THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
1631 Words
~Katherine~
Consciousness came back in pieces, out of order, none of them making sense until they did.
I heard the sound first. Dripping. My own breathing felt too shallow. I heard a door creaking open somewhere distant.
Then, the smell of mildew, stone and old damp air mixed together with blood. I opened my eyes.
Grey walls. No windows. A single bare bulb hanging from a ceiling that had been water-damaged too many times to pretend otherwise. Something dried and crusted had run down the left side of my face.
I tried to move my hands but I only felt a steel chain, fixed to the chair arms. Even with full wolf strength I had no angle, no leverage, nothing to work with.
Diana stood near the door with her arms folded, watching me with the mild patience of someone waiting for a process to finish. She didn't look troubled. That was the most frightening detail.
Eleanor came in and everything sharpened.
She crouched in front of me, close enough that I could read her face clearly.
I'd expected pure cold fury. What I found was more complicated, anger threaded through with something desperate and ragged, like a rope that had been under load too long.
"You are relentless," she said quietly. "Do you know that? You're like a wound I can't close. No matter what I do, there you are."
"I won a game," I said. Every breath hurt. Probably a rib. "That is the complete list of what I did."
"That is never the complete list with you!” She blurted out. "You walk into a room and it rearranges itself around you without you even trying. I have spent two years building everything I have here, and you have been on this campus for one week and people are already looking at you the way they used to look at me."
"So I should lose on purpose? Run slow so your lead feels real?"
"You should leave!" The composure cracked, just for a second, before she locked it back into place. "This is the last time I'll offer that."
"And if I don't take it?"
She opened her mouth. Then her hand flew to her chest like something had grabbed her from the inside.
The colour went out of her face, not gradually but all at once, like a tap turning off. Her pupils expanded until almost no iris showed.
A sound came out of her that I had no clean category for, sitting somewhere between pain and panic, and she folded forward as her body seemed to forget how to hold itself upright.
"My tonic." The word was barely a whisper. "Get it. Right now."
Diana was already moving. She came back with a small glass vial. It was empty.
The expression on Eleanor's face when she saw that vial was something I will not forget. Every layer of armour stripped away in an instant. Just naked, unguarded terror on the face of the most controlled person I had ever known.
"It's empty," Diana confirmed.
"Then bleed for me." Eleanor's voice was barely there. "Now."
Diana drew a small knife across her own forearm without flinching. Blood welled and she held the cut over a cup, then passed it across.
Eleanor took it in both shaking hands and drank with the single-minded desperation of someone drowning.
Thirty seconds passed and the colour flooded back to her face. Her spine straightened.
The terror smoothed itself away, layer by layer, until the Eleanor I knew was sitting in front of me again, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist like nothing had happened.
I said nothing. I was still trying to assemble what I'd just seen into something coherent.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked. It was a genuine question, not an attack.
She looked at me and smiled. "Nothing that will concern you much longer."
She stood and addressed her girls without looking at me again.
"Beat her up again. Don't stop until she can't get up," she said. Then she left.
The door was still moving when the first blow landed. I fought until fighting made things worse.
Then I protected my head and endured it and thought with a strange, detached clarity that three years of rejection letters had not broken me, and a public mate rejection had not broken me, and whatever was happening in this basement was not going to be what broke me either.
Then the door came open hard enough to bounce off the wall.
I heard heavy footsteps. Fast. With a direction.
"What the actual hell is going on in here?"
The girls scattered. I heard them run — feet, the door slamming, then silence. Then one set of footsteps, crossing toward me.
He crouched down and pressed a folded cloth against my face with steady hands. He had dark red hair, cut short. Eyes the colour of deep harbour water — grey-green and very still. A jaw and a build that pulled at something in my recognition without quite landing.
I know this face.
"I was supervising a community service group upstairs," he said, working at the chain on my right wrist. "Then, I heard something through the floor."
The chain on my left fell. I caught both wrists before the returning circulation could hurt.
"Thank you," I said.
"Hold that thought."
He stood. I looked up at him and asked before I could decide if it was wise.
"Who are you?"
The smile that appeared was not exactly warm.
"Zander Blackburn."
The surname hit me like a missed step. I looked at him properly; the height, the build, the jaw, the bone structure, and the resemblance to Xavier assembled itself in front of me like a photograph developing.
Same bloodline, without question. But where Xavier's eyes burned, Zander's were deep harbour water. Still. Patient. Calculating in a way that felt more dangerous than urgency ever did.
"You're his brother."
"His triplet. I'm one of three." He rolled his eyes, seeming bored by the explanation he gave. “There's Zeke Blackburn too but yeah, you've met the second Lycan triplet, Alpha Zander Blackburn.”
"You saved me,” I quivered as if I still didn't believe it.
"I did," he said. "And now I need something back."
"What?"
"Help me kill Xavier."
The basement swallowed those words and gave nothing back.
"Say that again," I said.
"You heard it." He crouched back to my level, patient as stone. "Everything that has happened to you; the dare, the public rejection, the video, the chair you were just chained to, it all traces back to one source. Xavier decided you were disposable and acted accordingly. I can give you what you actually want from him."
"Which is what, exactly?"
"Everything he's built, taken apart. His credibility. His reputation. The things he loves. And then yes, at the end of it, his life."
I looked at him. "You want to murder your own brother."
"I want to stop being his shadow." The composure slipped half an inch and something genuine bled through. "He is better than me at everything the world keeps score for. Stronger, more powerful, more loved. The one woman I wanted looked through me to find him. I have spent my entire life in second place to someone I share a face with and I am done."
"The woman you wanted," I said. "That's Eleanor."
His jaw tightened. The silence confirmed it.
"Have you tried to poison him?"
"Wolfsbane doesn't work on us. Neither does silver. All three of us carry Lycan immunity, it blocks conventional methods completely." He straightened. "But each of us has a specific weakness. Something private, something that gets through the immunity. Xavier hasn't told a living soul what his weakness is. But he would tell his mate."
The word settled in my chest like a key.
"Get close to him," Zander said. "Earn his trust. Make him love you if you can manage it. He'll tell you everything eventually, people always do when they trust completely. And then you bring it to me."
"He already rejected me in front of the whole school,” I stated. “What makes you think he'll tell me his weakness?”
"The bond doesn't dissolve because he said some words to you. It is still working on him whether he admits it or not. And you already know what an unaccepted rejection does to a she-wolf over time." He paused. "I can feel yours from here."
He wasn't wrong. Nyx had been dimming all week.
"If he marks you," Zander continued, "everything the rejection stripped away comes back. Your strength. Your wolf. All of it, and more than before." He let that sink in. "Get close. Get marked. Get the truth out of him. Then we finish it."
I was quiet for a while.
What he was offering was exactly what I needed and the reasons behind it were rotten. But Xavier had walked away from me once.
He had taken something I could not get back. He had let his girlfriend chain me to a chair and had not lost a second of sleep over it.
"And if I say no?" I asked.
Zander looked at me sternly. "I saved your life tonight. You owe me your life and I always collect debts that are owed to me.”
It wasn't a threat, just a law he lived by.
I thought about the prophecy. I thought about the pack. I thought about Katherine Thorne, first female Alpha ruler of Thornhill, spending the rest of her life smaller and quieter because she didn't fight back when she had the chance.
"Fine," I said.
Zander's smile came back. His evil smirk actually reached his eyes.
"Welcome aboard, partner."
- Writer
