Page 169 of Chased By My Grumpy Alpha
“Alpha Gareth stopped her from escaping,” she whispers. “He gathered the entire pack. Made us all watch at first, then...”
She can’t finish the sentence, but she doesn’t need to. The implication is clear.
“Made you all watch what?” But even as I ask, I know. I can see it in her eyes, in the way she flinches from my gaze.
“He forced everyone in the pack to take part in killing her.” The words come out in a rush, as if she’s been holding them back for decades. “Everyone, Astra. No one was allowed to refuse. No one could walk away.”
The room spins around me. Everyone.
I stare at my friend—my sister in everything but blood—and suddenly understand why she looks so broken.
“Even you?” The words are barely a whisper.
She covers her face with her hands and weeps harder. The sound is broken, anguished—the cry of someone who has carried unbearable guilt for too long.
I can’t breathe. Can’t think. My oldest friend, the person I trusted most in the world, was not only there when my mother was killed, she was forced to take part.
Time stops. I sit there in stunned silence, trying to process this new layer of nightmare. Not just that my mother was executed, but that children were forced to be part of it. The entire pack participated in my mother’s murder.
“I was six years old,” she finally whispers through her fingers. “You were eight. I didn’t understand what was happening, but they made me—they made all the children—”
She breaks down completely.
Only six years old. A pup. Just like I still was at eight.
More minutes pass in silence except for her weeping. I stare at the wall, my mind struggling to accept what I’m hearing. The pack probably thought I knew, that I remembered. They were all complicit. Every single one of them.
“I’ve lived with this for sixteen years,” Daciana eventually continues, her voice hollow with pain. “Sixteen years of knowingI was there when your mother died, that my hands—” She chokes on the words.
“Stop.” I say the word sharply, cutting through her spiral of self-recrimination.
She looks up at me, tears streaming down her face, terror in her eyes. She’s afraid of me now, I realize—afraid of what I’ll do with this knowledge.
I’m quiet for a long moment, watching my friend fall apart, feeling my own heart break for the child she was. For both the children we were.
The anger I expected doesn’t come. Instead, there’s a deep, overwhelming sadness that settles in my bones like the winter cold.
“You were six,” I say finally, my voice steady despite the tears on my own cheeks. “Six years old, Daciana. A baby.”
“That doesn’t make it—”
“It makes it exactly what it was,” I interrupt firmly. “Child abuse. You were a victim, too.”
She stares at me like I’ve said something impossible. “But I was there. I participated. I—”
“You were forced to participate in something I know you did not want to do.” My voice grows stronger, more certain. “What do you think would have happened if you had refused? Would Gareth have let you simply walk away?”
“Some of the adults enjoyed it,” she whispers, as if confessing a terrible secret. “You could see it in their faces. But the children, the others who were coerced—we were all traumatized.”
The whole idea makes me sick: adults who enjoyed torturing an innocent woman, and children who were traumatized by being forced to witness and participate in a murder.
“I’m so sorry, Astra,” Daciana sobs. “I’m so, so sorry. I should have tried to stop it. I should have—”
“You were a child,” I repeat, reaching for her hands. “What could you possibly have done against a pack of adults? Against an alpha?”
Something inside me breaks open then. Not anger or rage, but a deep, overwhelming sadness for the children we both were. For the innocence that was stolen from an entire pack.
I reach out for my friend and pull her into my arms, holding her tight. We’re both crying now, all those years of suppressed grief finally spilling out.
