🦋ALTHEA
He looked back at me, and the pity in his eyes made me want to disappear.
"What you found—the scars, the fear, the way she flinches at everything—that wasn't from two weeks of captivity. That was years. Years of systematic torture at the hands of the very people who sent her here to die."
The room was so silent I could hear my own heartbeat thundering in my ears.
"Her own mate," Kael said, the word an accusation, a curse. "Her own mother. The High Alpha himself. They broke her piece by piece, and when she was barely holding together, they sent her here with my arm and my blood, hoping you would finish what they'd started."
He turned back to the Hell Hound, his voice dropping to something raw and fractured.
"They wanted you to kill her, Alpha. Not because she was a spy."
His eyes found mine one last time.
"But because she was inconvenient. Because she knew too much. Because she was a loose end they wanted severed."
The silence that followed was deafening.
