"Where is Thomas?" My nails were digging painfully into the wall behind my back as I impaled the two men before me with all the loathing I was able to muster, but fearful withal.

They looked meaningfully toward each other ere Carac rose to his feet. Lucian, however, sat back with his heels against his powerful haunches, and studied me cautiously. With all that had happened since I had awoken, to an unremitting nightmare, I had neglected to notice that Lucian and Carac were, oddly, unclothed and covered in naught but blood — human blood!

I averted my gaze, but not in view of any sense of propriety. My need for self preservation, however, and the disgust I felt at regarding their grim appearance, was by far a greater influence than my need to damn them both with an accusatory glare. The predicament I presently inhabited was aught but commonplace, so I would forgive myself my lack of fortitude.

Still staring off to the side, I heard Carac retreating into the darkness beyond, presumably to afford us some privacy. I was now completely alone with Lucian.

"Where is Thomas?" I asked again, my voice hoarse.

"Surely you can have no doubt as to what has befallen that pup... after what transpired here tonight? You must know-"

"I know only that he disappeared into the trapdoor and locked it from within when... I was attacked." I watched as wrath darkened Lucian's lineaments dangerously.

"He left you to save his own hide?! After you risked your life for his!" His words were heavy with fury, but eerily quiet for all their rhetorical vehemence. I could not defend Thomas this time.

"Yes," I replied dully as he curled his fists atop his thighs, his marble-white knuckles a testament to his growing ire.

When Carac had left us, I had conveyed my gaze back to Lucian. He was as comfortable in his naked state as he had always been, albeit his passion was now of a livid kind. I could feel my brow furrowing with concentration as I tried to see the monster that I now knew him to be; but I could not. The creature lay dormant within and hidden from view. He looked as he always had to me: wild and uninhibited, yet diametrically reserved and cold. How had I not known before now that he was other? The proof stood clear and bright before me — his eyes radiating with a diabolical, amber fire! On what bygone occasion had they not been unnatural?

Never! They had always glinted with unwholesomeness...

How had I not known? And yet how could I have guessed? 'Twas impossible. I still could not quite believe it, and likely would still cling to ignorance if not for the fact that he had just confirmed it himself? Were he not now wearing crimson on his face, I would think my sanity a broken thing!

"Well then, he deserved what he has wrought with his craven behavior!" Lucian spat, and I finally realized how vain my efforts to liberate Thomas were. Lucian would now kill him for the crime of abandonment, if for no other reason.

"What do you mean?" I asked anyway. If I had not already been pallid, I was sure I'd have turned wan at the malice in his sneering visage.

"Simply this — you say he climbed into the trapdoor..." Lucian gritted out impatiently, his jaw grinding as he awaited my confirmation. I nodded. "Then... he is dead." I blanched. My blood pooled into my poor heart and It clamored like a thing demented.

"But, how! He escaped! He was supposed to live!"

"There is no escape from here, Aria. That you live is..." He shook his head incredulously. "Verily, tis miraculous for none have survived ere now. That trapdoor is an entrance and an exit, tis true, but when we transform," the thought seemed abhorrent to him, "we always leave a guard below."

He waited for me to grasp his meaning, but I remained confused. "Yestereve 'twas Ross that remained below to guard the passageway beneath Niflheim."

Niflheim?

"And Ross is also..." I was apparently only capable of half-phrases, my brain yet petrified.

"Aye. The same as I. The sons of Fendrel: monsters both," he clarified, on the off chance I mistook his meaning. "Ergo, Thomas' fate was set the minute he laid a filthy hand on you in that stable!" My eyes grew wide with comprehension. I slapped my hands across my mouth to prevent my lungs from expunging all my breath, lest I faint from air depravation!

My head collapsed back against the wall behind me, none too gently, and a heaving sob erupted from my lips. My mind was becoming utterly riven, adrift in madness and desolation. What I had known all my life, since arriving to my new home, was all a cruel fallacy! Everything had altered beyond recognition and I was no longer anchored, my feet no longer fixed in reality. Instead I was in the lair of beasts and grappling for equilibrium. I had unwittingly been married off to their black prince.

They would all as soon kill me as let me leave. Mayhap I might have escaped heretofore, with my ignorance intact, but now that I held their heinous secret in my hand... No, I could not deceive myself that easily. My destiny had been preordained from the moment Godwin had set his eyes on me and my life was now irrevocably weaved into the Greyback tapestry — twisted by their accursed threads! My future would henceforth be comprised of whatever Lucian allowed the fates to embroider there.

I wept for my loss of innocence and I wept for Thomas; but mostly I decried the lies and the secrets that had now destroyed my love and faith in the Greybacks. I vilified the hatred brewing in my breast because I felt its sharpness keenly and it was aimed full force at the tormentor who yet sat at my feet staring hopelessly as I sobbed. I had loved him! I knew that now for why else did I feel as though I'd lost a lung or an eye — the remaining organ now bereft of its twin. I felt now, emphatically, unbalanced without the other half of myself.

I wish I could love you still, Lucian!

That was the root of every excruciating tear I now shed. I had come to love Lucian and his betrayal had stung more than any wound that had ever been inflicted on me! 'Twas worse even than the agony of my mutilated leg. But I could love him no longer. He was not the man, in a literal sense not even the human, I had thought him to be. He was a monster who had tainted my heart and, in so doing, made a mockery of the sentiments I had thought I harbored for him. I had not, ere now, even admitted as much to myself and now I never would again!

Lucian had tried to move to me during the worst of my heart-rending wailing but I had clawed at the wall in an effort to remain untouched by him and he had backed away forthwith.

Finally my anguished howling became too much for him and he would stay separated from me no longer, so he forced me to his chest despite that I scratched it open viciously and bit at his arms. He maintained a stalwart self-restraint throughout my caterwauling, allowing my painful abuse of him to continue unchecked as if he actually welcomed the punishment I inflicted.

I knew not the hour, nor how long we sat thus, but time's ceaseless continuation affected us not. I remained trapped within my captor's forced embrace and my tears did not abate throughout the interminable hours that passed since Carac's departure. I bethought myself that Carac had returned during the worst of my episode, but I was not sure for no one had spoken. Perhaps Lucian had silently sent him away.



❅



We had been sitting in silence a while before I could bare his touch no longer. I moved abruptly away.

"My tears have dried up. There is now no reason for me to suffer your touch any longer!" I cried. Lucian's face became void of expression, but I knew enough of him to know that he had felt the sting of my biting lash. I did not care for his bruised ego nor for the stricken flinch he endeavored to hide. I wanted to inflict pain. "In fact, I would that you never touch me again!" His eyes narrowed into yellow slits.

"If that is truly what you wish," he bit out, "I will never lay these accursed hands on you again. Once you have calmed, be very sure, Aria, before those words pass your lips again..."

I flinched as the tone of each word diminuendoed until the last was merely an awful whisper. That he pushed every bit of his warning through clenched, pretercanine teeth, froze the very blood from my veins. Lucian's fury was a palpable thing and, having seen the physical manifestation of it only hours ago, I balked as if expecting him to change right before my eyes. Thus I held my tongue, fearful of eliciting his monstrous alter ego.

Noticing my terror he turned his rigid back to me and walked into the darkness beyond the light's peripheral glow. I knew he had not left me, but I welcomed the space he had allowed between us. The silence was thick with tension and I started with a yelp of fright when he finally spoke again, his voice emanating quietly from his obscure position.

"You cannot walk. You need to be carried home. Whom shall I call to convey you thither?" Then he aded, "In my stead... since you will not bear my touch." I swallowed audibly, the deglutition of the last vestiges of my belligerence and temper echoing into the darkness.

It was on the very edge of my tongue to tell him that I would as soon crawl home than let any of them lay a finger on me, but I was exhausted and the combative flame within my core had sputtered out in the face of Lucian's dejection. More tears escaped onto my cold face which surprised me utterly for I had bethought myself emptied entirely.

Why was his wounded spirit, the slump of his tired shoulders, devastating me so? Why did I still care? I yearned only to hate him, but I could not and the realization of the fact released a tempestuous storm upon my ravaged cheeks. Thankfully it was a silent flood, for the most part, but I knew that he could hear every droplet skid across my skin and every ragged breath leave my lips. Knowing now what he truly was, I had no doubt he could smell the saltiness of my damp skin.

Mayhap I will hate him again on the morrow. I consoled myself with that. For now I was too numb to feel aught. Liar!

"Take me home, Lucian," I sighed in defeat.

When he encircled me in his arms, I did not flinch or cry. I merely allowed myself to sink into his embrace as he lifted me up with the care he might show a bird with a broken wing. After everything that had transpired since yesterday, I still needed the reassurance of his arms, for all their latent monstrosity. Apparently I did not know what I wanted. I was overwrought and consumed by confusion. Nothing made a whit of sense... least of all my emotions.



❅



"When did Fendrel leave?"

"He left ere I arrived." Carac replied as he cast his gaze swiftly over the cavernous emptiness of the circular atrium and gave a shrug of his powerful shoulders.

"Did he sense aught... amiss?" Lucian's voice was as tense as I'd ever heard it, but this time his brother answered him.

"You mean, did he catch her scent?" Caine snorted derisively, his eyes flicking across my bleeding leg, "Nay, I think not. He seemed exhausted and preoccupied." There was a trace of relief that stole over Lucian's brow at hearing his brother's report, withal he was yet visibly disturbed.

He looked down at me, where I lay spent against his chest, and explained, "We are at our weakest, and our senses most dulled, when first we... awaken." My eyes hastily sought the floor as my mouth pulled down at the corners, aversion weighing heavy on my lips. I could still sense the unbearable touch of Lucian's attention, it was all the more acute with the added feel of his taut fingers as he cradled me in his arms, but it was Caine he addressed next. "And Father?"

"He knows..."

They all looked simultaneously toward me and I shrunk under their watchful and discerning gazes, Carac's glare abrading me unsympathetically. He, of all the remaining Greybacks, seemed to take umbrage at my presence. Thankfully they were by now dressed, all except Lucian, or I might have fainted under all that bare-arsed male attention.

Caine continued, "He accompanied the elders to Nørrdragor, but he bid me tell you to bring her to him directly."

Who were these elders, I wondered. Probably Warwick, Godwin and Fendrel, for the rest of the men were far too young to claim that title. Even Godwin and Fendrel seemed to young for the appellation. I assumed that Ross and Balder had also departed the area with their father, but I did not much care as my eyelids grew progressively weightier.

Why are they still so disturbed by Fendrel? I mused dully. I supposed I would find out soon enough.

I could feel Lucian lowering us into the pit, the combined weight of himself and his burden of no moment for his movements were as adroit as ever, so that I felt as if I were floating again. My eyes had all the while remained fused shut from exhaustion, the shadows flittering across my closed lids as Carac's torch lit the shaft we'd maneuvered into.

Somewhere behind me the trapdoor slammed shut and a lock clicked into place. We moved deeper and lower beneath the terra firma and, as a consequence, the air grew ever more dank and rife with the pervasive stench of loamy earth the deeper we moved.

"The light, Carac!" My eyes flew open at the panic in Lucian's voice. "Kill the light!"

I had only a vague impression of something bloody lying at the edge of the wall ahead, before the flame light disappeared and the darkness eclipsed it from view. It had been just a fleeting perception of mangled flesh and tattered clothing, but I had seen enough ere the shroud of blindness enveloped what now remained of Thomas.

My gasp of horror was ample testament that I had seen what they had sought to spare me and I gasped again when Lucian's arms tightened around me. Now that Carac's rushlight had been hastily smothered, I sealed my salty lids again, the image already seared in my memory, and could therefore only rely on my hearing to supply and decipher the information I garnered from the murmurs and activity taking place around me. That aural organ had become acutely heightened in the pitch-black that ensued.

Lucian walked only a few more feet afore he set me down, presumably to dress himself, for when he picked me up again I felt the wool of his tunic on my cheek instead of the heat of his feverish skin.

Incongruous though it was, I felt now bereft of that warmth, despite that he was still as incredibly hot even with the layers between us. Had he always been so inundated with impossible heat? Wherefore had I never really stopped to think about how inconceivable everything about him was — the scorching temperature of his skin, the eerie incandescence of his eyes and, perhaps most disturbing of all, his ability to heal rapidly.

My bones hurt and my skull felt as tenuous as an egg shell. Even the slightest pressure might crack it completely. The effort to stay conscious had become too great to bear, and thus I succumbed to fatigue, drifting into insensibility as the throbbing of my head lulled me thence.



🌟What do you think? Are her reactions valid? What would you do if you just found out your husband was not at all who you thought he was! Love hearing from you!🌟