What They Did To You
1729 Words
Nova's POV
I find Lyra in the side corridor outside the chamber.
She is standing against the stone wall with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes on the floor — the posture of a woman who has been holding something upright for so long that the moment she stopped performing it the collapse happened before she could catch herself.
The two men who flanked her into the chamber are gone.
Someone moved them.
I do not ask who.
I close the corridor door behind me.
The noise of the chamber falls away on the other side of it.
Just us now.
My sister.
The woman who stood in my sitting room with rehearsed words and a practised composure so complete it should have been its own warning. The woman who placed her hand on her stomach and watched my face and delivered every word like a performance she spent months perfecting.
She looks up when she hears the door close.
And neither of us speaks for a long moment.
I look at my sister's face.
Not the face she wore into my home.
Not the composed, careful, controlled face of a woman executing a plan.
Just Lyra.
The girl who climbed into my bed during thunderstorms and pressed her cold feet against my legs without asking.
The one who held my hand at our grandmother's funeral and did not let go for a full hour.
The one who used to sit across from me at our mother's kitchen table and steal food from my plate and laugh when I protested.
She looks at me the way a person looks when they have run completely out of versions of themselves that know how to handle what is standing in front of them.
Completely bare.
"Nova." Her voice is barely there.
"Tell me the truth," I say.
Not unkindly.
Not with the heat of everything I feel toward her sitting in every word.
Just directly. Clearly. The way you speak when you have moved through so much pain that the only thing left with any value is honesty.
She looks at me for a long moment.
Then she slides down the wall until she is sitting on the cold stone floor with her knees pulled to her chest.
And she talks.
"Father came to me three years ago," she begins. "A full year before he filed anything officially. Before you and Damien were even trying for a child. He sat across from me the way he always does... calm, certain, completely at ease with whatever he is about to say."
She looks at the floor.
"He told me the bond was wrong. That Damien had been placed in the wrong pairing. That you were going to hurt yourself staying in something that was never going to work the way bonds are supposed to work." A long pause. "He made it sound like he was protecting you. Like everything he was planning was for your benefit. Like he was the only person in the pack who loved you enough to do what needed to be done."
I say nothing.
I wait.
"He always made everything sound like protection," she says quietly.
Something bitter moves through her voice.
The particular bitterness of someone who believed something for a long time and only recently understood exactly how they were used.
"I believed him." She looks up. Her eyes are very open now. "I wanted to believe him, Nova. I had watched Damien for years. Long before you were together. I told myself every single day that what I felt was nothing — that it was just admiration, just proximity, just the kind of thing that fades if you're patient enough." She holds my gaze. "Father found that. He used it. He knew exactly which part of me to reach for and he reached for it."
"Lyra." My voice is quiet but firm. "I am not here about feelings. Tell me about the pregnancy."
She closes her eyes.
Takes one breath.
Opens them.
"Six months ago Father told me the plan had changed. That the Council petition was moving too slowly. That they needed something more immediate — something that would make the bond dissolution feel like a formality rather than a contested proceeding." Her voice drops lower. "He said if I was carrying Damien's child the Council would have grounds to recognise a competing bond. It would make yours look incomplete by comparison. It would change the entire legal position overnight."
The corridor is very cold.
I feel the cold of it now in a way I did not when I first walked in.
"He said the child would be raised as a pack heir," she continues. "That I would be given status and protection. That everything would be arranged properly and handled with care." Her voice fractures on the last words. Just slightly. "He said it the way he says everything... calmly, reasonably, like the arrangement was completely normal and I was the one who would be ungrateful for questioning it."
I look at my sister on the cold floor.
At the hand she has unconsciously pressed against her stomach.
The same gesture I make in private.
The same instinct.
The same fierce quiet truth underneath it.
"You want to keep the baby," I say.
It is not a question.
Her chin trembles.
Once.
"They told me last week," she whispers. "That once the proceedings concluded the child would need to be formally removed from any succession consideration. That it would be — handled." Her voice breaks completely on that word. She steadies it with visible effort. "They were never going to let me keep it, Nova. The baby was never a baby to them. It was a document they needed signed and then filed away."
The grief in her face is completely real.
I have no doubt about that.
Whatever Lyra is. Whatever she agreed to. Whatever she became inside the quiet rooms where my father made his arrangements.
The grief sitting in her face right now is hers entirely.
I sit down on the cold floor across from her.
Because some conversations need to happen at the same level.
"I cannot forgive you," I say.
She nods. She expected that.
"Not today. Not quickly. Not for a long time. Maybe never completely."
She nods again. Smaller this time. The nod of a woman accepting the weight of what she did without trying to argue it lighter.
"But I need to know if you will tell the truth in that chamber. Under pack oath. In front of all of them."
"Yes," she says.
"Why?" I ask.
Because I need to hear her reason.
A frightened woman's yes and a decided woman's yes are two entirely different things inside a Council chamber. One breaks under pressure. The other does not.
She looks at me.
"Because what he did to you was wrong," she says. "And what he did to me was wrong. And what he was going to do to this baby..." Her voice breaks. She brings it back deliberately. "I am not going to walk into that room and help him do any of it."
I look at my sister.
At the complicated, damaged, still somehow standing woman across from me on this cold floor.
"Alright," I say.
I stand.
I extend my hand toward her.
She looks at it for a long moment.
As if the sight of my hand reaching for hers is something she does not quite trust yet — something she wants but cannot immediately believe is real.
Then she takes it.
I pull her to her feet.
We stand facing each other in the cold corridor.
All those years of sisterhood between us and one enormous betrayal.
And the particular fragile strange understanding of two women who were used by the same man and have finally — in this cold corridor, on this morning — decided to stop letting him.
"There is one more thing," Lyra says.
Her voice changes.
Something moves across her face that I have not seen there across any of this conversation.
Older than grief.
Heavier than fear.
The expression of someone carrying a specific terrible knowledge they have been sitting with for a very long time and have finally decided they cannot carry alone.
"About our mother," she says.
My wolf goes completely still inside me.
"Father did not just silence her politically," Lyra says quietly. "I found documents in his study two months ago. Before all of this. Before I knew what I was going to do or whether I had the courage to do anything at all." She holds my gaze. Steady. Certain. "He did not just silence her, Nova. He made sure she could not come back."
The corridor goes absolutely cold.
Something drops through the centre of my chest.
"How long have you known?" I whisper.
"Long enough," she says. "Long enough that sitting in that chamber today and helping him was never something I was actually going to do. No matter what I performed in your sitting room."
She looks at me.
And beneath the grief and the guilt and the fear and everything else sitting in her face right now I see something I recognise.
The same thing I saw in the mirror this morning when I told myself they are not ready for you.
The decision that has already been made.
The thing that cannot be unmade.
"I came to your house that night because I was frightened," she says. "Not to destroy you. I was frightened of what he would do to me if I didn't perform. And I needed to see your face." A pause. "I needed to know if you were strong enough for what was coming."
I look at my sister.
"And?" I say.
Something moves across her face.
Almost a smile.
"You blew out the candle," she says softly. "And you walked back down that hall and you didn't fall apart."
She looks at me with the eyes of a woman who has been watching me her entire life... sometimes with jealousy, sometimes with love, sometimes with a complicated mixture of both that she never knew how to untangle — and finally, in this cold corridor, seeing me clearly.
"I knew then," she says. "That if anyone was going to end this it was going to be you."
- Writer
