Bled By My Alpha Parents Adopted By The Lycan King Chapter 07
The Woman on the Mountain Road
I didn’t see the fire.
I was already gone.
I stood in the crowd of onlookers outside the Ashborne gates, cloaked and hooded, and watched Vera’s mating procession leave the estate.
Silks. Pearls. A dozen guards. Warrior Kade Vaughn riding at the front, straight-backed, proud.
The night before, I had made peace with dying in that chest.
Then, hours before dawn, the lid had opened.
It was the little kitchen girl. The one who tended the fires.
Months ago she had come to me in the dark, forehead pressed to the floor, begging for a drop of blood. Her older sister was sick. Her family wouldn’t spend the coin for a healer. She had come to a blood slave because there was nowhere else to go.
No one had ever ‘asked’ me for anything before.
I cut myself. I gave her what she needed, but I hadn’t expected anything back.
Yet she remembered.
She pulled me out of the chest and pushed a heavy cloak into my arms and shoved me toward the servants’ gate, and she did not say a word. Words were dangerous. She only pressed her forehead against mine once, quickly, and then she was gone.
I did not know where to go.
For fifteen years, I had lived for three things.
Find my parents. Find my pack. Go home.
I had no home to go to.
A cold wind pushed through the crowd and I pulled the cloak tighter around my shoulders. My teeth chattered.
I remembered the maids gossiping once, years ago, about the southern territories. How the winters there were mild. How the wildflowers bloomed all year round.
South, then.
I turned my back on the Ashborne estate and I began to walk.
I did not know that behind those walls, the Luna was on her knees in front of a burning building, screaming a name she had not spoken in eight years.
I did not care.
The mountain road out of the capital was steep and empty. My legs shook after an hour. After three, I was moving on nothing but stubbornness. I passed a tree and thought about lying down under it and closing my eyes.
Then I saw her.
A she-wolf, half in a ditch off the road. Not shifted. Torn dark blue robes. Blood down the side of her face. Her chest was moving in shallow, wrong little jerks.
I almost kept walking.
I almost did.
But she was somebody’s mother.
Somebody, somewhere, was going to sit by a window tonight and wait, and never see her again.
I knew what that felt like.
I sat down beside her in the frozen dirt and I rolled up my sleeve.
Every patch of my forearm was ruined. The needles had gone in a thousand times. I searched until I found a small stretch of skin near my wrist that wasn’t scarred through, and I pressed the edge of a rock against it until the skin split.
I held my wrist to her mouth.
Her lips moved a little. Then more. Then some color came back into her face.
By the time she was breathing steady, my head was swimming and the trees had gone soft at the edges.
I stood up.
I made it maybe… three steps before the sky tipped sideways.
Then everything went black.