Chapter 145: Three months earlier...
Charis
Three Months Earlier.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The sound pulled me from the darkness, and the first thing I felt was its weight.
My eyelids felt heavy as lead, but I forced them open, squinting against harsh lighting above that made my head pound. White ceiling tiles swam in and out of focus above me, and an antiseptic smell that reminded me of a hospital filled my nostrils.
Tubes. There were several of them connected to me—monitors tracking my heartbeat, IV drips feeding something into my veins, oxygen tubes beneath my nose. A pulse oximeter was clipped to my finger, too. My throat felt raw and dry, like I’d been screaming for hours, though I couldn’t remember why.
A chair scraped beside me, and from my peripheral view, I caught movement.
I turned my head, trying to make out the face as my vision swam slightly until it normalised. It was the woman who had visited me at the holding cells back at Ravenshore. Isolde...something. I couldn’t remember.
Like the first time I’d seen her, despite the ugly scar on her face, she was still a stunning beauty, but this time, she wasn’t dressed to the nines. She reminded me of my mom, running around the pack house trying to cook up something for my dad.
"Charis?" Are you awake?"
"Are you alright?" she asked again as her hands hovered over me like she didn’t know where to touch without causing me pain. "Do you need water? I can call the doctor. I’ll—"
I tried to respond, but no sound came out. My voice seemed to have ceased entirely. As she moved toward the door, probably to call a doctor, I finally managed to croak out a single word.
"Wait."
She half-turned towards me. "What is it, dear?"
"Where...am I?" My voice sounded like someone else’s. "H—How long have I been asleep?"
She walked back to the bedside, sighing with relief. She returned to the chair next to the bed.
"Three days," she murmured. "You’ve been unconscious for three days. You slept with so much peace that I thought—" she trailed off and swallowed, rising from her seat to draw closer to the bed. "I thought I’d lost you. I’m sorry I didn’t come on time. I’m so sorry."
I stared at her, feeling confused. My body felt weak, like I’d been bedridden for years, and my memories were coming in pieces that didn’t quite fit together.
I remembered the trail, then the verdict that followed, then being thrown into the holding cell, then Kael—no, I didn’t want to think about Kael. I shook my head to dispel the thoughts. I was taken into a transport and then we had an accident. But after that, my mind went blank.
"Water," I managed.
Isolde slid a hand behind my shoulders, lifting me carefully as if I were glass that could break before she brought a straw to my lips. The first sip choked me, and it took me a few seconds of coughing before I cleared up, and I took the second sip until I drank the entire glass.
"Do you think you can eat something? I can have the cook make some porridge or broth for you."
I shook my head and relaxed on the bed. My breath was coming in gasps.
"Why?" My voice was steadier now, but still came in a whisper. "Why are you...doing this? You could have let me die on that bridge. I saw the others die. Why did you come for me?" I yelled.
"Calm down, dear, you’re not supposed to stress yourself this much.
"Calm down?" I hissed. "What do you want with me? Who are you to me, Isolde? Because people don’t throw their money and power around for girls like me."
She held my gaze for so long that I wondered if she’d heard a word of what I’d said. Then she pulled the chair close, sat, and folded her hands on her lap with one thumb rubbing over the other.
"Because," she started quietly, "someone needs to fight for girls like us. Girls like you."
"I don’t understand."
She sighed deeply, studying my face before finally speaking.
"My name is Isolde Knox, and I was a nobody. Twenty-five years ago, I was a happy child with high expectations for life, but I became an orphan. I became another orphaned child whose family was destroyed by the werewolf world’s unfair laws and traditions."
"My mother was an Omega. My father was human. They both fell in love and decided to get married. Their union was considered an abomination by the pack elders, a violation of everything they believed about bloodline purity and proper werewolf society. Back then, humans were considered even greater enemies to our kind than vampires."
"The elders tried to separate them, but my parents were inseparable, and they thought love could solve everything."
Her eyes glistened with tears, though she tried to smile through them.
"One night, while we were all sleeping, pack members came and set fire to our house. They didn’t give us any warning, any chance to defend ourselves or explain. They just decided we didn’t deserve to exist."
I felt my heart clench at the pain in her voice.
"My mother managed to push me out of a window just as the fire got to me. I ran toward the forest. I was ten years old then.
"And your parents?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
"They didn’t make it out." The words were flat, matter-of-fact, but I could hear decades of grief beneath them. "I spent twelve days trying to survive in the wilderness. Drinking from streams, eating berries, hiding from rogues and random pack members. The burn wounds from the fire got infected, and by the time humans found me, I was dying."
She rolled up her sleeve, showing me scars that ran along her arm—old burn marks that had healed into twisted tissue.
"A human man and his girlfriend found me collapsed by a roadside. They took me to a hospital, and the doctors said if they’d found me even one day later, I would have lost half my body to infection."
"They saved you."
"They did more than that. They adopted me, gave me the best life they could provide, and loved me as if I were their biological daughter. It took six months for me to recover physically, but emotionally fully... I knew I wasn’t complete. I still felt connected to my werewolf heritage, still had this burning need to understand why my family had to die."
She leaned forward.
"That’s when I learned about the alliance between humans and werewolves, how they’d begun sharing resources and technology. At first, I was devastated. If this cooperation existed, why had my parents been murdered for their mixed relationship?"
"What did you find out?"