Chapter 199: You Are The Wolfless Girl
Agnes brought food twenty minutes later. And clothes.....soft leggings and a sweater that fit perfectly.
She ate. Got dressed. Let the Marcus take her to St. Mercy’s.
She sat with her mother for an hour....holding that cold hand, watching the machines breathe for her.
"I don’t know how long you plan on sleeping for, Mama," she said quietly. "But i really hope you’d wake up, Papa is gone and you are all i have left, but you are here lying down while i keep talking to you everyday without even knowing if you can hear me. And now...." She looked at her mother’s still face. "Now I that i have decided to give the brothers a chance to prove to me that they are not the monsters i always thought them to be...." She pressed her mother’s hand between both of hers. "You are not here to let me know if i am making the right choice"
Her mother didn’t answer. Just lay there, pale and still.
An hour later, Marcus knocked on the door.
Lilith answered and said "Come in"
Marcus entered and said "Ms. Thorne. Alpha Sebastian requests your immediate return."
She tilted her head and stared at him and said "But i just left."
"Yes, Ms. Thorne. He just called me now and he said i should bring you back to the Estate as soon as possible"
She turned to look at her mother who was lying motionless on the bed, she took a deep breath and then stood up.
"Fine, lets go" She said and then walked out of the hospital room.
Whe they got outside, Marcus opened the door and she got in without arguing.
****
The car pulled through the estate gates and she still didn’t know why Sebastian had called her back.
There had been no explanation from the Marcus. Just "Alpha Sebastian requests your immediate return"
The estate was different when she got back.
Louder. There was noise coming from the east side of the grounds....something rhythmic and heavy that she couldn’t guess from the entrance hall. Agnes was passing through with a stack of folded linen and paused when she saw her.
"Training grounds," Agnes said, before Lilith could ask. She nodded toward the east corridor. "Through the glass doors at the end. You can watch from the upper terrace."
Lilith looked at her.
"He asked me to tell you," Agnes said and then she smiled at her and walked into the house.
***
She smelled it before she saw it.
Sweat and earth and something electric....the particular charge in the air that she was starting to associate with wolves in their element. She pushed open the glass doors at the end of the east corridor and stepped out onto the stone terrace and stopped.
The training grounds were enormous.
A wide flat expanse of packed earth below the terrace level, ringed by torches even in the afternoon light. And on it....wolves. Dozens of them. Some in human form, some partially shifted, moving through formations that looked almost military in their precision.
And at the center of it....the brothers.
Nicholas first. She found him immediately....that stillness even in motion, precise and controlled, moving through a sparring sequence with Callum that looked less like practice and more like a demonstration. Every strike was calculated. Every counter exact. He wasn’t fighting like a man working up a sweat. He was fighting like a man who had already decided the outcome and was simply executing it.
Lucian was on the far side....and Lucian fighting was nothing like Nicholas fighting. Where Nicholas was precision, Lucian was pure feral momentum. He moved like something barely contained, like the human form was a courtesy he was extending rather than a constraint he was working within. Three pack members were sparring against him simultaneously. They were losing badly and grinning about it.
And Sebastian.
Sebastian was in the middle of the ground with his shirt off and his hands wrapped and he was.....
She gripped the terrace railing.
He was devastating...
She’d seen him without his shirt on countless occasions. She’d felt exactly what his body was capable of. But this was different....this was him in his element, moving through the pack with that contained explosive power, and every wolf on that ground tracked him with a particular awareness. Not fear exactly. Something more like....orientation. The way compass needles all point the same direction.
He hadn’t seen her yet.
She wasn’t sure she wanted him to. She was happy to stand here and watch him move and not have to do anything about the heat that was crawling up the back of her neck.
"You’re in my spot."
She turned.
A woman had come through the glass doors behind her. Dark hair, amber eyes, the kind of beauty that came with absolute awareness of itself. She was looking at Lilith with an expression that was not quite hostile but was not making any effort to be anything else either.
"Sorry," Lilith said. "I didn’t realise this was...."
"It’s not assigned." The woman stepped up to the railing beside her. "I just always stand here." She looked down at the training grounds. "You’re the wolfless girl they brought back from Shadowmare."
"Lilith," she said.
"I know who you are." The woman’s amber eyes stayed on the grounds below. "The whole pack knows who you are."
Lilith looked back at Sebastian. His wrapped hands. The way sweat ran down his spine.
"And?" she said.
"And nothing." The woman shrugged. "Some of them think it’s strange. A wolfless woman living in the estate. In their chambers." A pause that had weight in it. "Some of them think it’s more than strange."
"What do you think."
The woman finally looked at her. Those amber eyes moving over her face with a directness that wasn’t quite challenge and wasn’t quite curiosity.
"I think," she said carefully, "that the Alphas have never brought anyone here that had stayed for more than three days before. Not once." Another pause. "Which means you’re either very lucky or very something else."
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