the way I probably should have been. I was too busy silently praying to anyone listening that whatever was left of my baby was still holding on.

Willow was still weak, as light as a feather inside me, but she was there. That was something. That was more than I had any right to expect after everything.

When the truck finally stopped, the air outside smelled like pine and something colder underneath that I couldn't quite place. Someone barked orders. Chains rattled. I heard names being passed down the line of guards, their voices low and careful, like they didn't want to say it too loudly.

My name was on that list.

Aurora Hale.