Chapter 314 The Silver Creek Pack would answer for what it let happen to its King’s Luna

Chapter 314: Chapter 314 The Silver Creek Pack would answer for what it let happen to its King’s Luna

Author’s POV

Watching the old woman crumble, Aria found there was no clean satisfaction waiting for her either.

She shifted, and Damian let her go without a word.

Aria stepped forward. The guards parted and cleared her a path straight to where Rose sat on the ground.

The old woman looked up at her, mouth trembling, eyes full of raw fear. Every trace of the venom from a minute ago had bled out of her. She looked, all at once, a decade older.

"I won’t waste ugly words on you," Aria said. "Only because there was a time you stood between me and the worst of it."

Beneath the ice in her voice ran something quieter, an old, worn anger.

"But you knew. From the very beginning, you knew exactly what Ethan was doing to me, didn’t you?"

"I told myself you were the one person in that whole pack who was kind to me. And even after I understood that you knew everything, and still chose your grandson over the truth, I could have lived with that. The only thing I can’t forgive is the pretending. The kindness you put on like a coat."

"In your eyes, only Holt blood counts as people. That double standard of yours, that clean little face over a rotten choice, it cut deeper than the ones who just hated me outright. Nobody in your family is innocent. Not one of you."

"What I took back was mine to begin with."

The words were barely out of her mouth before Rose’s hand shot up, grasping at her sleeve. A guard caught the old woman’s wrist and held it fast.

"Aria... Aria, I was wrong..."

The fury was gone from her withered face now. What remained was only helplessness, and a bleak, hollow desperation.

The thought of all the warmer moments the two of them had once shared surged up in her, and she reached for it at once, the last card in her hand.

"I’m just a foolish old woman. I let my temper run away with me. I know Ethan wronged you, I do, but you’ve brought this whole family to the edge of ruin. Please. I’m begging you. Show him mercy. Let Ethan go."

"I never went after him," Aria said. "He disgraced himself. Every bit of it, he did to himself."

She turned to leave.

"Aria, for the sake of everything we once were to each other, help the Holts. Just this once. Ethan knows he was wrong now, he does. He loves you, he truly loves you. He’s finished with Clara. The two of you could start over, completely fresh, you could—"

The words spilled out of Rose in a panic, and somewhere in the middle of them she caught herself, remembering all over again that the man standing beside Aria was not someone she had any right to provoke.

"Love?" Aria’s voice cut clean through it. "Ethan doesn’t love me. He’s the golden son your family raised, and he’s exactly like the rest of you. He has no love in him. He hasn’t even the decency to draw the line where a person’s supposed to. And besides—"

She crossed back to Damian’s side and closed her fingers firmly around his arm. Her voice gentled all at once, went soft the way it only ever did for him.

"I already have the most perfect mate in the world."

Aria lifted her chin, and the look she turned up at Damian’s face was pure, unguarded pride.

It was only with the Holts standing there as the measure, Ethan and every rotten choice they’d made, that she finally understood with total clarity what kind of life she’d been reaching for all along.

The other half of a soul that made a whole. The one whose eyes opened the world to you, the one who stood at your shoulder and faced down every impossible thing beside you.

The one your wolf had known before your heart caught up. The place a heart points to on its own, over and over, and calls home.

He would always stand at the front of her life, and she would gladly carry the lantern down the long road for him in return.

Damian drew her back into him, cradled her against his chest like something rare and irreplaceable. He took two steps toward the gate. Then he stopped.

His gaze slid back to the old woman on the ground.

Something occurred to him, and his voice came again, low and unhurried.

"Do you know, in all your years, what it truly means for two people to be matched? An equal bond?"

"It isn’t a ledger of rank and title balancing out. It’s the pull between two souls. Strength answering strength, character answering character, one wolf’s whole self recognizing its other half across a crowded room. The Moon Goddess doesn’t measure fortunes. She measures fit."

"Even if Aria had never been born a Smith, my wolf would still have gone still the first time he caught her scent. She is a mate. Mine. That word means more than your whole family will ever comprehend. And a mate, in our world, is not something you insult and walk away from. So tell me. In front of me, how could I ever let anyone lay a hand on what’s mine and live untouched?"

With each sentence, another shade of color drained out of Rose’s face.

His last words were the ones that put out the light in her entirely.

"My mate chose to leave the Holts a little dignity. I won’t. As of today, the Silver Creek Pack will answer for what it let happen to its King’s Luna. Every account frozen. Every trade route sealed. Every alliance revoked. The Holt name, and the pack that shielded it, will not draw another easy breath so long as the Blackwood Crown stands."

Said by the King himself, it wasn’t a threat. It was a sentence.

He had cut off every road the Holts had left. Not in this city, not in this Kingdom, was there a single soul with the standing to stand openly against the Crown and the Smith name both.

Terror seized Rose so completely that the words died half-formed in her throat. She could only watch, wide-eyed, as the two of them turned and walked away, their backs receding through the gate.

Something wrenched hard behind her ribs. The world went black at the edges, then all at once.

She crumpled sideways into the arms holding her, out cold.

"Ma’am! Ma’am, can you hear me!"

The very thing the security detail had dreaded most had come to pass. As the old woman went limp, the courtyard dissolved into chaos, guards shouting over one another.

Not long after, an ambulance carried her away.