Viola kept her eyes on her lap, not even looking at Sebastian as she didn’t want to see any amusement on his face. But then she felt his hand come down to take her chin and tilt her face up toward him. She was stunned to find that he didn’t look amused at all. There wasn’t a single trace of it in his silver eyes. There was only concern and worry as he asked her,

"Do you know how to at least swim?"

Viola flushed in embarrassment and shook her head. "I never had the courage to go near any open water long enough to learn..." She whispered. "Can’t we find another way to reach Nightshade? I heard the Blue Bridge has been standing for so many years that it’s no longer stable. What if it breaks apart and throws us into the water? What if—"

"I will be there to hold you." Sebastian said quietly, cutting off her spiraling words. "Don’t worry. If the bridge breaks, which I don’t believe it will, I won’t let you drown. Do you trust me?"

Viola stared at him with frightened eyes at that question. Did she trust him? She turned the words over without thinking too deeply into them, and found her head nodding before she had made a conscious decision to answer.

Sebastian smiled at her reassuringly. "Good. Let’s move. It’s too quiet to be sitting still out here." He released her chin, gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, and then started the car and reversed away from the fallen tree.

Viola could do nothing but dread the bridge ahead of them. It took six hours to reach it, and by then the sun had begun to lose its intensity in the sky. Her stomach felt like it was crawling out of her body from the dread consuming her, her palms damp with sweat and her throat dry as sandpaper.

As if sensing her fear as they approached the enormous long bridge that had no railings on either side, only solid concrete stretching straight across to the other side, Sebastian spoke. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

"Are you all right?"

Viola shook her head, her face as pale as a white sheet. "Why is there no blue on the bridge? I mean it’s called the Blue Bridge but I don’t see any blue color on it anywhere. Why does it look so long? It doesn’t even have side railings. Who built this thing? It doesn’t look safe at all." She rambled on without conscious thought of what she was saying, all she could hear was the loud hammering of her own heart inside her head.

What if her nightmare of drowning in the dark sea came true and she never got to reach her sister? She would rather take the longest route known to the werewolf world than sit in a car driving over a bridge like that.

"It’s as solid as a bridge could possibly be, babe. It has been standing here for more than a century and cars pass over it more than once a day. It won’t collapse on us." He reassured her, genuinely surprised at the full extent of her fear of water.

"I think I should get out of the car." She said, not believing a single word of his reassurance, and began reaching for the door handle, but Sebastian quickly caught her hand and held it.

"Don’t. Let’s talk about something else. Anything other than the bridge." He said.

"Wh-what could we possibly talk about right now?" She asked, her eyes glued helplessly to the bridge stretching out ahead of them.

"Have you ever considered the reason your wolf never surfaced at your awakening?"

Viola looked away from the bridge ahead to look at him. Why was he asking her this now of all moments, when she was about to cross her worst nightmare?

"Yes." Viola replied. She had more than considered it and wondered about it endlessly, why she had turned out without a wolf but with uncontrollable pheromones instead. "I have wondered about it many times but I never found any real answers, since my real parents are not around for me to know what must have gone wrong."

She was already aware that Sebastian must have done a thorough background check on her by now and knew she was adopted and had spent seven years in an orphanage, so she had nothing to hide by acknowledging it. She didn’t know her real parents. All she knew, and only vaguely recalled, was that a blue eyed woman had handed them over to someone to be killed, and they had somehow ended up in the orphanage instead.

"I have some theories that I worked through with Doctor Gilbert regarding the reasons behind being wolfless." Sebastian remarked, and those words caught Viola’s full attention so completely that her eyes left the road ahead entirely to look at him.

"You do? What are they?" She asked.

"One, he said it can happen when a person’s parents were an omega and a human. Second, it could be trauma that held the wolf down. And third, it could be spiritual. Some people use magic to put a wolf to sleep permanently. Since he couldn’t determine exactly which applies to your case, he suggested the method of spending time with your mate." Sebastian turned to look at her briefly as he said, "Do you suspect any of these being behind yours?"

Viola couldn’t easily narrow it down to any one of those theories. When people turned out wolfless it was most commonly attributed to one of the reasons he had listed, an omega with a human parent being the most frequent. But Viola had a quiet feeling she was not an omega halfbreed.

She still remembered the strength that came over her occasionally without warning, particularly the time she had broken her toilet seat and called for a repair, and the omega plumber had stared at the damage with wide eyes.

’It can’t be fixed, Miss, only replaced. It looks too damaged.’ He had informed her, and she still remembered the heat of embarrassment when he asked if she had broken it by sitting down too hard. Really? How could her little ass break a toilet seat?

Omegas didn’t carry the kind of strength needed to break a toilet seat with bare hands, and yet she had done exactly that. So she ruled out the first theory entirely.

"I don’t know..." Viola finally said, her brows pulling together. It couldn’t have been trauma either, not really, because she hadn’t been broken at her ninth birthday the way she was now at twenty three.

She had been a relatively normal child until the betrayal came, perhaps it would be considered abnormal given all the experiences of the orphanage, but still she didn’t think that was enough to lock her wolf.

Unless it was the last option. But then who would spiritually lock away her wolf, and how was something like that even possible?

She turned that question over in her mind, completely and utterly forgetting about the water and the bridge beneath them, until she heard Sebastian’s voice after a long stretch of silence.

"We made it to the other side."

Viola looked up sharply to find there was no long bridge stretching ahead of them anymore, and when she glanced down at the rear camera screen she could see the bridge already fading into the distance behind them. Her eyes went wide and she turned to her husband, who was wearing a slight grin.

"I didn’t even realize when we crossed it..." She murmured, genuinely amazed that he had managed to distract her so completely that her fear hadn’t gotten a single foothold the entire time. "Thank you." She added softly.

"You’re welcome." Sebastian said, and then after a comfortable stretch of quiet he announced, "We are almost in Nightshade. Thirty minutes drive and we will be in the heart of the pack."

Viola’s insides tensed immediately and she took in the familiar signs of the pack she had lived in for seven years, a place that held no happy memories for her, only fear and pain and a bitterness she had never fully been able to shake.

"Do you recall when you granted me three wishes?" Viola began, her eyes taking in the red muddy roads they had turned onto, the car bumping and jolting against the uneven ground and rocks beneath them.

"I do. Have you decided to take me up on your second wish?"

"Yes." Viola mused quietly, her eyes still watching the red muddy roads ahead.

"You didn’t ask me what we are going to do in this pack, but I figured you already knew. The day I got drunk and you came to me, I had a feeling I must have blabbered things to you. I vaguely recalled talking about my sister, and as you already know, I was adopted." She said, steadying herself before going on.

"I am here for my sister. I want to use my second wish to make you welcome her into your pack, to promise me you will protect her the way you gave your word to protect me. I want her to have a place she can call home. I want my wish to be that my sister will have everything and anything she wants in her life, and that she will be safe in Silver for as long as she lives there."