The Warrior King's Mate

Chapter 15

Margot P.O.V.

John and I have been fighting.

The last few nights he's been sleeping in his office. We've had fights before, but this one has rocked me in a way I thought was impossible. I know John never got closure about Gavin's death. I know he wants the world to believe his theory, but I also know he forgets that Grace is my sister. I find it painful and confusing, lining up the version he has of her with the little girl who used to braid my hair before school. Grace who, when we found out the boys were coming at the same time, made a betting pool as to who would be born first. When Malcolm was born, she showed up to the hospital with a first place rosette and gave my son such soft kisses on the top of his head.

When we were little, we used to snuggle under blankets in our mother's tea room, we would read each other Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Treasure Island, acting out the voices and playing rock, paper, scissors to find out who would have to be Heathcliff.

For my 18th birthday, she threw me a surprise party in the gardens behind the packhouse, and covered everything in my favourite colours, even the sprinkles on the cupcakes were pink and green. She hired a cocktail bar and my favourite band - we danced in bare feet at 2am, the pavement still warm from the hot summer sun and the sound of cicadas making the night air crunchy, a cotton candy machine whipping spun sugar into the air. My hair was so sticky when I woke up the next day.

John forgets that Grace was my person before she cut us off and I miss her. It's worse than grief to know she chose to walk away from me so easily, to know that my own niece and nephew wouldn't know if they were to walk in here now: Nova certainly didn't. That look on her face that first lunch...

She looked at me like I was a ghost, or a monster...I don't know what's worse. And the state of her! She was so thin - it made me recoil inside when I looked at her. Like a beast that looked human, but wasn't. Like something from a child's nightmare, so thin in the face that her eyes looked like they were barely held in place in their sockets. My sister - my Grace let that happen to her own daughter?

When she called, I'd been having lunch with John's Beta's wife, Helen and her mum, and returned to a voicemail. I was pulling my heels off as her voice echoed through my office and I just stood there, lopsided, one shoe off, one shoe on, frozen in place.

Maggie....Margot it's Grace. Look, I don't want to get caught up chatting. I'm glad I caught your voicemail. I just - I wanted to warn you my...my daughter Nova is coming to see you. She left this morning. She can go wherever she wants from there but she - look, I promised mum when the kids were older she'd see them all at least once. There's no need to talk after this. Simon has been sworn in as Beta here and I want you all to keep your distance. This isn't an olive branch, Maggie. Just a warning. Bye.

I've replayed the message every day since, sobbing into my sleeve, hearing her voice for the first time in two decades. John didn't understand - he listened to it and instantly ordered extra patrols to look for Nova. We assumed she'd look like Grace or how I'd pictured Hailey - blonde, tall, gorgeous. Grey-blue eyes, my mother's long straight nose, and maybe a little bit of sass behind her. When she didn't turn up, John became agitated.

"See?! See, Margot!!" He kept ranting, pacing back and forth waiting for one of the patrols to mindlink. "This is her MO, Margot - sends us someone and they never turn up, only to be found hacked to death in the woods!" He wouldn't relent.

Eventually, I snapped and screamed for him to stop it - I couldn't bare it - thinking of a nineteen-year-old girl cut up in the woods. He forgets that I loved Gavin too, that I saw what they did to him too, the rogues that ever since have battered down on us in a way they don't to other packs.

"Don't you dare put that image in my brain, don't you dare!" I had stormed out of the office, remembering the years of venom that had seeped between River Moon and Silver Shore since John accused Grace of orchestrating Gavin's death. She pleaded with the royal inquisition and elder councils that she had misheard a message - blamed it on pregnancy hormones - begged the moon goddess for forgiveness. John didn't speak to me for weeks - mate bond or not - after I broke down, ran to Grace and begged to end the madness, for the Elders to forgo their judgments and for us to move on as a family. My mate was filled with rage, and I have regretted every year since that I chose her over him, only for her to abandon us anyway - taking the children with her. Christmasses, birthdays, solstices all without her - each time breaking my heart all over again. Through the years, forced to feel my sorrow through the mate bond, John softened. He and I reconnected and we are now stronger, more in love, more understanding than we'd ever been before. It's been almost 15 years since our last fight - until a few weeks ago when a corpse of a girl, slashed and broken and starved, was picked up in the woods by patrol teams who, after frantically searching the woods for her, found her moments away from suffering the same fate as her father.

Every day since - John has felt further and further away from me. To him, Nova was proof that Grace was unhinged, evil - I just couldn't make myself believe it and - well, I guess he felt like I was rejecting him again, choosing her over him again. He all but begged me to listen to him about Gavin and now Nova, but I couldn't take it in. To me, Nova was the open door I'd been waiting for - the olive branch, the family coming back together.

Then last week, when Nova and Malcolm...I admit to being frightened. Malcolm told us everything he'd seen, how it felt, how he'd felt everything Nova felt as she was forced to...well. John looked at me almost triumphantly, that now he had poof that Grace was poison, and that Simon was clearly no better, leaving his sister to the wolves. Malcolm was inconsolable, Nova was catatonic, my mother and I could barely tolerate looking at one another, never mind talk about what had happened to our family. I wasn't sleeping, my mother wasn't sleeping, Malcolm was having nightmares and John was one wrongly worded comment away from launching an all-out pack war against Silver Shore.

Malcolm and I requested the Royal Inquisition, again - agreeing this went too far past what justice the Elder council could provide. The entire pack was complicit in the physical, mental, and s****l abuse of a minor - from the top down. The entire pack had to go. I only prayed that they arrive in River Moon soon, before John left and took them apart with his bare hands.

And yet her voice - her voice sounded the same. It sounded like the woman I'd grieved for half my life. It was confusing to me to look at Nova, to see Grace in her at all. All I saw was...pain. She was taking an age to heal and to gain weight. The doctor had reassured me that her wolf would have been weakened after 19 years of abuse, but I couldn't handle watching her haunt the house like a little ghost. I ordered blood tests after this most recent hospitilisation to see if there was anything wrong. Maybe she needed something to help her wolf regain her strength. The therapist helped too, giving us all jobs to do, although with John refusing to talk to me - convinced that Nova was potentially dangerous, and with Malcolm drafted to Selinis Castle but trying his hardest to do his pack work AND work with Nova, I still felt totally lost. Like I was adrift at sea, with no landmarks to tell me where I was or what direction I was moving in. I felt completely and utterly alone.

Realising this, as I wheeled Nova from the hospital and into the packhouse, I fought with myself about trying to make conversation with my niece. I wanted to express my joy that she had won her challenge, that she would now be considered for warrior training, if she wanted it. I looked over all the scars made from knives and whips and fire on her body as I helped her out of her hospital nightgown - maybe some sense of empowerment would be good for her. I wanted to bond with her so painfully, but I was too afraid to listen to what my sister had done to her. The things Malcolm had told me so far were...they were a lot. They hurt me like a punch to the gut every time I read them in his reports. Seeing her look so terrified and broken every day winded me. I needed to make this right. I needed to make this girl feel loved. I just didn't know how. Every day I looked at Nova, and every night I listened to Grace, my heart and reasoning growing more brittle each time. John was right.

Fixing Nova's hair and giving her clothes and food had been easy, but giving her a mother - that would be something. I noticed, as I tucked her in to her bed, that she didn't flinch from me for the first time. Even her expression was smoother. Less fear and pain, more like...resolve? Maybe tonight was the time for us to have the conversations I'd been dreading. Maybe now was the time to finally not choose Grace, not even choose John - I think Nova and I both needed me to choose her. I was about to tell her I was proud of her, when I received a terse mindlink from John.

"My love," he always called me this, even when not sleeping with me. "There is an unexpected visitor here. Please come to my office at once. She says it's urgent." With that, John ended the mindlink. Still mad with me, it seems. I wondered who this person was that would force him to invite me into his barricade. He sounded cautious and angry. He said 'she'....no?! It couldn't be....she wouldn't - Grace!?

"Nova," I cleared my throat, suddenly tight and my mouth suddenly dry. "Would it be okay if I left you to quickly attend to something? I promise to return very soon - perhaps with a pot of camomile tea?" Malcolm had discovered Nova enjoyed both peppermint and camomile tea and, given how exhausted the poor thing looked, a pot of camomile before bed seemed like the perfect excuse to come back and talk to her once I'd been to John's office. She nodded slowly and I smiled at her. Desperate to make myself as un-Gracelike as possible, I'd made sure to dress and do my hair very differently from Grace's professional style, and I feel like smiling is a big part of showing her I'm nothing like the mother she has described to Malcolm.

Exiting the room, I felt a knot begin to form in my stomach. As keen as I was to see who had visited us in the small hours of the morning, unannounced, I felt more than a little hesitant about leaving Nova on her own, especially after she seemed so out of it.

We won't be long, my wolf, Gohsa, assured me. We can bring her tea and spend time with her once we have seen Mate.

I felt guilty. While I was angry at John for being so black and white where Grace was concerned, my poor wolf has been pining for her mate, especially at night. The large bed feels so cold without him there with us. However, an idea struck me and as I headed down to the first floor, I popped in quickly to the library on the second to retrieve a copy of Little Women to take back with me with Nova's tea. I doubt she would have read it herself and thought that if conversation failed, I could read to her while she fell asleep. I'd sleep on her sofa so she knew she wasn't alone.

As I approached John's office, my mother came rushing up the staircase from the ground floor, mud-caked Wellington boots pulled over flannel pajamas - clearly having been woken up by news of this visitor.

"Is it Grace?!" She panted at me, paling at the thought of confronting her daughter in the middle of the night. I shook my head to indicate I didn't know, and without thinking, grabbed my mother's hand as we entered the office together.

John was sitting behind his desk, his hands clasped and resting on top of his paperwork. Opposite him, Malcolm leaned against the desk facing the doorway, his back to his father, the shadows on his face deepening with each flicker of the fire burning in the large marble grate I knew to be behind the door. Sitting beside him, her curly brown hair streaked with silver, pulled off of her plump face in a bouncy bun, sat a woman I'd never seen before. Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes twinkled brightly in the firelight. Her lips were the same sweet shade of pink as her cheeks , curled upwards at the sides in a natural smile. Her entire body looked soft, squashy and she smelled strongly of citrus and herbs, with a strange undertone of fried fish. Her clothes were singed slightly in places and a small tendril of smoke sauntered upwards from a hole burned in her shoulder, making me worry that in his temper John threw this poor woman into the fire.

"This is my mate, Luna Margot of River Moon, and her mother Moira, the former Luna of River Moon," John said, standing from his chair and moving around the room to put his arms around me, ushering me in to it so that I was sitting behind his desk, opposite this woman. Malcolm moved away from the desk and offered the remaining chair to his grandmother. "This," John indicated the slightly smoking woman opposite me, "is Flora Bell. She arrived here five minutes ago. Here. In my office," John said, his voice strained, moving up an octave or two.

"I did say to forgive the intrusion, shifter," the woman muttered. Her voice was soft and she had a lilting accent. I turned my body to her and waited, clasping my hands much as John had been doing as I entered the office. Flora Bell sighed and shifted her weight in her chair. As she did so, my attention was snagged by the two large duffel bags looped over her arms.

"As I told your mate," she sneered the word at John, "I wanted to speak with you privately. I've had bad run-ins with Alpha males before, all fights and no thought. You're Nova's aunt and grandmother, yes?"

My stomach dropped like a stone, my eyes trained on Flora while my mother's voice flooded my head urgently. "She knows about Nova?! Who is she, Margot?!" Ignoring her, I kept my focus on the plump little woman in front of me.

"Why did you barge in to our family home in the middle of the night, unannounced, presenting so...strangely," I let my eyes wander over the many singe and burn marks on her clothes, "to ask ME questions?" Despite John and mine's differences, he and I were sworn to rule and protect this pack, and I am confused by this woman's presence entirely: Our patrols allowed no one to enter AT ALL under the cover of nightfall unless pre-approved to do so by any of the people in this room. "You have broken into our pack, for what? Explain quickly, as it is very late and we do have room available in our cells if this conversation is one that could wait until morning," I said, knowing full well that whatever she wanted, whoever she was, she came here to talk about Nova and with the threat of a pack war looming over us, we knew damn well this woman would not be made to wait until morning.

"My question was redundant," Flora says, smiling gently at me. "I know who you are. I've come here because Nova is in grave danger. Did the thyme work?"

I looked at the others, but they looked back at me equally confused.

"The thyme? For her wrists? They were wounded...?" Flora prompted. When I shook my head at her, she dropped her bags and forced the sleeves of her coat up to her elbows, showing us dark green smudges where she seemed to have rubbed grass along the insides of her forearms up to her wrists. The strong smell of thyme permeated the room but I was as confused as ever as to what she was talking about.

"I have runes carved on to Fae bone. They told me that Nova was wounded on her wrists - the thyme is a Roman trick, aids with healing and health."

"I'm sorry but who the f**k are you, Ms Bell?" Malcolm stepped forward, clearly having had enough.

"My name is Flora Bell, I run a fish and chip shop in the human town of Port George. A few weeks ago, Nova Blackwell traveled from Silver Shore pack to River Moon, correct? Well," she said, not waiting for any signs of affirmation. She knew about packs? "On her way here, Nova stopped at Port George, waited out in the cold all day for a ferry that wouldn't come until the morning. So, when it got dark, she found her way to my fish and chip shop and - well, you'll have seen the state she was in. She's lucky to be alive, given how hungry and weak she was. I fed her. I even kept her in the shop. She helped me batter and fry some fish while I tried to get some bloody calories into the girl. I took her home with me to my apartment. I tried to ask her about a fresh bruise on her face, and she had - well, she had some sort of intense panic attack. I had no idea what to do. I thought she'd cried herself to sleep, but in the morning she had somehow snuck out and disappeared. I've consulted the runes every day and saw nothing, until last week - something happened last week and they were suddenly able to find her. They told me over and over - Nova Blackwell is in River Moon - well, now, so am I."

We sat there, silent. I was dumbfounded. Johns's eyebrows knitted together as he appraised the woman sitting in his office. He seemed to want to keep some sort of distance between himself and her.

"You're a witch," he finally said.

"Well, of course," said Flora, nodding towards him. Then, with a heavy sigh and tears suddenly filling her round, doe-brown eyes, she latched her gaze on to me once more. I could see something in those eyes, a pain, a plea, a cry for help. "I am a witch. And twenty years ago, Beta Grace Blackwell, of Silver Shore pack made a bargain with me to do something terrible. It didn't seem terrible at the time, I swear to you," tears began to flow down her face as she refused to look away from me. Malcolm and John suddenly tensed, ready to grab and restrain the witch if need be, if she threatened their Luna on orders from Grace. Witches were not usually welcome in werewolf territory.

"Please," she begged me, reaching her plump, green-stained arm across the pine and gold desk towards my clasped hands, "please. I'm begging you. Just let me speak to Nova, let me explain everything and then I promise, I promise you that I will do my best to undo what I've done. I owe that wee girl her life back, I owe her a chance at life, at happiness. I- I'm scared I'm the reason she's in danger - Please, please just let me see her!"

Then -

"Aaaaaaah!" Flora shrieked, ripping her arm back towards herself and inspecting it. We all saw it, the green stains on her wrists smoked suddenly, burning her in the process. She whipped her head back up to me, this time, her face contorted with mistrust.

"You said her wrists weren't wounded!" she spat at me. I shook my head at her, her wrists were fine - it was her side! Her wrists were...

The sinking stone in my gut suddenly crashed to the bottom. Without warning, I leaped over the desk, over the crying witch and bounded straight out of the door. I took the stairs two at a time as I sprinted as fast as I could up to the fourth floor. Malcolm and John came crashing out of the office after me, barking orders out loud and through the mindlink, but I was faster than them, blocking them out. I only had thoughts of reaching Nova's room as quickly as I could.

I left her alone. Why did I leave her alone!?

I reached her door and ran straight into it - locked!

"Nova? Nova, it's Margot, open the door!" I knocked.

No answer.

"NOVA!" I yelled, pounding my fists on the door, Gosha paced in a panic in my mind. I moved back and attempted to run at the door, all the time calling out "NO! NO! NO!" and hammering every part of my body against the thick wood. I was screaming now, yelling her name and begging her to open the door.

Hands grabbed me and yanked me back, hard enough for me to land roughly on my backside. Undeterred, I scrambled to my feet to once again throw myself at the door until it opened, until I could get to her. John caught me mid-air and held me tight against his body, frantically trying to calm me down and ask me what the matter was.

That's when we smelled it. Blood.

It took less than a second for Malcolm to understand what I had in the office. He took over my assault on the door, his deep voice calling for her, his alpha command, his fists - all trying to force their way into the bedroom. John's arms slackened around me and I felt the sharp sting of his understanding through the mate bond. I used the sudden looseness of his grip to wriggle free, and together, Malcolm and I forced the door off of its hinges and scrabbled into the room.

My eyes darted manically around for her, and saw a pile of money and a folded note lying on her bed. Not right now, I thought, following the overwhelming smell of blood to the bathroom.

We both stopped abruptly at the sight before us. Lying there, her hair hacked at, her eye bulging and purple, surrounded by broken glass and huge pools of blood, was a clearly unconscious Nova. What stopped us in our tracks was the faint green glow coming from her wrists, and we watched as the deep, jagged gashes knitted themselves neatly together, the large shard of mirror in her hand glinting menacingly. She wasn't bleeding anymore. I stared at her chest, waiting to see the rise and fall of breathing. When I couldn't, I began to feel panicked.

"Nova....?" John entered the room, his face falling as he took in the body of his niece lying like a ragdoll in the chaos of the bathroom. Malcolm turned and saw his father, his wide, white eyes, his downturned mouth, his paling face. Immediately, he opened the mindlink to the hospital, asking for a trauma unit to be prepared for them arriving. Then, he stepped forward, hauled Nova on to and over his shoulder, ran as fast as he could from the room.

John and I heard his footfalls echo horribly up the grand stairwell of the packhouse. We stood there, looking at the floor where Nova had been dying. The blood was darkening by the second. It seeped like cement between the shards of the smashed bathroom mirror like the most hellish mosaic. The silence began to press in on us, the pressure of it keeping us suspended for a time. Remembering, I turned my head to look back at the bed I'd tucked Nova into. I looked at the cash strewn all over it. Where on earth did she get that - why was it there? And then -

"John - John she..." I struggled. My mate turned away from the bathroom, holding what looked like a large clump of Nova's beautiful autumn-coloured hair. I averted my gaze - the hair made me feel queasy. "John, she left a note."

He looked at me, tight lipped and eyes bubbling with tears. I felt it, I felt his guilt and his shock and wondered if he could feel my blame and my grief. I couldn't. At that moment, all I could feel was him. He dropped the clump of hair and marched towards the bed, grabbing the note and reading it.

He said nothing.

Like a damn had burst, I watched the man I loved more than myself crumple under the weight of two decades worth of grief and anger. His knees folded and he fell to the floor, his hands pulling at the hair on the back of his head, his weight on his elbows, sobbing. The note fell from his hand and I grabbed it, reading the confirmation my husband had been fantasising about for far too long, reading the proof he always felt he was owed. It was there, in my sister's handwriting, and it was horrible.

Sitting beside him on the floor, I rested my hand on his back and said nothing.

Flora, her footsteps muffled by John's open-mouthed sobs, walked stoically past us both and into the bathroom. She knelt down and pulled from her pocket a sparkling crystal perfume bottle with a stopper. I watched her, detached, as the strange woman who knew my sister, who helped her do this terrible thing, used the stopper to decant some of Nova's blood, thick and dark, into the crystal bottle.

She stood and looked at us both, her eyes sad.

"I will leave you, you and your family need time to grieve, Luna. But in the morning, I would like to speak to you again. I would like to tell you everything."