Chapter 135: A Mother’s Vengeance

Author’s POV~

"They stole Chloe? As soon as she was born?"

Lucas’s voice cracked right down the middle, coming out small, broken, and impossibly thin. He stared wildly from his father’s scarred face to his mother’s deathly pale complexion.

"But why?" Logan stepped forward, his boots scraping hard against the stone floor. His hands were shaking so violently he had to ball them into tight fists at his sides. "Why would Fredrick and Scarlett do something like that? Why would anyone like them would ever kidnap a newborn baby straight out of her own mother’s arms? What the hell did they even want with Chloe?!"

For one split, agonising second, just a fraction of a heartbeat, something terrifying flickered across Selena’s face.

A sharp tightening around her tear-filled eyes, a sudden, ragged intake of breath through her nose. If the twins hadn’t been so blinded by their own shock, they would have seen it for what it truly was.

Pure, unadulterated panic.

Selena forcefully squeezed her eyes shut. When she snapped them open again, the crack was gone, buried beneath a thick, suffocating mask of performative grief and cold, venomous pity.

"We don’t fucking know," Selena said quietly, her voice flat as a corpse.

"What do you mean, you don’t know?!" Logan shouted, his patience snapping. "She was your own only daughter. And they took her away from your hands right away. You mean to tell me you never dug into why they took her?!"

"They are dead, Logan!" Selena snarled, her voice whipping back with lethal force. "Fredrick and Scarlett are both burning in hell. The only two people who knew the sick, twisted reasons behind that kidnapping took their secrets straight into their graves. There is nobody left on this earth for us to ask!"

"That is not a goddamn answer, Mother!"

"It is the only answer you are ever going to get!" ℯ

Alpha Daren moved heavily across the grand hall, his massive frame closing the distance. He wrapped his arm around Selena’s trembling shoulders, pulling her hard against his side. She collapsed into him, her fingers clawing desperately into the heavy fabric of his coat.

For a fleeting second, they looked like two utterly broken souls clinging to each other in the dark.

"She was a newborn," Daren rumbled, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly. "A tiny, fragile baby who hadn’t even opened her eyes to look at the world yet. And they tore her away from her mother’s bleeding arms like she was nothing. Like she was just a stolen piece of property."

He slowly raised his heavy head, fixing his dark, unforgiving eyes on his sons.

"Chloe went through absolute hell when she was a child. Things no innocent creature should ever have to endure. We can’t even speak the full horror of it out loud in this house. And through all those nightmare years, she never knew her real family. She grew up trapped in the hands of monsters. They ripped a living infant from her mother’s chest, and for that unforgivable sin, their own daughter will never know peace."

Daren’s voice dropped to a lethal hiss. "She won’t even remember their faces now."

Lucas stood utterly paralyzed. His jaw was locked so tight his teeth ached, his golden eyes fixed blindly on the floorboards. Slowly, he raised his head.

"So that’s it?" Lucas whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying realization.

"What?" Daren barked.

"All of this." Lucas gestured wildly around the room. "The daily tonic. The memory-erasing poisons. The slave labor. It was all just... revenge?" His voice cracked, rising in pitch.

"You brought Adeline into our home when she was just a ten-year-old child! You knew exactly who her parents were. You knew she was the own flesh and blood of your sister! And you kept your mouth shut. You hid her entire identity on purpose, day after day, year after year, just to make a little girl pay for a war she didn’t even start?"

Selena didn’t flinch away from his burning stare.

"Yes," she whispered without a shred of remorse.

"You forced a ten-year-old kid to scrub bloody floors," Lucas yelled, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling, "in the exact same house where you could have given her a proper bed and a family! You fed her neurotoxins every single night and lied to her face, calling it medicine! You watched her mind rot, watched her forget her own mother’s face, and you did it all while smiling at her across the dinner table?!"

"Yes," Daren answered calmly.

Neither of them looked away. Neither of them showed even a microscopic flicker of guilt or remorse. Their eyes were dead, cold, and hard as frozen iron.

Lucas stared at them, his stomach violently turning. Something inside his chest shattered cleanly in two, and for the very first time in his life, he felt like he was standing in front of complete strangers.

Logan took a slow, agonizingly careful breath. When he spoke again, his tone had shifted, dropping into something terrifyingly quiet, almost gentle.

"Mother... Father," Logan murmured. "I am not sitting here defending what Fredrick and Scarlett did. I know it was pure evil. But what in the name of the Moon did any of that have to do with Adeline? She was just a little girl! She was a helpless child, the exact same way Chloe was a baby. She didn’t choose the monsters who spawned her! She didn’t steal anyone, she didn’t lay a hand on Chloe, she wasn’t even there!"

"Don’t you dare," Selena hissed.

Her head snapped up with terrifying speed. She violently shoved herself out of Daren’s arms, stepping right into Logan’s space, her entire body shaking with a feral rage. ℓ.

"Mother—"

"Don’t you ever stand in my house and lecture me!" Selena shrieked, her voice cracking and shattering.

"What did my daughter do? What did Chloe do?! What did my innocent baby girl do to deserve the nightmare that was inflicted on her?! She was barely a few hours old! She hadn’t even learned how to cry yet! What sin was written on her tiny, flawless body? Tell me, Logan! Tell me what Chloe did to earn a decade in hell!"