Chapter 286: What She Buried

Orion leaned forward slowly, eyes fixed on her as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Sophia didn’t look at him at first.

Her gaze drifted to her hands resting on the blanket that was placed over her. She turned them over slowly, as if she were seeing someone else’s fingers attached to her wrists.

"It wasn’t recent," she murmured. "The memory I saw... I... it was from a long time ago, almost twenty years ago," she told them.

"I think... no, I’m rather sure of this." She gave Lysander a look. "You told me before, when I met with you, that my condition had to do with my mind protecting me, right?" she asked him.

"Yes," Lysander said with a nod.

"Well, my mind has been protecting me for a while," she said with a wry laugh, but then she shook her head. "Well, it’s not like my mind was protecting me. It’s more like I made myself forget that this even happened. I made sure to forget about it."

"Sophia," Orion called softly. "You are confusing me."

"I’ll start from the beginning—at least the beginning of what I just recalled," she told him.

"When I was six," she began quietly, "I used to sneak out of the house. I lived with my mother, but she made sure I didn’t leave the house."

Sophia’s voice softened.

"There was a boy," she said. "I can’t remember his name or the names of all my other friends from then. I... I hate that I can’t. But I remember that this boy... he was the captain of the guard’s son. And he always bragged about how good of a fighter he was."

A faint smile ghosted across her lips—one tinged with nostalgia and sorrow.

"I overheard him boasting one day when I was sneaking out. I was just going to be with people, I think. I’m not really sure, but I know I felt suffocated in my room. But anyway, that was how we became friends. Him and the other three. I liked being around them. They taught me things." She turned to Orion. "One of them being how to play ball without looking like I would die at any moment."

Orion nodded. He had noted it before when they played together and he pointed out how she did not get tired easily. Now he understood why.

"When they noticed how physically weak I was, they came up with ways I could play with them that wouldn’t make me tired easily. I also wanted to learn to fight from them, but we hardly knew anything. The only one with little knowledge was our leader, the captain’s son, and even he could only swing a wooden dagger. But we followed him because he was our leader after all and he was smarter than the rest of us."

Her gaze drifted to the window, to the falling snow outside.

"I wanted to keep going out. I wanted friends. But my mother..." She hesitated. "She always told me to stay inside. Not to move around too much. Not to play. Not to get dirty. Not to run. Ever. She always gave me something to do and I just... I can’t remember it, but I know she gave me something to do."

She tried to draw her knees slightly inward but winced at the pain, so she just let out a breath.

"But even with that, I snuck out. She wasn’t always around. She had things to do—I know she was working but I still can’t remember what type of job either. But anytime she wasn’t around, it gave me the chance to sneak out and relax," she told them.

"One day, we were all playing ball. And it rained. Really heavily. The rain was similar to the storm we had here. It was heavy, and we were soaked from head to toe, but we never stopped playing. It was fun, and we didn’t even register the fact that we had been under the rain for so long. We didn’t care that we would likely fall sick for staying that long. We were just having fun. But all good things must come to an end after all, right?" she asked them, then paused.

Orion’s eyes softened. Lysander’s jaw tightened.

"When I realized how late it was, I ran home. I ran as fast as I could, leaving my friends behind. They wanted to go with me to explain to my mother, but I knew that if they tried to do so, then we would end up in more trouble, so I refused, adamantly. When I got home, I tried to pretend I’d been inside the whole time. I moved to my room and climbed on the bed with my soaked body and pretended to be asleep so if my mother came in, she would think that I was tired from reading my novels or something."

Her fingers curled a little around the blanket.

The room was quiet as she spoke. No one cared to interrupt her. No one spoke a word as she recounted everything.

Sophia continued, voice thinning.

"But I should have known that that wouldn’t work. Things like that never worked when it came to my mother. She was always perceptive. She knew what had happened, and when she walked in... it was the next day. I fell asleep in my wet clothes. It was stupid of me, I know, but I was scared that she’d walk in at any moment and then catch me in the fact that I was outside. So I stayed in bed, waiting for her to come into my room because she always did, and I... I fell asleep. And I woke up with a fever the next day. Guess who also came to me the next day, like she already knew I was sick?"

No one answered—they didn’t even need to because she answered the question herself.

"My mother."

It was like she could see everything play out before her, like she was still back in that room even though she knew very well that she wasn’t there. She was in the medical facility at the Nightshade Pack, yesterday, but it felt like she was back in that room... her old bedroom as she recounted her story.