After being blinded by those sworn to protect her, Artemis trades her vision for her ability to have a mate. Only things are not as they seem when she's taken in by a pack where everybody already seems to know her face and the brooding Alpha keeps a...
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The whiskey had an edge of smoke embedded beneath the amber hyde. Like a fire it burned my throat and warmed my belly, flames licked their way up my throat and in some sick way I found myself enjoying the feeling. I had been burnt before.
Like the fire Mare started.
"I don't believe it." I said dumbfounded, I hadn't regained many memories other than the faces and names of my family but I knew enough to know that this wasn't true. It couldn't be... could it?
He drank deeply, the dark look in his eye proved that his demons could swim too, just like mine. No amount of alcohol could drown them at this point. He was too far gone.
We both were. I no longer sipped the bitter sweet honeysuckle from the glass, I drank greedily, letting it warm me from the inside out. I pushed my empty glass back and watched carefully as he refilled it, a little more this time. He had rolled his white shirt up to his elbows, revealing sinfully strong olive skin that had me feeling some kind of way...
Enough. None of that.
I fingered the baby blue silk that clung to my torso. "How did she do it?" I asked cautiously.
His nostrils flared ever so slightly as he forced himself to recall. "She always liked to play with fire." He drawled with some kind of emotion that I couldn't quite trace. Malice? Regret? Sadness? Or something entirely separate.
"She liked to play with matches, she enjoyed watching the flames.." Another empty glass met with mahogany. "Until one day she took it too far.." He was quiet for so long I didn't know if he was going to continue, his face creased, deep in thought. "They couldn't tell if it was an accident or not.."
Every word he spoke was careful and calculated, not a single word would be needlessly spilt. "Her burnt out matches were found in the forest by the trackers days later.. She set the place alight," I had never seen such deep rooted pain before. "With mother's and their pups asleep in their beds." His anger was tangible, it permeated the air, thick and heavy and hot. I watched his fists clenched and unclench. "And do you know what she did then?"
I stayed silent, I didn't even dare look him in the eye for fear of what I might see looking back at me.
"She fucking ran." He hissed, the scent of whiskey and cigarettes rolled off of him in waves. "She left them all to die!"
She ran. Mare was a coward. My eldest sister was a murderer. My dead sister.
But how did she die? What was her fate? Was it truly deserved...
