Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna-Chapter 161: The lone wolf

Viola woke at the first light of dawn and subconsciously rolled over on the bed, instinctively seeking the warmth of the body she remembered from the night before, but her hand met nothing but a cold, empty space beside her. Her eyes opened slowly to the dimmed room. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling without blinking, replaying the events of the night and everything that had come before it.

Remembering how Sebastian had cooked her ginger and honey porridge, something funny stirred inside her and it shifted within the walls of her chest. She raised her hand and pressed it against her heart, feeling it throbbing steadily beneath her palm.

Viola was not naive when it came to matters of the heart, she recognized this pattern all too well. And the more it kept happening, the more it frightened her. Sebastian was being so kind to her, in a way that nobody had ever been before. He no longer fights his mate bond like he did in the past when they first met. He treated her so well, more than anyone she had known before.

Last night he had told her something that the people of her former pack had dismissed as petty, but to Viola it was something deeply serious, serious enough to make the hatred he carried for them entirely understandable.

She felt her heart soften by a fraction as a thread of genuine pity wound its way through her. He had lost his parents so young and had been burdened with responsibilities that even full grown adults would find crushing to carry...

And yet he seemed all right, he didn’t appear to carry that pain on the surface very often, Viola thought, biting her lip as she turned her head to look at the side of the bed where he had lain last night when she had kissed him. That kiss...

She made the mistake of allowing herself to recall the feeling that had swelled inside her when his lips had been on hers, but that infuriating pain shot up through her chest immediately and she bit back a moan before quickly pushing Sebastian out of her thoughts and replacing them with the reality that tomorrow was their wedding.

Viola swallowed hard. It was tomorrow. She would be marrying him.

She quickly got out of bed and put on her cracked glasses to go and locate the spare pair she had been given back when she had first arrived here and was still in training. Sebastian had promised her that after their wedding, he would take her to the doctor who would perform her eye surgery.

After finding the spare glasses, Viola freshened up and then stood in front of the floor to ceiling mirror in her closet, turning sideways to look at Evan’s mark at the back of her neck. Lately it had been faint, but after running into Evan and being in the same building as him, the mark had surfaced again, and Viola felt a wave of regret wash over her at the sight of it.

She pursed her lips. She had invited Evan with the intention of getting him to break his mark, but she had been completely ignorant of the fact that the heart binding mark and the mating mark were not one and the same. This one couldn’t simply be broken by the person who gave it, not unless she fought her way through the pain of it by falling in love with someone else, or by getting marked by another man, especially if that man happened to be her mate.

Only that mate wouldn’t be able to mark her now, for reasons she hadn’t yet asked about. She had wanted to ask him last night but something inside her had held the question back, because she was afraid of hearing that he was reserving his mark for another mate he considered more worthy than her. After all, he had them in abundance. That thought carved a hot, twisting path of jealousy straight through her chest, and she caught herself frowning at her own reflection in the mirror.

He wouldn’t mark you, so what is the big deal? Deal with it. At least he is marrying you, and that marriage will give you every advantage you came here wanting. You don’t need to long for a mark that would only bind you down and hurt you further. A natural relationship built on mutual respect is more than enough. She scolded herself firmly, and then deliberately removed the thought from both her heart and her mind.

Viola was in the middle of dressing up for the day when she received a text from Zoe asking her to come up to her floor. With the many guests now filling the High Tower, Zoe had also moved here and brought her work along with her, and being the designer of Viola’s wedding dress, she needed to be close. Viola, for her part, desperately needed a distraction, something to keep her mind from spiraling into nerves about tomorrow.

Despite the fact that it wasn’t a marriage born from love, the jittery, fluttering feeling in her stomach was very much present, and she wanted to feel it as little as possible. She needed to prepare herself to face the thousands of intimidating guests whose combined presence was already thick and heavy in the air throughout the building.

There were more than twenty Alphas who she would have to meet tomorrow and be introduced to.

When Viola finished dressing, she left her penthouse and headed toward Zoe’s floor. However, Zoe’s floor was on the opposite side of the building, and the elevator from her own penthouse floor didn’t go there directly, she would need to step out into the lobby and use a public elevator on the other side.

When Viola reached the lobby, every public elevator was packed with people, and she changed course and decided to take the stairs instead. She wanted to avoid people as much as possible today until tomorrow, especially anyone from her former pack after everything that had unfolded the day before. If she would meet them again, she wanted to be the supreme Luna.

Viola didn’t mind taking the stairs at all, particularly since it would serve as a morning workout of sorts. She made her way up the steps, her footsteps echoing softly in the stillness of the stairwell as she went, she was the only one there.

Then she thought she heard something and stopped, tilting her head and straining her ears to listen.

Viola’s brows pulled together when nothing reached her but silence, only the distant, muffled sounds of activity from the lobby far below. Had she imagined the scraping and sobbing sounds she thought she had heard? She wondered, and began to resume walking, but the moment she took a step, the sound came again.

This time, when she stopped, the scraping and muffled sobs didn’t stop with her, and Viola’s frown deepened as she turned and followed the sound upward.

The closer she climbed, the more strange and agonizingly raw the sobs became. Who was crying like that? She thought, as the sound led her all the way to a sleek stairwell door marked with a polished silver plate bearing the number 56, its surface catching the light of the recessed lighting above it.

Right there, just before the door on the floor of the landing, a woman was crouched with her face turned toward the wall beside it. Her long black hair poured all around her face and body like curtains drawn shut, and her fingers were scraping against the surface of the wall, creating the very sound Viola had been following.

But she had scraped so hard and for so long that her fingers were bleeding, the blood dripping quietly onto the floor beside her.

Viola didn’t need to see the woman’s face to know who it was. She recognized her from the curtain of dark hair, the small and fragile frame, and the faint but unmistakable smell of a body that had gone unwashed for a long time. Sofia. What was she doing here alone, like this?

Viola stood still and watched her for a moment. The sobbing that had drawn her here had gone quiet, but the scraping hadn’t stopped.

She had heard all sorts of things about this she-wolf, many said she had lost her mind and her sanity entirely after she had cheated on Javier, and that when he caught her he had taken it upon himself to become the sole punisher of her sin, with no one having the right to interfere because she was his mate and therefore his to deal with as he saw fit.

But Viola didn’t see someone who had cheated sitting crouched against that wall. What she saw was a caged and mentally broken person, someone who had been abused into this state, not shamed into it. The rumors didn’t sit right with her at all, and something deep inside Viola simply refused to believe them.