Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna-Chapter 15: The unbelievable_Part 1

Hours ago.

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Viola’s entire body burned. The pain had no single origin anymore, it had consumed everything, spreading from her skin down into her bones, her organs, the very marrow of her. It was as though hot water had been poured over her from the inside out, searing her alive with the torment of the wolfsbane coursing through her veins.

She tried to move. Even the smallest twitch of her fingers sent a fresh wave of agony crashing through her, and she bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep from crying out. There was no one to hear her anyway.

Would death bring relief from this? she wondered. But even death seemed unwilling to take her, just as living had refused to be kind to her. Every person she had ever believed cared for her had turned away. And she lay here, burning, unable to even lift her own hand.

She wanted to make them suffer. She wanted them to feel this, every searing, cramping, suffocating second of it. But the thought alone drained what little energy she had left, and she could do nothing but moan, low and broken, into the silence. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Her throat burned with thirst. Her stomach cramped so violently it felt like something with claws was tearing at her insides. She had been starved so long that hunger had stopped announcing itself. All that remained was the bitter, relentless taste of wolfsbane coating her tongue, ruining everything.

She forced herself to breathe. In. Out.

Open your eyes, she told herself. Open them.

It took everything she had. Her eyelids felt weighted with stone, and when they finally cracked open, the first thing she registered was light, faint, dancing, coming from somewhere across the room. A window, maybe. Or a door left slightly ajar.

Then the second thing hit her, and it hit her like a blow to the chest.

Her right eye saw nothing. Only white. A flat, absolute, consuming white. Her left eye was blurry and hazy, the faint light smearing and doubling in her vision. She blinked once. Twice. The white in her right eye didn’t move. Didn’t shift. Didn’t clear.

She had lost it.

Hot tears rolled down her feverish, hollowed cheeks and burned the bruises there, and she let them fall because she no longer had the strength to hold them back.

Ember had done this. Her Gammas had beaten her because she refused to tell them where she had gotten the coat from. What Ember hadn’t known was that even if Viola had wanted to speak, her throat had been too raw to produce a single sound. The injection had burned her vocal cords to nothing. She couldn’t have answered them even if she’d wanted to.

Evan had broken not just her heart and soul, he had broken her eye. She would not be here if it weren’t for him.

But would you blame your parents too? a bitter voice inside her whispered.

She almost let out a hollow laugh at that. How could she blame parents she didn’t even know?

The Lindens had adopted her from an orphanage, a decision born not from love but from necessity. As a Beta family who believed they could not conceive, they had needed a daughter, someone who could one day marry and strengthen their position in the pack. That was what she had been to them from the very beginning. A strategy. A piece placed carefully on a board.

And not just her. Ivy too.

Viola’s chest tightened with something far worse than the wolfsbane pain.

"You’re cold."

Ivy’s voice rang in her ear, young and soft, the way she remembered it. Years had passed since then, and Viola wondered distantly what Ivy sounded like now, wherever she might be. But the girl who appeared before her in the darkness remained exactly the same. Small. Gentle. Unchanged.

Viola smiled bitterly as that little girl knelt beside her and pulled a blanket over her trembling body with careful hands.

"Don’t cry. I’m here. I always will be."

Viola reached forward, desperate to grab hold of her, the only soft, sweet presence she had felt in what seemed like a lifetime, but Ivy dissolved between her fingers like smoke, and Viola choked on her own tears.

The girl she had shared a womb with. Shared the cold floors of the orphanage with. And then abandoned. Left behind in the cruelest way imaginable.

Beta Elliot had sent his wife away to her family pack for a few years, letting the Moonwillow Pack believe she had gone there to give birth. Nobody ever knew the truth. Nobody knew that the daughter they brought back was a seven-year-old girl pulled from an orphanage, scrubbed clean and dressed up and presented as their own flesh and blood. Nobody except Evan.

Life in Moonwillow had been good to Viola, at first. She had been dressed like a princess, doted on, given everything she reached for. She had loved her adoptive mother fiercely and kept every dark secret of her past buried beneath gratitude and performance, terrified that if the truth surfaced, the warmth would vanish and she would be sent back.

She knew what it meant to go back. Life in a werewolf orphanage was brutal in ways that didn’t make it into stories. Most of the children there had been born to rogues, people without packs, without stability, without the will or means to raise a child. They abandoned them in a cold, indifferent place and never looked back. Viola had grown up watching that happen. She had sworn she would never go back to it.

Unlike Ivy, who had endured the orphanage with a quiet resilience that Viola had never understood and never possessed.

Then came the day that cracked the foundation of everything, the day her adoptive mother announced she was pregnant.

Viola had been ten years old. She remembered the fear that had seized her like a physical thing, cold and sharp and immediate. What if they no longer need me? What if they send me back?

That fear had made her calculating in ways a ten-year-old should never have to be.

She had attached herself to Evan with deliberate precision, doing his homework, helping him pass exams he would have otherwise failed. At school, before her, he had always received the lowest scores. After her, he came second to none but her. She had made herself indispensable to him, and through him, indispensable to the Lindens.

Even as her adoptive parents had their own children, their real children, their flesh and blood, they still kept Viola close. But she had never allowed herself to believe that love was unconditional. She had seen the way their eyes lit up when she gave them updates about Evan. She had understood early on that their affection for her was tied to her usefulness.

So she had made herself useful. She had made herself irreplaceable.

She had bullied every she-wolf who dared glance at Evan too long. She had made their lives miserable, one by one, until the message was clear across the entire pack, he belonged to her, and anyone who forgot that would regret it. She had cheated during the Alpha test to push him to the top, had drained her savings to bribe and manipulate the outcome, had given everything she had and everything she was.

And he had left her anyway.

More tears burned down her cheeks, and this time she couldn’t tell if they were for herself or for Ivy.

"I am sorry, Ivy," she rasped into the dark, her voice barely a thread of sound, raw and ruined. "I am sorry for being a terrible twin sister."

If she could go back. If she could reach back through all those years and pull herself out of that fear, she would have done everything differently. She would never have given herself so completely to someone who saw her as nothing. She would have held onto Ivy instead of leaving her behind. She would have lived for herself instead of for people who were never going to stay.

If I ever get out of here, she thought, though the idea felt like fantasy, like something that happened to other people, I will find Ivy. And I will make every single one of them pay. Evan. Leni. The Lindens. Ember. Every last one.

And her fated mate, the one who had turned his back on her when destiny itself had bound them together. The one who was supposed to be the one person in this world who would never walk away.

Hot anger surged through her chest at the thought of him, burning hotter than the wolfsbane for just a moment before exhaustion swallowed it whole.

He didn’t deserve to be the last thing on her mind before she died. She refused to give him even that.

She let her eyes fall closed, surrendering slowly to the dark that had been pulling at her for hours. It felt almost peaceful at the edges. Almost quiet. Almost—

Crack.

Her eyes snapped open.

The door. Someone was opening it.

Heavy footsteps. Multiple sets. Male voices, low and unhurried, the way men spoke when they had no reason to rush.

"Are you sure?" one asked.

"Hell yeah," came the answer.

A third voice, closer, directly above her head, close enough that she could feel the shift in the air, spoke with the flat efficiency of someone reciting a task. "Miss Ember said to take her away from the estate, inject the killing wolfsbane into her veins, and bury her out there. The guest is already inside the house, and it’s dark outside. Hurry up."

Viola’s body went rigid despite itself. Every cramping, burning, shattered part of her pulled taut with something primal and desperate and entirely involuntary.

She had prayed for death. She had begged for it in the dark, silent hours when the pain had become too much to name.

But not this death.

Not the killing wolfsbane, the kind that didn’t simply stop a heart. The kind that dissolved bone from the inside, that turned the body against itself in the most agonizing way imaginable, that made every torment she had already endured feel like a mercy by comparison.

She was already burning.

She could not survive that. She would not survive that. And for the first time in hours, lying broken and half-blind in the dark, Viola felt something flicker inside her chest that was not grief and not anger and not resignation.

It felt, terrifyingly, like the will to live.