Chapter Five: Hatred Borne

CIARA

I never once reminded Damien of how I had saved him all those years ago.

Not because I had forgotten.

But because I knew—deep down—he never wanted to remember.

For so long, I convinced myself that love, even if it was one-sided, could thaw the ice between us. I told myself that if I stayed, if I endured, if I gave him everything, he would eventually turn toward me.

And for a while, I thought I had won.

Until she came back.

Eve.

The woman who had disappeared without a word, the woman who left him when he needed her most—she returned like a ghost from the past, and just like that, everything I had worked for shattered.

Damien didn’t hesitate.

He didn’t demand answers.

He didn’t question why she had abandoned him when his world was falling apart.

No.

The moment she needed him, he ran to her.

Unlike me.

I had spent years standing in the shadows, fighting for a place beside him. I clung to every fleeting moment of warmth he tossed my way, convinced that, one day, I would be enough.

But it was all an illusion.

A carefully crafted lie I told myself to justify the years of suffering.

And now?

Now, I was dead.

There was no need to lie anymore.

All those years, all those memories—they meant nothing. They had been nothing but ashes in the wind.

The bodies lay on the cold stone floor, blood pooling beneath them.

One of them was mine.

Or so they believed.

Damien stood motionless, his golden eyes unreadable as he gazed down at the lifeless form before him. His expression was carved from stone, unreadable even as his assistant kneeled beside the corpses, his voice unwavering.

"This is her, Alpha. This is Ciara and the pup she carried."

A sharp intake of breath came from beside him.

Eve’s face paled as she clutched his arm. The color drained from her delicate features, her lips parting as if to speak—but no words came out.

Damien, however, didn’t acknowledge her.

For the first time since her return, he ignored her.

A flicker of resentment flashed in her eyes, but she buried it quickly, choosing instead to stumble weakly into his embrace.

“Damien… you don’t really believe this is Ciara, do you?” Her voice was filled with disbelief, laced with something more—something bitter. “You locked her in the attic for three whole days without food, and she still survived. How could someone like her die from something as simple as a fall?”

Her words hit their mark.

Damien’s eyes, which had been clouded with hesitation, suddenly hardened.

The softness disappeared in an instant, replaced by the cold, ruthless expression I knew all too well.

A flick of his wrist.

The order was silent, but his guards understood.

The assistant was forced to the ground, his face smashing into the marble with a sickening crack.

Damien’s voice was sharp, cutting through the silence like a blade.

"Exactly. A woman as vicious as her wouldn’t die so easily." His golden eyes darkened, his jaw tightening. "She must think faking her death will make me let her go."

I watched, unseen, as the first punch landed.

The assistant barely flinched.

Another.

Then another.

Blood splattered across the floor, yet he didn’t waver. He groaned, his body wracked with pain, but his voice remained steady.

"This is her," he choked out. "The body is real. Ciara is dead."

I should have felt guilty.

After all, I was the one who had dragged him into this mess.

But as I turned my gaze back to Damien, that guilt was drowned out by something colder.

Mockery.

I had died once.

Not in the literal sense, but in the way that mattered.

Damien had killed me long before my body hit the ground.

The attic, the darkness, the hunger—I remembered it all. The slow unraveling of my sanity as I waited for him to acknowledge me. The realization that no matter how much I suffered, he would never look back.

That was when I knew.

Love wouldn’t save me.

Only revenge would.

And so, I became something else.

Something he couldn’t predict.

Something he couldn’t control.

I became his ghost.

Damien had always been ruthless.

That was the part of him the world feared, the part that made him the most dangerous Alpha of our time.

But what they didn’t understand—what Eve didn’t understand—was that he wasn’t heartless.

He could love.

I had seen it before, the way his eyes softened when he looked at her. The way his voice gentled when he spoke her name.

He had the capacity for love.

He had just chosen not to give it to me.

But now, he stood there, staring at the corpse he believed to be mine, and for the first time in years...

He looked lost.

Eve spoke again, but he didn’t answer.

The bodyguards waited for his next command, but he said nothing.

The assistant, bloody and broken on the floor, refused to take back his words.

And me?

I stood there in the shadows, watching.

Waiting.

For what, I wasn’t sure.

Maybe I wanted to see regret flicker in his eyes.

Maybe I wanted him to suffer the way I had suffered.

Or maybe…

Maybe I just wanted proof that I had mattered.

This wasn’t over.

Not even close.

I had allowed Damien to destroy me once.

But this time, it was my turn.

This time, I would be the one holding the knife.

And when I finally struck—when he finally realized what he had lost—

I would make sure he bled.

---

The wind howled through the pack house, rattling the windows. The Beta stood beside Damien, waiting for his Alpha’s command.

Damien’s jaw was clenched, his expression unreadable as he looked down at me.

“This isn’t over,” he muttered.

The Beta hesitated. “Alpha?”

Damien didn’t answer. He reached down, fingers brushing over my cold skin. And in that moment—

My fingers twitched.

It was so faint—so impossibly brief—that for a heartbeat, I thought I’d imagined it.

A flicker.

A breath caught in stillness.

But Damien felt it too.

His gaze snapped into focus, gold eyes narrowing like a beast sensing a predator it couldn’t see.

His shoulders tensed, his muscles coiled with sudden awareness.

He went still—deathly still.

As if the very air had turned against him.

And maybe it had.

Because I felt it then.

A pulse deep in the marrow of my bones.

A slow, aching burn in the hollow space where my heart should’ve stopped.

A whisper in my blood. A call.

Something ancient, something powerful, something mine.

It wasn’t warmth.

It was rage.

It wasn’t hope.

It was hunger.

I wasn’t truly dead.

The world thought it had buried me—forgotten me, replaced me.

But something had cracked open in the silence, in the dark earth where I had fallen.

And from that crack, I was rising.

Not as a Luna.

Not as a wife.

Not as the broken, discarded woman sobbing in the shadow of a man’s fated mate.

Something was calling me back.

Or maybe I had clawed my own way through.

Maybe grief had dug the grave, but vengeance was dragging me out of it.

And this time—

This time, Damien wouldn’t be able to look away.

This time, he wouldn’t find a tear-stained face begging for scraps of affection.

He wouldn’t hear pleas.

He wouldn’t see love.

He would see reckoning.

Because I wasn’t here to be chosen.

I wasn’t here to be forgiven.

I was coming for him.

And I would make him fear the very thing he once called love.

Because when I returned,

I would wear his guilt like a crown—

And his ruin like a dress stitched from every lie he ever told me.