Chapter 332: Secrets coming to light
"We can talk about this after we finish eating, Viola." Sebastian said smoothly, gesturing toward the meals on the table that had visibly drained the color from her face.
Every single dish on the table contained fish, and at the center of it all sat a large grilled fish on a wide tray that made her stomach turn just looking at it.
"I... I don’t eat fish. Can I change my order?" Viola asked, looking up at Sebastian, feeling more hurt than she could put into words. Was he punishing her? What had she done to make him treat her this way so suddenly?
"No. I made these special arrangements for both of us. Doctor Gilbert suggested you eat more of it, it benefits us werewolves, remember? I can feed it to you if—"
"No. You don’t have to." She said tightly, balling her fists under the table.
Sebastian’s gaze remained hard, Viola studied his familiar silver eyes where she usually saw warmth and tenderness sitting there unconditionally for her, yet right now these eyes only held coldness, as though there were a firm wall between her and the Sebastian who never failed to make her feel safe, never failed to make her feel adored.
The aroma of fish delicacies wafted through the air, and every breath she took was filled with it and it further settled the fact that Sebastian was making her do this, and he was looking at her with the strict eyes of the supreme Alpha.
"It won’t taste as good cold. Eat." He urged her, going so far as to serve her plate himself.
Viola stared at him. "I am not eating. I think I would rather go home since—"
"Home?" Sebastian said with a humorless laugh, all traces of it leaving his face the very next second, his eyes going cold as frost. "You mean go back to the sea? After you destroy the werewolf world?" He accused, his voice dropping to something quietly devastating.
Viola felt her heart plummet. Cold sweat broke out along her spine. "What do you mean?"
"What are you, Viola?" He said coldly, holding her gaze without flinching. "If you truly have nothing to do with the sea creatures, then eat the fish. You can’t, can you?" He paused. "I thought as much. You are an imposter, and I ended up mated to you." The disappointment in his eyes were as clear as day, it clenched around her own heart like a fist, yet something about that look in his eyes didn’t feel like him. He had never once looked at her with a gaze like this one.
"Sebastian, I have nothing to do with the sea creatures, what has gotten into you?" She asked, the reality of what this was all about settling over her like ice water. He had figured it out. Deny it as she might, Viola knew in the deepest part of herself that her origin was tied to the very creatures his kind despised most, but she never expected such reaction from him of all people.
"You are still lying, Viola." He said quietly, and she could hear that it cost him something to say it, that he hated causing her pain even as he was doing it.
"I am not." She whispered agonizingly.
"I spoke to Miss Lara yesterday. She killed herself afterward. She wouldn’t reveal your background or what happened to your sister to me, so I sought out Julia instead."
Tears had already started falling before he finished the sentence, but it was Miss Lara’s death that hit her first. He’d spoken to her already? And that too, behind her back? She couldn’t even digest the elder she-wolf’s death before she realized another thing he had said.
"Julia told you I am a sea creature?"
Sebastian looked at the tears on her face and felt them like blades to the chest. "She didn’t tell me. She summoned the creature who could. Julia told me Miss Lara had made a pact with a creature of the sea and knew how to call it. She filled a tub in the bathroom and called it forth. It came in a water form." He paused.
"It said, ’Your Luna is not who you think she is. She is one of us and she was sent to destroy you all. She is your greatest enemy, the one behind every misfortune you are bound to face. Her only mission is to prevent you from breaking your curse." He recited the words the water creature said as if he still couldn’t believe it himself, yet something else seemed to solidfy it.
"You have been hiding a secret, haven’t you?"
She’d never thought that keeping the recent encounters she had with water would come back to bite her this soon. She didn’t tell him about her encounters with water, and everything in his expression right now, the anger and mild look of betrayal told her that he knew, and a lot of his anger came from the fact that him knowing didn’t come from her.
She could only nod her head.
He stared into her eyes as he asked, "Did you break Zoe’s kitchen glass with your ability, yes or no?"
When she didn’t reply fast enough, he gritted out, "Yes or no, Viola?"
Viola felt her throat close and her entire world shudder, as though the ground beneath everything she had built here was cracking open all at once.
"It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t know how I did it. It was—"
"Did you drain Ember with your ability, yes or no?" he asked again, his eyes turning colder than frost.
"I didn’t mean to do it—"
"But you did it and didn’t tell me about it because you were one of them. You came into my life to stop me from finding the prophesied mate who will break my bloodline curse," he accused emotionlessly.
"That is not true. I am not one of them. Yes, I have experienced strange things connected to water since that day in Nightshade, I admit that, and afterward too, but I swear that is all. I don’t know who I am or what my origin is." Her voice came out quiet and fractured with pain, more tears of hurt coming down her cheeks at the accusations he was throwing at her like that.
"I kept the reason I don’t eat fish from you because I spent my whole life watching people get killed and punished for things like this. I was afraid. I didn’t want to be one of the sea creatures, I wanted to be here, in the world I grew up in, in your life." She choked on the words and pressed her hand over her mouth as though she could hold the cry inside. "I have nothing to do with what you were told. But if you believe it, I cannot change your mind."
Alongside the choking hurt in her chest, a deep wave of disappointment washed through her, that not even their mate bond had been enough to make him choose her over what a creature had whispered into a bathtub. But she couldn’t fully blame him. Those creatures were responsible for the curse that had haunted his bloodline for generations, and that alone was enough to cloud everything he felt, everything he knew.
He had been disgusted last night. She understood it now, why he hadn’t kissed her, why he hadn’t touched her, why he had held her but kept some invisible wall between them. Because he had believed she was one of the things he despised most.
She hadn’t told him the truth because she knew this would be the outcome of knowing.
With her vision blurred and burning with tears, Viola looked down at the fish on the table, reached out, tore a piece from it, and began to raise it toward her mouth.
