Chapter 16
Hours ago.
Viola’s entire body burned to the point she could no longer tell where the pain was coming from. It was like hot water had been poured over her skin and seared her internal organs from the torment of the wolfsbane.
Would death bring her relief from this agony? she wondered, but even death couldn’t take her, just like living hadn’t, and every person she had thought cared for her had turned away.
She wanted to make them suffer double the amount of her torment and pain. She wanted them to see what living in hell while alive felt like. But Viola couldn’t even help herself. She moaned and groaned in pain. Her throat burned with thirst, and her stomach cramped painfully.
Every part of her body felt light and heavy at the same time. She had been starved to the point where she could no longer even feel hunger or think about food, her taste buds ruined by the constant bitter taste coating her tongue because of the wolfsbane.
Viola at least tried to open her eyes to see where she was and where the evil Ember had brought her.
Ember had made her Gammas beat her because she refused to tell them where she had gotten the coat from. What Ember didn’t know was that even if Viola wanted to talk, her throat was too raw to make any sound, the injection given to her had burned her vocal cords to rawness.
Normally, there were different kinds of wolfsbane: one dose mainly for torturing and another for killing instantly. But even the kind used for torture could kill when the dose became too much.
Viola couldn’t tell how much of it she had been injected with and forced to swallow.
She moaned again as her stomach cramped, feeling as if pins were digging into her insides. She was burning all over.
She tried to force her eyes open to see where she was and to find anything that could end this miserable life of hers and make the unbearable pain stop.
But when Viola opened her eyes, she was hit with, and wacked by, the realization that her right eye vision had turned completely white, the other eye blurry and hazy, with the little light coming from what must have been a window or door dancing in front of her.
Hot tears rolled down her feverish, hollowed cheeks and burned the bruises there. She had lost one of her eyes. Evan had broken not just her heart and soul but her eye. She wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for him.
Viola wanted to blame her parents as well, but how could she blame them when she didn’t even know them? The Lindens had adopted her from an orphanage, believing they wouldn’t be able to give birth to their own child, and as a Beta family, they needed a daughter more than a son, so she could marry and increase their power in the pack.
That was the reason they had adopted her, or should she say adopted her twin sister, Ivy? Viola almost let out a bitter laugh, but even that proved impossible with the kind of pain she was in. Was this karma finally getting back at her? Was she paying for that long-past mistake of what she had done to Ivy?
The Lindens had made the adoption a secret. Her father, Beta Elliot, had sent his wife back to her family pack for a few years to make the Moonwillow Pack members believe she had gone there to give birth, not knowing they had arranged that to adopt a seven-year-old daughter from the orphanage to make her appear to be theirs.
When Viola had been brought to Moonwillow Pack, nobody knew she was adopted. Everyone took her as the biological daughter of the Lindens, who doted on her like a princess and gave her everything she ever asked for. The only person who knew was Evan.
She and her adoptive mother had gotten along so well that Viola kept the truth of her bitter past a secret, because she feared losing their affection and being thrust back into the harsh life of the orphanage. Life in a werewolves’ orphanage was brutal in its own way, a place no child would ever want to grow up in. Many of the children there were born to rogues who didn’t have the means, the stability, or the will to care for a child, and so they abandoned them in a cold, unforgiving place like that.
Viola hated the orphanage with everything in her, unlike Ivy, who had seemed to endure it far better than she ever could.
She had done everything ever since she was a little girl to remain loved so she could never be thrust back to the orphanage, but that shattered when the Linden couple finally found out they would be having their own child. Fear had lunged into Viola when she learned her adoptive mother was pregnant.
What if they stopped loving her and threw her back to the orphanage? What if they threw her out into the streets to live as a rogue without a pack?
She had been ten years old then. Because of that fear, Viola had begun to do things that would ensure their love and care wouldn’t wane. She became close to Evan, who doted on her so much because she did his homework in school and made him pass his exams. At school, he had always flunked every test receiving the lowest scores, but when they became friends, he started coming second to her.
Her relationship with Evan had grown into their teenage years. Even though her adoptive parents now had two children of their own flesh and blood, they still doted on Viola, but she often felt it wasn’t unconditional love, because they always asked about how her relationship with Evan was progressing.
Viola had never wanted to lose Evan’s affection because it would mean losing her parents’ affection along with it. Thus, she had begun to do many despicable things to make sure she was the only one he ever saw. She would bully and make any other she-wolf’s life miserable if Evan showed even a slight interest in her. She was possessive over him and made sure every female in the pack knew he belonged only to her.
Evan had been the reason she got everything, and she had done everything to keep it, even cheating during the Alpha test for him to become Alpha. She had used all her bank savings to bribe and manipulate her way for him to reach that position, but in the end, he left her.
How easily she was disposable to everyone, how easily they turned their backs on her, how easily she had also turned her back on Ivy?
More tears rolled down her eyes as she moaned,
“I am… sorry, Ivy… I am sorry for being a terrible twin sister p>
If she could turn back time, she would have done things differently. She would never have given her all to Evan. She would have lived her life differently. She wouldn’t have been so desperate to keep everyone who never wanted to stay in her life around her by doing things.
And if she ever got out of here, which she knew she never would, she would find Ivy and make up for the past and bring them all to their knees, even if it was the last thing she ever did. Evan. Leni. Her adoptive parents. Ember. Every single person who had brought her to this state of pain.
Not only them… Viola thought, a bitter taste lodging in her throat, but her fated mate as well, the one who had been heartless enough to turn his back on her when he was supposed to be the first and only person to care for her unconditionally, because he was fated to her by destiny itself.
Thinking about him made hot anger rise inside her chest, and she decided not to think of him anymore. He didn’t deserve to be the last person in her mind before she died. He wouldn’t be.
She was beginning to give in to the darkness pulling her under, into its subliminal peace, when she heard the cracking sound of a door opening, followed by male voices and heavy footsteps.
“Are you sure?” one of the voices asked.
“Hell yeah,” another answered.
“Miss Ember said to take her away from the estate, inject the killing wolfsbane into her veins, and bury her out there. The guest is already inside the house, and it’s dark outside. Hurry up p>
The last voice sounded right above her head, and its words made her tense despite her weakened state.
Though Viola had begged and prayed for death, she didn’t look forward to dying from the killing wolfsbane, the kind that would melt every single bone inside her body before finally killing her. It would be treacherous and devastatingly agonizing.
She was already in unbearable pain p>