Chapter 58: Communal Popcorn

Chapter 58: Chapter 58: Communal Popcorn

Azura pinched the bridge of her nose, already feeling a migraine forming behind her eyes like a tiny construction crew was setting up scaffolding inside her skull.

"You guys..." She spoke slowly, as if addressing a particularly dense classroom of kindergarteners. "Did you... you know... investigate my family first? Before you went full ’snatch-and-grab’ on my unconscious body?"

She gestured vaguely with her hands.

"Like, a background check? A quick Google search? A carrier pigeon with a resume attached to its leg? Anything?"

Because surely, surely they had done their homework. No one just kidnaps someone based on a tip from a mysterious stepmother they met two weeks ago. That would be insane. That would be the kind of decision-making that gets people killed in horror movies.

Their investigation should have revealed that the Williams family had one son and two daughters. Unless there was some kind of affair happening? A baby swap? A secret twin hidden in the attic?

But that didn’t make sense either. Werewolf parents could smell their own blood. A switched child would be sniffed out faster than a moldy sandwich in a packed lunch.

And besides—she, Selena, and Jonathan had nearly identical facial features. The same nose. The same jawline. The same family resemblance that screamed "we share DNA, please stop asking."

The only difference was that Jonathan and Selena had softer, more "protagonist" faces, while Azura’s face screamed "I will ruin your life and enjoy it." But they were clearly siblings. You couldn’t fake that bone structure.

So why the hell did their mom only mention one daughter?!

Azura’s brain was now smoking. Literally. She could hear tiny alarm bells going off in her skull.

Caelus watched her internal crisis unfold with the calm detachment of a man observing a particularly confused squirrel trying to bury a nut in concrete.

"We investigated the Williams family before taking action." His voice was flat, factual. "The report confirmed three children. However—"

He paused.

"The youngest one died ten years ago."

Azura’s jaw unhinged like a cartoon wolf seeing a juicy steak.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN DIED?! My sister is still—"

She slapped both hands over her mouth so fast she nearly gave herself a concussion.

Her eyes went wide.

Oh. Oh no. Oh yes.

This was it. This was the golden ticket. The universe had just handed her a loaded gun aimed directly at the female lead’s love life, and all she had to do was pull the trigger.

If the triplets thought Selena was dead, then Selena would never meet the male leads. They wouldn’t discover she was their real fated mate. The harem plot would be destroyed before it even started. No more kidnapping. No dramatic rescues. No soul-bonding nonsense.

And when they eventually realized Azura wasn’t their actual fated mate? Well, that was future Azura’s problem. Present Azura was going to milk this misunderstanding for everything it was worth.

Because let’s be real. These three alphas had egos the size of small moons. If they ever discovered they’d kidnapped the wrong sister, the villainess, the bully, the big-breasted monster who made Selena’s life a living hell... they wouldn’t admit they were wrong. No, no—they’d blame her. The villainess was always the scapegoat. Always the one who got burned at the stake while the male leads held hands with the female lead and watched her roast.

But if Selena was "dead"? Then the plot was ruined. The harem was destroyed. And Azura could finally live her life as a mediocre potato without worrying about being executed in the final arc.

She slowly lowered her hand, a strained, manic smile spreading across her face.

"Ah... yes... my poor, dear, tragically deceased sister." She pressed a hand to her chest, attempting to look mournful, though she looked more like a cat who’d just knocked a vase off a shelf and was pretending it wasn’t her fault. "So young. So beautiful. So... definitely not alive and well in the Williams house right now. A tragedy, really."

She nodded to herself.

Great job, Azura. You’ve just killed off the female lead with your words alone. If this were a D&D campaign, you’d be rolling for deception right now.

The triplets stared at her.

Azura smiled wider inwardly.

Plot status: RUINED. Suck it, original storyline. This potato is now the CEO of chaos.

The triplets exchanged glances the moment Azura’s expression flickered. It was subtle—a micro-twitch of the lips, a slight widening of the eyes—but to three alphas who had spent their entire lives reading prey and enemies alike, it might as well have been a flashing neon sign that read "SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR DETECTED."

They maintained their friendly facades, of course. Caesar was still lounging with that easy, arrogant grin. Caelian’s smile remained charming and warm. Caelus was as unreadable as a brick wall painted gray.

But beneath the surface, their minds connected like wolves howling across a shared frequency.

’She’s lying about something.’

Caelus’s voice echoed in his brothers’ heads, flat and analytical.

’Investigate the youngest daughter of the Williams family. Her reaction was too strange to ignore.’

’On it,’ Caesar replied, his mental voice carrying a hint of excitement. He loved a good mystery.

Caelian followed, his tone smooth.

’I’ll have my contacts dig into the records.’

The mind link dissolved, and Caelus returned his attention to Azura. His finger tapped against the wooden table—once, twice, three times—each tap a deliberate beat in the silence.

"Your mother said her daughter suffered greatly before she quietly left the pack." His voice was calm, clinical, like a doctor delivering a diagnosis the patient really didn’t want to hear. "She said that after she departed, her daughter wasn’t allowed to stay at the Williams house or the pack’s territory. Instead, she was forced to live alone in the forest near the border."

He tilted his head, dark silver eyes boring into hers.

"Is that you? The one who lived alone in the forest? And if so, when did you return to your family? Because, frankly, you don’t look like you’ve been surviving on tree bark and existential despair."

Azura’s smugness evaporated faster than a puddle of water in hell.

Cold sweat began to prickle at her temples. Her brain, which had been congratulating itself for its brilliant manipulation just moments ago, was now screaming at her like a fire alarm going off in a burning building.

That’s Selena’s tragic backstory. The part where the entire pack blamed her for the Alpha heir’s death. The part where she was cast out to live in the forest like a stray dog, surviving on berries and spite until she saved Mara the witch and earned a favor that let her return.

Azura had overheard the she-wolves gossiping about it. She knew the basics. But if she pretended to be that Selena—the suffering, tragic Selena—the triplets might investigate further and discover the truth. And if they discovered Selena was alive? The whole house of cards would collapse.

She couldn’t use Selena’s past. She couldn’t admit she wasn’t the tragic daughter.

She had to use her own.

Her stupid, pathetic, absolutely ridiculous death story.

Azura’s eyes suddenly welled up with tears. Not fake tears—real tears. Because the more she thought about how she died, the angrier and sadder she got.

A frozen dumpling box.

Her mother’s love.

Her favorite food.

A stupid, ridiculous, ABSURD death that would make anyone with half a brain laugh at her funeral.

"YOU—" Her voice cracked dramatically as she pointed a trembling finger at Caelus. "You know I have a tragic past, and yet you try to make me relive it?! How can you be so CRUEL?!"

She clutched her chest like a Victorian maiden about to faint.

"This is something I want ERASED from my memories! I have locked them away in the deepest, darkest vault of my soul! And you—YOU—with your cold, handsome face and your stupid tapping finger—want me to OPEN THAT VAULT?! The fact that those who were supposed to be my loved ones are the ones who made me MISERABLE and DYING?!"

She was talking about the dumpling.

She was absolutely talking about the frozen dumpling that fell on her head.

But she made it sound like Crimson Crest, the pack, the entire werewolf society had personally delivered her to the gates of hell on a silver platter.

Her tears dripped dramatically down her cheeks as she sniffled.

"Every time I close my eyes, I see it falling toward me. I hear the thud. I feel the cold. The betrayal. THE AGONY."

The dumpling. She meant the dumpling.

The triplets stared at her with varying degrees of confusion and concern.

Caesar scratched the back of his head. "Uh... was it that bad? Living in the forest?"

Azura sobbed louder.

"YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! IT WAS—" She choked on her own words, trying to find a way to describe the emotional trauma of being killed by a dumpling. "IT WAS UNFORGIVABLE!"

Caelus’s eyebrow twitched.

Something was off.

Very, very off.

But for now, he simply filed this information away and nodded slowly.

"I see."

He didn’t see.

Nobody saw.

And Azura was too busy mourning her dumpling-related death to care.

She collapsed onto the table, burying her face in her arms, her shoulders shaking with genuine sobs of existential despair.

Caesar leaned toward Caelian. "...Did we just accidentally trigger her trauma?"

Caelian whispered back. "I think we broke her."

Caelus’s finger stopped tapping. For the first time, a flicker of uncertainty crossed his stoic face.

His brain, unfortunately, did not come with an "off" switch. While his face remained a stoic mask of sympathy—brow slightly furrowed, lips pressed into a thoughtful line—his mind was running laps around the track of deduction like an Olympic athlete on performance-enhancing drugs.

"I see it falling toward me. I hear the thud."

Falling toward her. A thud. Living alone in the forest.

His mental gears ground together, sparks flying.

...Did a tree fall on her?

It made sense. It was the only logical explanation for why Azura Williams—reported to be a sharp, venomous she-wolf—was now acting like a chaos gremlin with the emotional stability of a squirrel on espresso.

Maybe the tree had given her brain damage.

Maybe she’d been conked on the head by a rogue branch during a storm, and ever since then, her neurons had been firing like a broken slot machine—random, nonsensical, but occasionally hitting a jackpot of sheer stupidity.

Caelus sighed internally, his gaze lingering on her tear-streaked face for a moment longer than necessary.

Brain damage. That’s the only logical explanation for this chaos incarnate sitting before me.

He pushed his untouched glass of water toward her.

"Alright. Let’s put that aside for now." His voice was flat, but not unkind. "There are still plenty of other things we need to discuss."

Azura’s head snapped up so fast her neck almost cracked. She snatched the handkerchief Caelian had produced from somewhere—did he keep those in his pocket specifically for crying women? She blew her nose loudly. She then grabbed the glass Caelus had pushed toward her and chugged it like she’d just crawled out of a desert.

Azura grinned internally. She hadn’t lied about living in the forest. She hadn’t mentioned the forest at all. She’d just been sad about the dumpling. So technically, technically, she had been one hundred percent honest.

If they ever accused her of lying, she could smugly cross her arms and say, "I NEVER ONCE SAID I LIVED IN THE FOREST. YOU ASSUMED."

Her internal smugness was reaching dangerous levels.

Then, a thought struck her like—well, like a frozen dumpling from heaven.

"By the way..." She tilted her head, her voice deceptively innocent. "Where’s my mom?"

Caesar blinked, genuinely impressed by how quickly she’d bounced back. One second she was sobbing into the table like a Victorian orphan, and the next she was sipping water like she’d just finished a refreshing jog.

"Our dad and your mom went on a seclusion to bond in the mountains not far from our pack territory." He shrugged. "They’ll probably be back in a month."

Azura’s mouth twitched.

A seclusion. In the mountains.

So, basically a werewolf honeymoon.

Middle-aged parents going off to "bond" in the mountains for a MONTH.

She didn’t want to imagine what kind of bonding they were doing, but her brain, being the traitor it was, immediately supplied images of her mother and the former alpha doing... activities. Forest activities. VERY intense forest activities.

She shuddered.

Gross. I’m going to have another werewolf sibling, aren’t I? A little furry brother or sister that’ll bite me and call me a disappointment.

Caelian glanced at Caelus, his voice dropping to a sly murmur.

"Shouldn’t we be talking about the fated mate situation now? Since she wants to know the other reason we kidnapped her?"

Caelus didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he rose from his seat with the slow, deliberate grace of a predator who had all the time in the world.

"If we’re going to talk about that, we need our uncle to be included too." His voice was calm, but there was a weight to it. "Since he’s also her supposed fated mate."

Azura’s brain screeched to a halt.

"Uncle is currently in his wing. Let’s go there."

Everyone stood up, the scraping of chairs against the floor echoing through the dining room.

Azura followed on autopilot, her legs moving while her mind was still trying to process what she’d just heard.

They walked through the hallway, the triplets’ footsteps synchronized like a well-oiled machine. The mansion’s corridors stretched endlessly, lined with paintings of ancestors who looked like they’d bite your head off if you sneezed wrong.

And then it hit her.

Her brain, which had been wandering through the forest of "my parents are making a baby werewolf right now," suddenly stumbled into a clearing and saw the TRUTH.

She was pretending to be their fated mate.

They believed she was their fated mate.

Which meant—

Oh no.

Oh no no no no no.

Azura’s eyes widened as the horrifying realization crashed over her like a tsunami of dread.

The harem route.

The PORN harem route.

The one where the female lead spends 90% of the book making sounds that would make a porn star blush, being passed around like a communal bowl of popcorn, and walking bow-legged for twenty Chapters straight.

And she—Azura Luo, failed artist, professional liar, and accidental dumpling murderer—was now the leading candidate for that position.

She was going to replace Selena.

She was going to be the one who couldn’t stop moaning.

She was going to be the communal popcorn.

Her soul left her body.

Oh god... So... am I supposed to be some kind of... of... pack-sharing wife?! Do I get a schedule? A rotation chart?