Chapter 4: What The Moon Gave And Took

Aviana's POV 

“Mate.”

I could finally feel it in my veins. It felt like an invincible force pulling me to look for something. Like a missing half of my soul.

I sat up slowly. The pain in my back was still there … but underneath it something else had woken up too. It felt like a thread attached to the center of my chest being tugged by invisible hands.

My emotions were all over the place. I hadn’t expected it to feel like this.

I pressed a hand to my chest. My heart was beating too loudly, my eyes had shifted to a bright gold colour.

Then the smell hit me.

I followed it outside, through the corridor, down the steps, into the garden where the morning was still grey and soft and the dew hadn’t dried yet. The scent hit me like a wave … warm and deep and so achingly familiar that my eyes filled immediately.

I knew that scent.

I had known it my whole life, it was Phillip.

He was standing at the garden’s edge in his training clothes, having just come around the far path, and he stopped when he saw me. 

For one second he looked completely shocked … and then it moved across his face, the recognition, the same pull I was feeling reflected back at me … he was crossing the distance and I was crossing it too and his arms came around me and I pressed my face into his chest and cried.

I had almost forgotten happiness existed. She heard me. The moon goddess heard me.

When he pulled back, his eyes were bright and his hands cupped my face. He kissed me like I was something he had been waiting for.

“Come with me,” he said, voice low and rough.

“Where are we going?”

“You’re my mate, Aviana.” His forehead dropped to mine. “I want you now. I can’t wait to have you.”

I frowned, moving my hair out of the way to see him better. 

“Can’t we wait for the proper ceremony? I just … I want to do it right, Phillip. I want…”

He lifted me off the ground.

“I’ll protect you,” he said firmly. “Nobody will harm you. You are mine now. My mate.” His eyes searched mine. “Trust me.”

And I did. I trusted him completely and immediately and with everything I had.

I said yes.

What followed was nothing like I had imagined. 

It was raw, and painful, almost like a punishment. I gasped, then cried out sharply when the first real thrust tore through me…pain blooming hot and sudden between my legs. 

My fingers clawed at his back as he drove in harder. I couldn’t catch my breath. Each rough stroke forced broken sounds from my throat until I was sobbing his name, half in shock, half in overwhelming pain mixed with pleasure. 

My legs shook violently and then went numb; by the end I couldn’t feel them at all, only the deep, throbbing ache where he had used me.

When it was over, I lay trembling beneath him, chest heaving, tears drying on my cheeks. He smoothed my hair back almost absently, then rolled away and began straightening his own clothes.

“Don’t tell anyone yet,” he said, calmly “I’ll handle everything. I’ll make the announcement properly.”

I waited a moment, still dazed, hoping he would gather me up, carry me back like something precious. He didn’t. He simply stood and offered me his hand to help me rise.

I took it. My knees nearly buckled when I tried to stand; a fresh spike of pain shot up my thighs and I bit my lip to keep from whimpering. I dressed as quickly as possible.

“Okay,” I whispered, managing a small smile.

“Go back to your room. I’ll come find you.”

I walked back through the garden alone. Every step sent a dull throb through my core and made my numb legs wobble. I didn’t see him the next day.

Or the day after.

I told myself he was busy. The knights were busy. He was handling things, the way he said he would. I went about my work and kept the warmth of that morning tucked close to my chest and waited.

A month passed.

The sickness started quietly … just mornings at first, then the dizziness, then the vomiting that left me shaking on the cold floor of my room. I thought it was exhaustion. I thought it was hunger.

Then one of the older servants passed me in the corridor and stopped.

She looked at me strangely. “Your scent,” she said slowly. “It’s different.”

I checked that evening.

I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and my hands pressed flat against my stomach and I stared at nothing for a very long time.

A baby.

Phillip’s baby.

I pressed my hands tighter against my stomach and I thought … you are mine and I am yours and I will not let anything touch you. Not the beatings. Not hunger. Not any of it.

I was smiling when I fell asleep. I went to find him early the next morning.

I heard the crowd before I reached the courtyard. It was a very large crowd almost like half the park had gathered here. 

I slipped through the outer edge trying to find a gap to see through. Eventually I found one.

Phillip stood in the center of the courtyard in his formal knight’s uniform. With his back straight and composed. His face was completely unreadable.

Patricia stood beside him in pale gold, her hand through his arm, her hair perfect.

The pack elder was speaking.

I couldn’t hear the words at first over the blood rushing in my ears. Then Phillip’s voice rose clear and formal and loud across every corner of the silent courtyard …

“I, Phillip, knight of the West, forsake Aviana the cursed wolf as my mate. Whatever bond existed I dissolved here, in front of this pack, completely and permanently.”

The pain I felt was immediate. I felt the pain all over my body. It felt like my soul was being ripped out of my body. For a moment the spiritual energy between me and my wolf weakened and I felt death. 

I doubled forward and grabbed the arm of the person nearest to me just to stay upright. 

My whole body screamed. But underneath my own pain I did one thing … I pulled every piece of energy I had and wrapped it inward, around the tiny life in my stomach.

Not you, I thought fiercely through the agony. I won’t let this touch you.

The crowd erupted around me.

I straightened. Pushed through them. Until I was standing in the open and Phillip could see me.

“Why.” My voice came out broken but loud enough. “Phillip. Why? I am your mate. I am…”

“Shut her up.”

Aldric stepped forward from the crowd, his voice hard and sharp.

“You still think you deserve a mate?” He looked at me with the flat disgust I had grown up under. 

“After what you did to your father? After everything?” He shook his head. “And Patricia is pregnant with Phillip’s child. How dare you try to claim what belongs to your sister.”

The world tilted.

I looked at Phillip.

He looked back at me with nothing in his face. Not guilt. Not sorrow. Not even the decency of shame.

Nothing.

“We wanted to wait until the moon festival to share the news.” Patricia’s voice was warm and bright. She pressed a hand to her stomach and smiled brightly. “But I am so in love I simply couldn’t keep it secret any longer.”

The crowd cooed. Congratulations rippled outward like water.

And I stood in the center of it holding the only secret I had left pressed between my own two hands, invisible, mine, the only thing they hadn’t taken …

I looked at Phillip again. He smiled, kissing the side of Patricia's head. And everything in me snapped, every wound and every beating and every stone in every path and every time I had bitten my lip and swallowed it down and kept walking …

All of my pain came up at the same time.

I heard the sound before I realized it was coming from me. I sounded like an animal, My claws came out.

“I am NOT a murderer.”

I lunged. Not at anyone in particular. At all of them. At all of them for everytime they hurt me.

“I HATE YOU. I HATE ALL OF YOU.”

Screaming. I was screaming. After seven years of silence I was screaming and I couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, the sound felt like the only true thing I had said in years.

“I’ll destroy every single one of you…”

Someone grabbed my arm. I threw them off. Another grabbed my waist and I slashed backward with my claws and heard them hiss in pain.  

And good, good, let them feel something, let them bleed the way I had bled …

“I DIDN’T KILL HIM. I DIDN’T KILL MY FATHER…”

Three of them this time. Hitting from different directions. I fought all three with everything I had left which wasn’t much … I had been starved and broken but this was the worst pain of my life … So I fought anyway, with my claws and teeth.

Through it all I kept one thing pulled tight and close and protected. The tiny flicker, low in my stomach. No matter how wild I became I wrapped that up and held it separate from all the rest.

Not you, I thought even in the middle of the madness. Stay safe my baby .

A blow caught the side of my head.

The world lurched sideways.

Another. My knees hit the ground. I was still trying to claw forward, still trying to reach them, my voice still going even as my body gave out …

“Not a murderer … I’m not … I never…”

Arms hauled me upright from behind. Both of mine pinned back. My feet dragged against the ground as they lifted me. 

The courtyard was spinning, faces blurring, the crowd a wall of eyes all staring at the thing they had made and called a monster.

My voice gave out last.

It went hoarse and then, quiet and I hung there between the guards with my head dropped forward and my chest heaving and my claws slowly retracting, and the silence that followed was enormous.

Patricia’s voice drifted through it, soft and shaken and perfectly arranged.

“She has completely lost her mind. The poor thing.”

Nobody disagreed.

They hauled me away.

My feet dragged twin lines in the dirt the whole way.