Inhumane

024

PAIGE

I was once a girl who had grown up in the woods. I had two parents that I idolized because they were all I had. One was a mother who was everything light and beautiful. They said I looked just like her, but was not at all like her. The other was a father who was often absent and full of mystery but loved his wife and daughter in a way that could never be reciprocated. He expected too much from them and took too much to ever be satisfied with what he was given. I was once a girl who took pictures and drew in her sketchbook and played in the forest.

But then my mother was dead and I was left an empty shell of the girl who I had been. I played pretend, I lied, and I tried to be what my father wanted though I could never give him exactly that. I tried to recreate the life my mother had given me, but in my head. I wanted to be angry that she left, that she was killed. But I couldn't understand her, and I wouldn't for a long time. I was unable to read the lines back then, but if I had, I would have seen a different story. I would have seen the abuse she endured from my father and his men, I would have seen the pain she was in, I would have seen the way she looked at the trees like she longed to live among them. I would have seen that she never saw the wolves as anything but creatures that she had grown to love.

Years later, I would still be struggling with the trauma my parents had left me with.

I replayed the interaction with my father the whole way back to the Wolf's house. The tears eventually stopped and the sadness and humiliation replaced itself with anger, as it always did. By the time the house was in sight, I was cold to my core, dark with the fury that was eating me whole. I was numb, more numb than I ever had been. My resolve had hardened. If I could leave this world with one thing, it would be my father. He was the last tie to my mother, and they were all I ever had. I couldn't see past the look on his face. I couldn't step out from his shadow.

I didn't stop moving, I hadn't since I left the lookout spot. I just kept trudging forward on my mission. I felt volatile and unstable, like a bomb waiting to detonate. My vision flashed with images of my father's angry face, my mother's throat torn out, the wolves, the bear worrying at my flesh. When the house came into view, the light was just beginning to creep over the mountain peaks. The cold and anger were tearing my insides apart.

The window to the bedroom was still cracked open but I blew past it. The snow had long since stopped and my footsteps were silent through the soft new snow. I went around to the front door, slowing only as I hit the porch. I made myself entirely silent. The dagger was gripped tight in my bare hand. I could hear the Wolf's heartbeat inside, steady, asleep. I stripped off my coat and dropped it on the porch, I was sweating.

I was out of my own body as I silently opened the front door and closed it behind me. It wasn't me moving my limbs, it was someone else. A hunter stalking prey. Someone dark and terrifying, someone that I had become but didn't recognize well. The dagger was still tight in my grasp, but I was shaking uncontrollably. The sleeping form of the Wolf on the couch drew me forward. I came around before him and realized I wasn't breathing.

He was on his back, one arm resting languidly behind his head, the other over his belly. He didn't have a shirt on and a blanket was draped haphazardly over his legs. My eyes honed in on the center of his chest.

I raised the dagger up high. My hand was shaking so badly I feared I might drop it.

Kill your mate, kill the Alphas, open the window.

Kill your mate.

Mate.

For one terrible second, I felt absolutely nothing at all. Not the cold, the anger, the sadness, the loss, the destruction... Nothing. I was just a girl, standing there before the only person who had ever really given her a chance. The only person who had believed in her and trusted her and loved her with everything he truly was. I was just a girl with a terrible past and terrible choices and grief that ate her down to her bones. For that horrifying second, I realized I was about to kill the wrong thing.