🦋 ALTHEA
When light streamed into my cell the way it did when the Hell Hound had been away for a while, I knew it was not him this time. I turned my eyes up, squinting at the stranger who stared down at me with thinly veiled disdain.
"Get up," the person ordered.
I obeyed, trying to still the tremors that racked my body.
I opened my mouth to ask a question as I was gestured over. "Where is—" I cut myself short, realizing what exactly I was about to ask.
Where is he?
I tried to shake some much-needed sense into myself. He held me a few times and now my body had grown accustomed to his touch and presence. The mark on my back flared, the coolness spreading into my chest, my heart foolishly skipping a treacherous beat.
Here we go again.
I thought to myself as I was shackled with silver chains again. The ebbing pain returned, but I was grateful that unlike many of my kind, who could not stand the mere presence of silver in their vicinity, I had it on my skin with minimal relative discomfort.
I used to wonder why that was so. I still had no answers to that.
There were many questions I had about myself that I had no answers to.
I followed my guard through corridors that grew increasingly familiar, dread building with each step. The war room. They were taking me back to the war room. A knot formed like a rock in my throat, heavy and choking, as the doors were pushed open and I was led inside.
This time there were more Vargans. So many more.
They lined the walls, filled the seats, crowded the space with their presence and their hatred. Every face turned toward me with expressions that made it clear they would prefer to rip me limb from limb. The air itself felt hostile, thick with their collective fury and grief.
I was made to sit in the center of it all, a spectacle for their judgment.
My chains rattled as I lowered myself into the chair, the sound abnormally loud in the tense silence. I kept my eyes down, trying to make myself smaller, trying to disappear even though I knew it was impossible. The weight of their stares was suffocating, each glare a physical thing pressing against my skin.
Then movement at the far end of the room drew every eye.
An elder was brought forward, supported by two deltas. My breath caught.
He was missing an arm.
The stump was bandaged, recently healed but permanent. An elder too old to regenerate what had been taken.
No. No, no, no, no.
The arm. The severed arm they’d found me with, covered in my scent, dripping with evidence of my supposed crime.
This was him. The owner of that arm.
Dread that had been a wave crashed over me like a tsunami, drowning me in the realization of what this meant. They had brought him here to identify me. To confirm their suspicions. To seal my fate.
I couldn’t breathe. The knot in my throat had grown into a boulder, crushing my windpipe.
Then the doors opened again.
He stepped in.
The Hell Hound.
His eyes were covered with a silver mask, ornate and ceremonial, hiding his gaze from the room. But even without seeing his eyes, even with that barrier between us, relief flooded through me like a breaking dam.
He’s here.
My traitorous heart leapt again, the mark on my back pulsing with warmth that spread through my chest. I didn’t understand why his presence brought comfort when it should have brought fear. He was my captor, my interrogator, the one who held my life in his hands.
But my body knew something my mind refused to accept.
His eyes didn’t meet mine—couldn’t, with that mask—but I knew he could see me. I felt it like a physical touch, that awareness of being observed, being known.
Then a prickling sensation crawled across the back of my neck, insistent and sharp.
I looked forward.
And locked eyes with hazel ones beneath red eyebrows.
The woman’s glare was simmering, barely contained, like embers waiting to become wildfire. The heat of her hatred was so intense I could feel it across the space between us, scorching and accusatory.
She looked at me like I had personally destroyed everything she loved.
And maybe, in their eyes, I had.
"You have been convened here for one sole reason," the Hell Hound’s rugged voice carried, reverberating in my gut, stirring something there.
I wanted to curse out loud.
Falling was always inevitable. I had fallen before, and history had begun to repeat itself again, and I could do nothing.
Yet again.
The Hell Hound paused. The entire room had their eyes on him, unwavering, not one even once straying.
Intrigue blossomed like a weed’s flower. I had gathered that his eyes on them could damn them all, yet all of them looked to him with no hesitation, no fear that a mishap, a gust of wind, an impulsive thought could end in their doom.
They all looked at him like they would prefer never to look elsewhere.
My mother was not particularly loved—more like revered, worshiped.
Draven, as Alpha, had put up an act of charm to be adored, but the Hell Hound, despite his name, simply was—in all his authoritative countenance and intense presence—and yet they all looked at him with adoration wrapped in respect.
He did not seem to gloat in it, the way Draven did, nor demand it, the way my mother did.
"One of our own has returned, and he has informed me that what he has to say must be heard by every ear in this clan."
My heart did not dare to skip a beat this time; instead, it leapt into my throat. I shifted where I sat, having no doubt that every move I made was being catalogued as more proof of my undeniable guilt.
"So I give him the stage," the Hell Hound announced, gesturing to the elder Zeta.
I looked away, my gaze dropping to my feet as he began to speak.
The quiet was pensive before his voice broke it with one word.
"Althea."
My name.
Ice spread through my veins, I felt claws at my throat, tearing. I held my breath.
"Althea Nocturne is as much a victim as I was."