Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna-Chapter 181: Undeserving

"Nick, can you do me a favor?" Viola turned to him where he was sniffing his arms and body and then grimacing, but at her words he nodded almost eagerly.

"Sure. What’s up?"

"Can you go and explain to the guest that something came up that makes me unable to show up? You can make up any excuses for me. I don’t think Sofia should be left alone."

"Don’t worry, we can handle this. I will go with him," Zoe said. "Let’s go." She pulled Nick along.

"Be careful around her, Vee. She might not be dangerous enough to harm but her husband is. Don’t let Javier know she’s with you." Nick warned as he got dragged away by his cousin.

After watching Zoe and Nick leave, Viola turned and went back into the room, only to find Sofia already crawling her way down the side of the bed with the clear intention of getting up and leaving. Viola moved quickly and pushed her firmly but gently back down onto the mattress.

But the she-wolf suddenly turned on her and gripped her arm with a force that hurt, before she said, "Don’t trust any Kade. Don’t trust any male Kade. They are bad, all of them!" She gritted aggressively, giving Viola a shake that made her dizzy. Could it be that everyone was right and Sofia wasn’t sane?

Viola quickly racked her brain before she got shaken to the end of tomorrow, because for someone who had been barely conscious minutes ago, Sofia possessed a startling and unexpected amount of strength.

"Calm down, Sofia. Don’t worry, I don’t trust people easily. Relax. Are you hungry? I can get you something to eat." She asked gently.

As though she had been burned by the question, Sofia released Viola’s arm and scrambled away from her, shaking her head frantically. "No. You want to poison me too. They want to kill me so he can marry again. They give me good food and my stomach hurts so badly afterwards. He asks if I am hungry..." Trembling from head to toe, she slid off the bed and sank onto the floor, trying to make herself small in the corner beside it.

Viola frowned and crouched down to her level, keeping her voice as gentle and coaxing as she could manage. "Who is trying to kill you?"

Sofia said nothing and only stared at her through the thick curtain of her hair, scraping her nails slowly against the floor in that familiar back and forth motion.

"Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I promise. Tell me who is trying to kill you." She asked again, lowering herself fully onto the floor so that she wouldn’t appear intimidating to the frightened woman.

"Him..." Sofia whispered in a small, airy voice.

"Who?"

"Mi vida..." She whispered.

Mi vida. Viola turned the words over in her mind, recognizing them immediately. My life. And she frowned in confusion.

"I don’t understand," Viola said. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"Mi vida. Javier..." Sofia added.

Javier was trying to kill her? What on earth could Sofia have done to him to earn this level of punishment? Viola thought in displeasure. Was he the one who gave her the wolfsbane?

"Mi vida wants another wife. If I die, he will marry someone powerful. His Mami wants him to marry someone that will give him a child before you do, someone more sensible then me. He asks if I am hungry and I say yes, he gives me poison..." She sniffled quietly. "He gives me poison. Mi vida wants to kill me... like the other Kade killed Evangeline..."

Viola’s brows pulled together. She didn’t like a single thing she was hearing, and Javier wanting to kill his own wife was a level of heartlessness that turned her stomach, but it was the name Evangeline that made her go still. "The other Kade?" She asked carefully.

Sofia nodded, her hair swaying with the movement. "Your Kade. The Alpha. The Kades are wicked, that is why they are cursed. I saw Evangeline’s dead body. Your Kade killed her and I saw him dragging her body away, and he looked at me and said, ’Shh, don’t tell anyone or you will end up just like her.’ And then he left. Kades are wicked."

Though many thought she was insane, Sofia was perfectly sane and knew what she saw. Being seen as a crazy person made people careless, they didn’t bother to hide their darkest secrets even when she was right there to catch them. And she had caught the supreme Alpha. She had seen what he did to his wife with his own hands. That memory would never go away from her mind.

"Javier... he used to love me... Now he is wicked too." She said wretchedly, the words torn from somewhere raw and deep inside her throat.

Viola was struggling to absorb everything the she-wolf was saying. She hadn’t expected Sofia to begin opening up to her like this, as though a stopper had been pulled from somewhere inside her and everything had come rushing out at once. She had seen Sebastian kill the late Evangeline with her own eyes? Had he truly done it with his own hands?

"Wickedness. You will die too." Sofia’s eyes fixed on her with an urgent, desperate intensity. "You are nice. Run away now, take the ring off your finger and go far away from here. They will kill you!" She said, and then began pushing at Viola’s chest in short, frantic shoves. "You have not loved him the way I loved my Kade, you can still leave!"

Viola quickly caught Sofia’s wrists before the pushing could send her backward and hurt her, and then she said steadily and calmly, "Okay, okay, I will run away just like you want. But first tell me what happened between you and Javier. Why is he treating you this way if he once loved you?"

Sofia yanked her hands back and hugged them tightly to her own chest, dissolving into quiet, broken sobs as she began rocking herself back and forth. "It was my fault... my fault. I am to blame. I went out when I shouldn’t have. I went out when he told me not to leave our room."

"What happened when you went out?" She asked softly.

"I... was in my heat season..." Sofia began, her face lowering into her knees. "Javier was not around and I was waiting for him to come back. We had gone on our honeymoon and were staying in a hotel in another pack. But I didn’t know my scent would travel that far and reach outside the hotel room. I didn’t bother to suppress it because I knew my husband would be back soon to take care of the heat. I went out to check if my Javier is coming. But instead of my Javier coming through the door of the hotel... other men came. They followed my scent..."

Viola’s fingers began to curl slowly into fists at her sides as the picture took shape. In the werewolf world, the belief that a she-wolf who failed to conceal her heat was inviting whatever came to her was so deeply and disgustingly ingrained that countless she-wolves had been forced into rape with no action ever being taken against the men responsible.

"I couldn’t fight them. There were too many. They all forced me down and took turns putting out the heat in our room, and Javier came back and found them, and me, like that. I told him I hadn’t brought them in, that they had forced themselves on me. Javier didn’t believe me. He blamed me. He called me a bitch. He rejected our bond..." She whispered, her sobs coming out soft and silent and utterly defeated. "He beats me every day now and calls me a madwoman. But I am not mad... I am not."

"Shh." Viola moved forward without hesitation and pulled her into her arms. "It was not your fault. Not a single part of it. Don’t you dare blame yourself. Javier is stupid and he is completely undeserving of you."

"No..." Sofia shook her head against Viola’s shoulder, her voice cracking. "I am the one who is undeserving of him. I turned him into a wicked Kade... just like your Kade..."