CH 10 - Silas
1672 Words
SILAS POV
The silence in the office thickened until it felt like a fifth presence standing among us, heavy enough to press against my lungs. Robbie’s words did not drift into the room; they drove themselves into my chest and lodged there like a blade I could not pull out. I stared at her, waiting for the punchline, waiting for Heat to scoff, waiting for Hudson to admit he had misread the letter. Anything at all that would quiet the roaring inside my skull.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
They only watched me fracture.
The metallic taste on my tongue spread slowly and I realized I had bitten the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood. Seiryu surged forward at the scent, scraping fire along my ribs, demanding control. He did not care about logic or alliances or consequences. He cared about one thing only: the mate we had hunted for three years was promising herself to another man.
I braced my hands against the desk when the floor tilted. Heat pulsed under my skin, rising with the same steady inevitability as a burn spreading through dry brush. Harrison shifted his stance, already preparing to restrain me. Hudson moved closer, foolishly trying to read my expression as if anything left in me resembled a sane man. Heat watched with his jaw locked, shoulders tense, understanding that the wrong breath could detonate me.
Robbie folded the letter and slid it back into the envelope. The care she used to do it only made the pressure inside my chest tighten further. She looked between us, her eyes moving from surprise to something quiet and wary.
“She is happy,” Robbie said. Her voice dropped into something soft, as though softness could dull the meaning. “She has built a life. She is moving on. She is getting married. You should be happy for her.”
Something inside me cracked. I felt the snap, the shock of it, the flood of molten rage filling the empty space where reason had once lived. My vision blurred not from tears but from the force of the emotions tearing through me.
“Who is he?” My voice came out low and rough. It sounded like someone else.
Robbie shook her head. “She didn’t say.”
Of course she didn’t. Helena was too smart to leave a trail easy enough for a dragon to follow.
Harrison stepped closer, his tone a careful mixture of authority and pleading. “Silas, breathe.”
“I am breathing.” The words vibrated with the effort it took not to crush the desk. “She is my mate, and she is engaged to someone else. Tell me how I am supposed to breathe.”
Robbie flinched at the word mate. Her pulse stuttered. Her eyes widened.
She knew something.
She had always known something.
In the next heartbeat I was on her, slamming her against the wall with enough force to rattle the frames. Harrison and Heat grabbed at my arms and Hudson pushed his aura forward, but I did not feel any of it. Seiryu had already wrapped himself around my mind, dragging my instincts to the surface.
“What are you hiding from me?” My voice was a low growl scraping through the room, sharpened by the dragon driving it. “What do you know about my mate?”
Robbie clenched her jaw, meeting my gaze even as my aura pressed against her like a blade to her throat. The scent of her fear only made Seiryu more relentless.
“Let her go, right now,” Luna Katherine said from the doorway.
I had not heard her enter. Her presence hit the room like a shift in gravity. Sekhmet and Hathor pushed through her aura, and the pressure of their combined power slammed into me so hard my grip faltered. Heat and Harrison dragged me back while Robbie gasped for breath.
“What the hell was that?” Hudson snapped. “You could have killed her.”
“She is hiding something.” My voice was still rough, still dangerous. I kept my gaze locked on Robbie. “Tell me what you know about Helena. Tell me what happened to her. Tell me what she said to you.”
Robbie rubbed her throat and straightened her shoulders. The tremor in her hands betrayed her but she lifted her chin anyway, defiant even against the tension choking the room.
“It is not my place to tell you,” she said. “I will not betray my best friend the way you did.”
The words struck harder than any physical blow.
And the meaning clicked.
Robbie knew.
She knew about Helena’s eighteenth birthday.
She knew about the forest and the snow.
She knew about the mistletoe.
She knew why Helena ran.
And she blamed me.
I did not wait for Harrison or Heat or Hudson to catch their breath. The moment Robbie’s accusation hit the air, the moment the ugly truth settled between us with the weight of a hammer, something inside me snapped clean in half. I turned and walked out of the office without a word, every step vibrating with too much pressure, too much heat, too much fury to contain in a human shape.
The hallway blurred. Voices rose behind me, calling my name, demanding I stop. I did not even hear the words; the blood pounding through my temples drowned everything else out. I pushed through the front doors of the packhouse hard enough that the hinges shrieked, and the cold Winter Pack air punched me in the lungs.
Good. I needed the cold. I needed anything that was not the suffocating fire clawing through me.
“Silas!” Harrison’s voice cracked behind me. He was running. They all were. Their footsteps hammered across the porch, the three of them storming after me with all the fury of alphas who suddenly realized the man they trusted was seconds away from tearing apart the world.
They reached me right as my control slipped.
“What the hell was that?” Heat demanded, shoving my shoulder and forcing me to turn. “You almost killed her. You attacked Robbie in our packhouse. What is wrong with you?”
“Answer us,” Hudson growled. “You do not get to walk away after that.”
I whirled on them, breath heaving, vision fractured with threads of blue fire. “I am done explaining myself. I am done sitting here while all of you pretend she is gone forever.”
“You need to calm down,” Harrison said, stepping closer. His aura pressed against me, an attempt to force reason into a man who had long since abandoned it. “Silas, we will help you, but you cannot lose control like this. You cannot—”
“I am not calming down,” I said, my voice low and dangerous enough that all three of them stilled. “I have spent three years dying slowly while you stayed comfortable in your packhouse believing she would return when it was convenient. I have spent three years searching while you convinced yourselves that doing nothing was loyalty.”
Heat bristled. “We did not do nothing.”
“You did exactly nothing,” I said. “And you think you have the right to question me for finally acting?”
The fury in me surged again, breaking past the boundary of skin and bone. My spine arched as heat tore through it, vertebrae twisting, reshaping, reforming under Seiryu’s violent rise. My vision went sharp, bright, blinding. The cold night air evaporated under the heat spilling off me.
Hudson stumbled back. “Silas, stop—”
I did not.
My dragon roared through me, a sound that cracked across the sky like thunder ripped open at the seams. My bones splintered and rebuilt themselves, wings tearing free, scales rolling down my arms, claws replacing fingers. The shift was not graceful. It was violent and reckless and born of a desperation that had lived too long without release.
Blue fire erupted from my jaws as Seiryu forced us upward, scorching the air, shaking the snow from the pines in a single blast. I heard someone shout my name, but the wind swallowed the sound as my wings beat hard enough to shake the treetops.
The ground dropped away beneath us.
The packhouse shrank.
The triplets became small figures staring up at the storm we became.
And I did not care.
Helena was out there. My mate was out there. And she was engaged to another man, living a life that should have been mine, carrying a happiness that did not belong to anyone else.
Seiryu roared again, a violent sound that tore into the clouds, scattering them like smoke. We flew higher, slicing through the night until the air thinned and the moon glowed silver against the edges of my wings.
There was only one thought left in my mind, and it burned with a clarity that was almost cold.
Find her.
Find her now.
We angled sharply, diving back toward the far forest, away from Winter Pack, away from every memory that chained us here. I let the wind whip past us, let the night swallow us whole, because there was no turning back now.
The hunt had already begun.
And I would not stop. Not for alliances. Not for consequences. Not for whatever stood between us now.
I needed only one thing to find her.
The witch who dealt in blood.
The only one reckless—or desperate—enough to help me track a mate who clearly did not want to be found.
Seiryu’s wings tilted as we changed direction, and for the first time in years, I felt something close to purpose settle into place.
It was time.
Time to drag Helena Savage back into my world.
Time to burn down whatever stood in my way.
Time to call the blood witch.
- Writer
