A moment of silence stretches between us, horrid and unnerving as I glare at the white rug on my living room floor, imagining it catching alight and going up in flames.
“I had to do it in person, Sophie. It’s the least I could do,” Damian explains, as if he’s doing me a favor, and my face contorts with disgust as I bring my eyes back to his face.
“The least you could do, huh?” I scoff, fighting through the pain lodged in my throat, ready to spill out if I’m not careful. I can’t show him that I’m breaking apart inside. What kind of sick satisfaction would he gain from it if he knew?
It’s the only explanation I can find for any of this: Damian showing up on a Sunday, right after we’d confirmed our next date while texting last night. Just yesterday, he walked me home and pressed a kiss between my brows like a devoted lover, bidding me goodnight.
Was it all pretend?
“Well, I wish you didn’t come here at all,” I sneer, glaring at him with as much fierceness as I can muster. “I wish I had never met you at all.”
“You don’t mean that, Sophie,” Damian whispers, attempting to step forward before I lift my hand to stop him.
“What are you hoping to achieve here, Damian? If you’re breaking up with me, then just leave. I don’t wanna see your face ever again.”
Damian gulps—I see it when I lower my hand—and he blinks at me in disbelief, as if he’d been expecting a different reaction. Did he think I’d break down in front of him and beg him not to do this? Try to convince him to change his mind?
He’s wrong.
“Sophie—” he begins, but I cut him off by raising my hand again and stepping to the side.
“Leave.” The single word is cold, cruel. Final. And it prompts him to hang his head and walk back out the door, and out of my life.
As soon as the door clicks shut behind him, I drop to my knees, a sob tearing from my throat as I realize the true extent of what just happened.
Damian just broke up with me, and I’ll probably never see him again. I hope I don’t, because I won’t survive seeing his face without being reminded of what could have been. Anger burns inside me like a fire, and I suddenly want to crawl out of my own skin, feeling uncomfortable in this dress, in my body, in my life.
I hate the color of love and hope, I hate the season of brightness and warmth, and I hate anything that might remind me of Damian Hans. As I sit on the floor in a miserable heap of heartbreak, I feel invisible walls meant to shield me forming around me, picking up the pieces of my heart and stitching them back together to form a rock that will never be broken again, or infiltrated with a silly infatuation that hurts as much as I imagine death does.
No man will ever fool me again. It’s a solemn oath I make to myself in that moment when I realize that love can turn to hatred in an instant.
Chapter 1 - Damian
Present
The pine-framed window is a square sanctuary in which I rest my mind for a moment, drowning out the sounds of the others trying to make sense of our current predicament. I shouldn’t be trying to escape like this, lost in my thoughts and the fantasy of a safer world for my people, but it’s almost as if this is the only hope I have left.
Escapism.
It seems like that’s all I’ve been doing these past two years. Running. Hiding. Escaping the things that might bring more harm than good. Pressing my forehead against my forearm where it’s braced against the cool glass, I stare out the window, beyond the mountain range, at the thin line of blue at the bottom of the valley where the river rages on, fierce and unyielding, bending earth to its will and defying the direction of the wind, forging its own path. The water shimmers, clear and blue, with a tinge of golden shimmer on the surface from the sun’s rays hitting it at a perfect slant.
The view from up here, in the private cabin that belongs to the Valley Wolf Council, should feel soothing. It often did feel that way growing up, until I received my wolf and all the weight that came with growing up.
For a short, stolen moment two years ago, I’d tasted peace again, but that moment couldn’t last forever. Not for people like me. Not when our kind is being haunted and hunted by a dark force of evil.
“It’s been nearly three years since the first attack,” a depressed voice wallows, and the familiarity snaps me out of my daze, feeling the pain of a fellow alpha as if it were my own.
Another pensive sigh echoes, and this time, I turn to see Alpha Heinrich’s second-in-command, Gregory, offering him a consoling pat on the shoulder.
“We’ve all suffered losses,” Alpha Conan says matter-of-factly, without a flicker of sympathy in his tone or the way his long fingers are sharply steepled in front of his chin.
Heinrich lifts his head and turns to glare at Conan, the hand resting on the ancient oak table curling into a fist, the veins on his forearm pulsing with fury. There’s a shriek of wood, like a splintering crack, as if a leg holding the tabletop up is giving in to the weight, which is impossible, considering that the table has been standing since the dawn of our wolf packs.
It’s Heinrich, slowly losing his patience and his will to stay composed around Conan.
“You have not lost one of your chief officers, Conan,” Heinrich says the other man’s name with venom on his tongue, scoffing as if there’s a bitter aftertaste. “I don’t appreciate your lack of empathy in a time like this.”
“What do you want? A fucking hug?” Conan asks snidely, and that’s when I snarl and step forward, intercepting this before the splinter of wood becomes a tornado of furniture in the Council’s meeting den. It’s not like they’ll get far, and the whole scene will look like a joke, a useless show of weakening powers desperately clinging to what we all once were.
