“I will never hate you for this, or for anything. I will love you forever….”

I shut my eyes as I feel his claws dig into my back and I try to bite back the pain.

But I can’t. I scream out in agony, wrapping my arms and legs tighter around Isaac’s body, using his flesh as a means to filter the pain somewhere else.

I scream out one more time and so does Isaac; a heartrending bellow that echoes infinitely through the darkness.

ISAAC

25

ADRIA WAS GONE WHEN I woke up. Sometime, in the early morning hours of June 21st, she slipped out my bed and out of my life. I can no longer smell the scent of her hair, or her skin lingering on my sheets. I can’t even taste her in my mouth even though I try. The only evidence that she had ever been here was the necklace that I gave her lying on the pillow, and this torturous, burning hole in my chest where my heart used to be. The link I once had with her through my blood is also gone. I can’t feel her emotions anymore. I can’t see a glimpse into her life through her eyes as I was able to do on occasion throughout the seven months she had been bonded to me.

I knew she could feel me at times, too, that she could see through my eyes never knowing how it was possible, or if it was real. But I could never tell her. I could never let her know what I did to her or that because of our link, I knew about Viktor Vargas all along…at least…I knew about him being alive.

Nothing could have prepared me to learn the truth about Aramei and my father….

I knew that Adria didn’t keep the truth from me to save herself, to secure her place in my heart. No, she kept the truth from me to save me, my feelings about my father and his unremitting betrayal. Adria’s fears of being bonded to Viktor had little to do with how she felt. Because she knew deep down that it never would have made me love her less.

She was punishing herself for keeping me in the dark about Viktor being alive. I just wish I could’ve seen that long before I did, because I would have told her everything much sooner to spare her that guilt.

Submissive to guilt. I heard her say that once. But I never fully understood the way it affected her, until now. Adria lived a lifetime of pain and grief and injustice in just the few short years of her young life. There were things that happened to her as a child that I would never speak aloud and that she never told me. And when someone grows up knowing so little of what real love feels like, whether from family, or friends, or the love of a companion, that person starts to believe that they weren’t meant to be loved, that good things will never happen to them. They start to believe that whenever something good does happen, it’s inevitable that something bad will come along to replace it.

But she never complained. Adria never once cried on my shoulder about how life treated her. In fact, she often talked about how good her life was and that she was lucky she didn’t have to face some of the hardships that other people face.

She never complained.

And sometimes, it pissed me off, because she had every right to.

Adria didn’t deserve what happened to her the night she almost died in that car wreck. I did the only thing I thought I could do by feeding her my blood and hoping that it was enough and that I wasn’t too late. I may have only saved her for a little while, but I wanted to give her that chance to live. I had no idea that me being so young would cause the effects of the blood to happen faster. Genna told me this on the way to Georgia. I never would’ve thought…Yet another way that my father betrayed me.

But she didn’t deserve any of it, not the attack, or the Blood Bond, or the months she spent worrying about me. She didn’t deserve to be forced to make a fateful decision that I knew she would honor. And seven days ago, when I last held her in my arms and listened to her implore that I infect her, I knew if I didn’t that the alternative was…well, I couldn’t let that happen.

“Isaac,” Daisy says gently from the door of my bedroom, “They’re ready for you now.”

I sit on the edge of the bed, looking down at Adria’s necklace draped over my fingers like I’ve done every day since she left. And I put the symbolic pendant to my lips and shut my eyes, reliving the memory of her face before placing the necklace back in the box on my nightstand.

My beautiful English sister watches me from the door, always worrying about me even though Harry went missing the same morning that Adria did. None of us knows what to make of it, and none of us can find any evidence that they may have left together. But one thing is for certain: two of us are brokenhearted. Daisy and I have grown closer as brother and sister in just a week than any of my brothers and sisters have in all of our years together.

Except maybe for Nathan, but the reasons for mine and Daisy’s newfound closeness are different.

And I try to find some humor in all of this by admitting to myself that Daisy is stronger than I could ever be. I don’t know if it’s the nature of a female werewolf, who are often more powerful than the males, or if she was just born that way, able to keep a straight face when someone lets it slip that Harry might not even be alive.

I put a hole in the downstairs wall when someone said that about Adria.

“I don’t want you to do this,” Daisy says, her face downcast.

She walks over and sits next to me on the edge of my bed. I don’t look up. I continue to stare downward at the floor, my arms suspended between my legs.

“Are you doing it for yourself?” Daisy says, “Or, are you doing it for her?”

She goes on when I don’t answer.

“Isaac, she wouldn’t want this,” she says with heartache in her voice. “Not if she knew….”

“You’re right,” I say, finally lifting my head to see her. “No, she wouldn’t, but I think it’s time for a change, Daisy. And that’s something she would want. It’s something that I want….”

“It’s brutal,” she says, shaking her head and crossing her arms. “I can’t bare it…and you can’t change it. Not as long as Father is alive.”

I sit quietly for a moment, looking at my sister with silent resolve. “Then this is the first step toward ending his reign.”

Daisy’s face is assailed by trepidation; her eyes dart toward the door as if fearful someone might’ve heard my blasphemous admission, but her head never moves.

“Oh no…no Isaac, you can’t.” She reaches up a hand and rests it on my shoulder. “No one has ever…Isaac; no one has attempted it since Viktor. It’s suicide….”

“I don’t fear death,” I say. “I fear a life of imprisonment and as long as he lives, this cycle will never end. We’ll always be under his foot and more of our blood, our brothers and sisters; they’ll die because they aren’t strong enough.”

“Isaac—”

“They’ll continue to die whether by his hand or on his orders and they will never be given a choice.”

I look away from her now and stare out ahead of me.

“A choice is a valuable thing, Daisy,” I say, thinking of Adria. “And I intend to take ours back.”

“What if you die?” she says. “Then you can’t take back anything.”

“If I live through today, then I’ll know I’m strong enough to go on with my plan.”

I stand up from the bed, dressed in my finest ceremonial clothes: black Armani suit, white shirt and black tie. I wear my father’s six hundred year-old ring, pure gold encrusted with six onyx stones and the Prvovencani crest. On my upcoming twentieth birthday, July 20th, my age Abating will begin.

Today, I become Alpha.

The house has been cleared of all half-breeds and werewolves of no rank. All that remains are my brothers and sisters, the Governess, who aside from my father taught me everything I know, thirty members of the Elder Council, and my father, Lord General Vukašin Prvovencani.

I take the stairs slowly, my hands folded in front, lying against my pelvis so that the ring can be fully seen as I enter the room. I keep my chin raised, for if to lower it at all during the ceremony, I disgrace my father’s Lineage and he will kill me where I stand.

This ceremony is different than Seth’s was. Seth was given a lower-ranking Alpha position under my father. My advancement, like Nathan’s, has always been predetermined and makes me right-hand to my father. The only thing standing between he and I that would make me his equal is his life. I will be tonight just as my father was to his before he killed him and took control of everything.

Daisy joins my brothers and sisters away from the center of the room where my father and the Elders stand waiting for me. The Elders bow only their heads as I appear before them.

Of course, I keep my chin high.

“Are you prepared to face your fate and assume your position as Alpha?” my father says, standing in the center of the room in all of his dominant glory. His hands are folded just as mine are, his chin always two inches higher than anyone else’s. He wears a long black leather coat split down the sides.

“Yes, Milord.”

I am afraid; only a mindless fool wouldn’t be. We’ve only ever heard stories of this ceremony growing up. I have nine more brothers other than those who have lived in this house with me. Most of them I have never met, but the only one left alive is Andrei.

Five of the others died during this very ceremony, all of them on the end of my father’s sword.

I suppose that if Adria ever knew about this detail, things might be different. But it would not change my mind about wanting to change it, to set in motion a new era that has been unchanged since before my father became Lord General more than six centuries ago.

I take two more steps forward, chin high, and I raise my hands out to my sides. Two Elders, both tall with slicked-back brown hair, come on each side of me and rip open my suit jacket and shirt to expose my bare chest.

I don’t have to look to know that all of my brothers and sisters stand watching in restrained, terrified shock. We are connected in this way, able to feel one another’s most tumultuous emotions. Daisy can barely stand. I can feel her heart breaking, the absolute fear tearing it in half. I feel her tears just below the surface, but she knows she cannot outwardly show emotion during this ceremony in front of our father. And Nathan, he holds his emotions well, but I know that if I die tonight that he and my father will become mortal enemies.

I wonder if my father knows how he feels, or if my father feels nothing, because he shut our link off to him many years ago.

His link to Aramei was all that he could handle.

Another Elder breaks the perfect oval-shaped line and steps into the center of the room holding my father’s sword carefully in his hands. He bows to my father at the waist, holding the sword out for him to take.

I shut my eyes.

I think of Adria. I let my mind wander through that life I had with her and still hope to have again one day. I dream of her face, the tiny freckles that I loved so much and she hated. I dream of the way she used to smile and how her laugh sometimes made me laugh because it sounded like an evil, giggling child. I picture the way she walked, the way she ran and the way her body felt so delicate and light when I held her in my arms. I think only of her because if I’m going to die, her face is the last thing that I want to see.