7.Aaron
1464 Words
“Cover him.”
My voice came out lower than I intended, rough around the edges.
“Clean cloth. No restraints. No chains.”
The clearing was quiet except for the wind threading through bare branches. The body lay where Rowan’s wolves had discarded it, half turned on its side, blood dark against the frost-bitten earth. His eyes were still open.
Not a pup, not grown. Somewhere in between. Old enough to take orders. Young enough to believe them.
I crouched beside him and closed his eyes myself. His skin was already cold beneath my fingers.
“We’ll take him back,” I said. “He deserves that much.”
My beta, Calder, stood a few steps away. His shoulders were tight, jaw set so hard I could see the muscle jumping. He had been the one to push for speed. To act before Rowan could notice the disturbance.
“Aaron,” he said quietly. “If we’d waited—”
I straightened slowly and turned to him.
“If we had waited,” I said evenly, “he’d still be alive.”
The words landed heavy between us.
Calder didn’t look away. To his credit, he didn’t try to justify it either. He nodded once, shame flickering across his face.
“I know,” he said. “I thought we could get her out without bloodshed.”
Thinking.
That had been the mistake.
“Thinking isn’t enough anymore,” I said. “Not when Rowan Blackwood is involved.”
Around us, my pack moved with care. Maeve, my gamma, knelt to help wrap the boy’s body properly, murmuring a quiet apology under her breath. Jonah, my omega, stood watch, eyes scanning the tree line, protective instinct overriding grief.
No one questioned the respect. No one needed to be told why it mattered.
This was what separated us from Rowan’s pack now.
Not strength.
Choice.
When the body was lifted, I turned away. Anger sat tight in my chest, coiled and restless, but I forced it down. Losing control helped no one. Not now.
“We don’t move openly,” I said as we started back through the forest. “No patrols that can be tracked. Maeve, I want information, eyes and ears everywhere.”
She nodded. “Understood.”
Calder fell into step beside me. “No more rushing.”
“You’ll do more than that,” I said. “You’ll make sure no one acts without coming to me first. I won’t lose another innocent because someone panicked.”
He exhaled. “It won’t happen again.”
I hoped he was right.
We were halfway back to the pack lands when Jonah stopped abruptly.
“Aaron,” he said. “You need to see this.”
He held up his phone.
The glow from the screen felt wrong out here, too bright against the muted grey of the woods. I took it from him, irritation already prickling.
Then I saw her face.
Eliza Hartley.
The world narrowed.
Missing, the headline read.
Christmas Eve disappearance. Last seen near Bridge Street. Police appeal for information. Family devastated.
My chest tightened sharply, breath catching before I could stop it.
“No,” I muttered.
The scent hit me again in memory, sudden and vivid.
Christmas lights. Human noise. The wrong place for something so ancient.
I had felt it the moment I stepped into that town. Not attraction. Not curiosity.
Recognition.
It had struck so hard it had staggered me. A pull I hadn’t felt since the day I buried my mate. I’d followed it on instinct, weaving through streets and crowds that meant nothing to me, heart pounding for reasons I couldn’t explain.
Then it vanished.
Cut clean. Severed.
Rowan.
Only he could have done that. Only an Alpha of royal blood, strong enough to override distance and will.
But there had been no tearing agony. No echo of the bond being ripped away.
So he hadn’t finished it.
Claimed, perhaps. Marked in some incomplete way. But not sealed.
That knowledge had stayed with me. Haunted me.
Now her face stared back at me from every channel, her name scrolling beneath it, her life laid bare for the world to consume.
“She’s human,” Jonah said softly, disbelief threading his voice.
Maeve leaned in, eyes narrowing. “That can’t be right.”
“I know,” I said.
The forest felt suddenly too quiet.
Human.
A human woman carrying a scent strong enough to wake a royal Alpha after years of silence.
Someone swore under their breath.
“This is history repeating,” Calder said grim.
I closed my eyes briefly, and the past rose whether I invited it or not.
The words settled into me because history was the only thing this family ever did well.
Long before Rowan and I were born, before the name Blackwood meant power instead of warning, one of our ancestors had wanted more than the Moon Goddess ever intended to give. Not her blessing. Not her favor.
Her.
He had reached for her beauty, her power, her divinity, believing his strength entitled him to what even gods were not meant to possess.
She did not strike him down.
She cursed him.
His wolf would turn against him. Not immediately. Not cleanly. Slowly. First through those he loved. Mates. Children. Pack. Each Alpha of his bloodline would watch his world collapse by his own hands, unable to stop it, until there was nothing left to protect.
When the pack of that time begged for mercy, when their Luna bled on sacred ground and pleaded for the lives of those yet unborn, the Moon Goddess relented only once.
There would be a Luna born who could lift the curse.
She would be salvation.
That was all the goddess gave them. No timeline. No certainty. No explanation of the cost.
Every generation after had lived in fear of the turning point. The dream. The moment an Alpha would know his wolf was no longer fully his own.
Before we turned eighteen, everyone believed Doe was meant to be that salvation.
Her scent aligned with mine naturally. The elders noticed. The pack whispered. Some dared to hope openly that she was the Luna promised to us. The one who could finally break the cycle and make our Alpha the strongest there had ever been.
Rowan saw that hope and wanted it.
He took her before either of us were old enough to understand what choice truly cost. Not by force. That would have been honest. He took her with confidence, with certainty, with the kind of authority that made people believe he was already the better Alpha.
Doe chose him.
I told myself I had no right to resent it. Love was not a prophecy. But knowing something and surviving it are not the same thing. Watching the woman everyone believed was my mate bind herself to my brother hollowed me out in ways I never spoke about.
They mated. The pack adjusted because it had to.
Then our father had the dream.
The warning.
The moment every Alpha of our bloodline feared.
Instead of waiting to see who his wolf would turn on first, our father chose death. He ended his own life to spare the pack from what he might become.
The curse did not lift.
Doe was not the salvation.
Rowan realised it the same way I did. The difference was what he did with that knowledge.
He killed her.
Not because she betrayed him. Not because she failed.
Because she proved that even after stealing what was never his, fate still refused to bend.
That was the second sin. The one the Moon Goddess had never accounted for. Innocent blood spilled not by curse, but by choice.
The pack fractured after that. Wolves who had grown up together stopped trusting the same future. Those who believed restraint was strength left with me. Those who believed power justified everything stayed with Rowan.
Now, years later, standing in the forest with a human woman’s face blazing from a screen, the same pattern unfolded again.
Another scent strong enough to wake something ancient.
Another woman taken before she understood what she was being dragged into.
Another attempt to force destiny into submission.
“She’s human,” Jonah said quietly.
Human.
Doe had known our world. She had grown up within its rules and its lies. Eliza Hartley hadn’t even been given that chance.
Maeve spoke carefully. “The Goddess never said the Luna would be one of us.”
No. She hadn’t.
I stared at Eliza’s face, at the human life unraveling on every channel, and felt the curse tighten its grip again.
Rowan had found another gamble.
And this time, the consequences would not stay within our bloodline.
- Writer
