Even Sienna can’t take away that pain.
The water shifts as Callum steps out of the bath, Sienna’s dangling feet disappearing soon after. I expel all the air from my lungs and feel the pressure, the heat, both begging me to breathe—to reconsider—to do everything in my power to keep Sienna, even if it means damning her to a cursed existence alongside mine.
My soul was tainted long before the rot was born.
But she doesn’t know that.
I’ve never told her the real reason I left my pack all those centuries ago. She only knows what everyone else does—thatI left, willingly abandoning the wolves who raised me and the pups thatIhelped raise—all because I couldn’t handle pack life.
The truth is a nightmare I can never wake from.
I burst from the bath and take gasping breaths, my vision swimming as I stumble to the edge. A woman rests there, her legs dangling in the pool and a lullaby on their lips as she braids a little girl’s matching blonde hair. Behind her, two young boyschase each other across a spring field while their father watches, his closest friends among him and laughing at a joke one of them said. The forest radiates heat as thick plumes of smoke rise from the treetops.
None of them notice until the two boys disappear. Then the father, running into the burning woods after them. The mother and daughter linger, their gazes locked onto mine as screams break out across the meadow, and its flowers rapidly wilt.
“You left us to die,” the woman accuses, her voice rough with soot. Smoke billows past her lips and her face turns to ash. “What pack can survive without its alpha?”
I shut my eyes, but it’s no use.
Their ghosts haunt my dreams.
The little girl taps my cheek, wetting her charred fingers with my tears. “Was it worth it?”
My answer is always the same.
“No.”
A rush of heat accompanies her scream, and I flinch as flames lick my skin. When I open my eyes, Sienna and Callum are gone, but so too are my ghosts.
I’m alone, as I always should have been, and yet...
I yearn for my mate.
But I can’t be the alpha she needs.
I’ve already failed once. I won’t condemn Sienna to the same fate. A pack without its alpha is a gift for death, and an alpha without its pack mourns their loss.
Except for me.
I was too busy fighting for glory in The Great War to care about protecting my pack. I earned my battle scars and went home to find thathomeno longer existed. It had been burned to the ground in my absence, its charred remains a stain on the earth. To this day, nothing grows in the Revarynn Meadows, and nothing ever will.
Like my soul, its soil is soaked in rot.
Chapter 36
Sienna
Disappointment at Revyn’ssilent rejection is a punch to the gut, but stepping into the hallway puts me in a choke hold. Overstimulated from the bath, exhausted from the night prior, aching in the best way possible from not one buttworounds of sex with powerful men—and all of a sudden, the air in my lungs collapses and every nerve in my body ignites. A flare of magic bursts from my chest, and I grit my teeth as white hot flames dance across my skin, burning through my clothes and leaving me naked.
The fire flickers with a life of its own, the brightest tips burning pink while the rest settles into muted shades of gold ranging from the warmest rose to soft waves of amber. My senses sharpen as my eyes shift and my wolf lingers just beneath the surface, a warning growl rumbling deep inside my chest.
I follow my instincts and walk down the hallway to a door like all the rest, except this one has a gaggle of girls crowding its front. They whisper and giggle among themselves until one of them senses me, her eyes bulging as she turns to stare. “It’s not what you think it is,” she shrieks, her voice pitching toward hysterics. Grabbing her friends, she hauls them away from the door. “He’s the one who approached her!”
With a wave of my hand, the door bursts into flame.
The girls shout in panic and flee as the wood splinters into charcoal and I step into the dark bedroom.
Down feathers float through the air, the few nearest me catching on fire as they drift past. Pillar candles adorning twin nightstands ignite and cast light across the room. Claw marks carve through a mattress, its headboard broken in half and the linens torn to shreds. Alistair’s scent twists in the air, its usual aroma stained with something so cloyingly sweet that my nose crinkles as I step deeper into the room.
