Chapter 187: It Wasn’t Him
Aurora’s POV
When the heavy, dark curtain finally pulled away from my mind, the first thing I felt was the soft mattress of a bed underneath my skin. My body felt like it had been crushed under a mountain. For a few seconds, everything was completely blank. My mind was empty. My eyes blinked open, squinting against a soft, warm light that made my head throb with a sharp pain.
Slowly, the sounds of the room came rushing back into my ears. There was the quiet rustle of cloth, the soft clink of small glass bottles, and the low, tense murmur of voices nearby.
I rolled onto my back, my breath catching in my throat as the memory of what had happened hit me like a physical blow. The gun. The silver mask breaking on the floor. Oliver’s beautiful sea-blue eyes filled with pain as the dark, gray veins of the poison crawled up his neck.
Oliver.
Fear rushed deep into my chest. My hand flew down to my stomach quickly, my fingers pressing flat against my skin. A wave of pure terror washed over me as I searched for any sign of the tiny life growing inside me. My mind cried out to the little one, begging for a sign, a flutter, anything to tell me that my fall and my pain hadn’t taken my baby away too.
"Lie still," a gentle, quiet voice said from beside me.
I forced my eyes to focus. A female healer was sitting right next to my bed, her hands glowing with a soft, pale green light. She looked tired, her face covered in sweat, but her eyes were full of a calm, quiet pity. Right behind her, standing like a tall, dark shadow against the wall, was Oscar.
He hadn’t washed. His shirt was still soaked through with his brother’s blood, the dark stains turned into a rusty brown color now. His face was completely pale, and his jaw was set so tightly that the muscles looked like stone. He was looking down at me, his eyes completely empty of the kindness he usually showed.
"Oliver..." I gasped out, my voice sounding raw and broken, like I had been swallowing sand. I tried to push myself up from the pillows, my hands sliding against the bedsheets. "Where is he? Oscar, please, where is he? Is he alive?"
Oscar didn’t move. He didn’t reach down to help me sit up. He just looked at me, his deep voice cutting through the quiet room like a cold wind. "Why did you do it, Aurora? What did you do to my brother?"
A violent sob ripped through my chest, and I fell back against the pillows, my whole body shaking. The tears came fast and hot, burning my cheeks as they washed through the dirt and dried blood on my skin.
"I didn’t know!" I screamed, the words choking me as I held my stomach. "I didn’t know Oliver was Raymond! I swear to God, Oscar, I didn’t know! Raymond killed my family... he took everything from me! I only wanted to avenge my parents’ death. I wanted to end the monster who ruined my life and protect my baby from him. I never knew Raymond and Oliver were the exact same person! I never knew!"
The words poured out of me in a desperate, wild rush. I wanted to tear my own skin off. The realization that I had spent months planning the death of a monster, only to put three silver bullets into the chest of the only man who had ever truly loved and protected me, was breaking my mind into tiny, unfixable pieces.
Oscar didn’t yell. He didn’t growl. Instead, he just took a slow, heavy step forward, his eyes locking onto mine with a strange, deep confusion.
"How do you know it was Raymond who killed your parents?" Oscar asked, his voice dropping into a low, gentle tone that somehow felt scarier than a roar. "What proof did you have, Aurora?"
"The tattoo!" I sobbed, lifting my hands to cover my face, my fingers catching on my messy hair. "The scorpion tattoo on his wrist! The day my parents were murdered, I saw the killer. I saw the face hidden beneath a hood, and I saw that exact same tattoo on his hand as he held the weapon. When I saw Raymond at the club, he had the same tattoo of the masked killer who murdered my parents. It was him. I knew it was him!"
Oscar closed his eyes. He let out a long, heavy sigh that sounded like all the air was leaving his body, and he slowly shook his head from side to side. The look on his face changed from anger to a deep, terrible pity.
"That was not Oliver," Oscar said softly, his voice echoing in the quiet room.
I froze. My hands fell away from my face, and I stared up at him from the bed through my blurred, tear-filled vision. My heart stopped beating for a second. "What... what do you mean? It was his tattoo. I saw it on Raymond’s wrist."
"That is the mark of our mother’s family, Aurora," Oscar explained, his voice heavy with a truth that felt like a death sentence. "But Oliver didn’t kill your parents. That was Oliver’s cousin, Alex. Oliver and Alex have the exact same tattoo because they are from the same family line. You shot the wrong man."
"No..." The word came out as a quiet, breathless whimper. I shook my head wildly, pulling the blankets tightly to my chest on the bed. "No, no, no! That’s a lie! It can’t be true! He was Raymond!"
"Stop it! Please, stop it!" I shrieked, pressing my hands tightly against my ears, but Oscar’s words still cut through, destroying every excuse I had built up in my head.
Oliver was innocent.
The man I had shot three times with poison and silver hadn’t touched my family. He hadn’t murdered my mother or my father.
"Calm down, Aurora," the healer said quickly, her hands pressing against my shoulders to keep me steady on the bed as my breathing became fast and shallow. She looked up at Oscar with wide, worried eyes. "Alpha Oscar, please. You must stop. The healers said her pup is already very weak from the shock and the stress. If her heart goes any faster, we might lose the baby. Be careful!"
"I’m dead..." I whispered, the tears dry on my face now as a cold, empty numbness started to take over my body. I looked down at my hands, seeing Oliver’s blood trapped beneath my fingernails. "I’m already dead. I killed him. I killed an innocent man. I killed my Oliver."
Oscar looked down at me, his shoulders slumping as the anger left him, leaving behind nothing but a tired, broken brother. He rubbed his face with his hands, sighing deeply.
"Why didn’t you just tell Oliver about Raymond?" Oscar asked, his voice full of an endless, painful regret. "Why didn’t you just talk to him, Aurora? If you had told him what you saw, if you had told him about the scorpion tattoo and your parents, he would have understood. He would have told you the truth. Things never would have ended up this way. You didn’t trust him."
"I was scared," I choked out, a fresh wave of sadness breaking through the numbness. "I was so scared... I thought I was saving everyone. I thought I was being strong."
"You were blind," Oscar said quietly.
I didn’t argue with him. He was right. I had been so blinded by my want for revenge, so trapped in my own pain, that I hadn’t looked closely at the man behind the mask. I hadn’t noticed the way Raymond’s touch always felt familiar, or the way his scent always calmed my inner mind even when I tried to fight it. I had ignored every sign because it was easier to hate a monster than to face the truth.
"Where is he?" I asked, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, ignoring the healer who tried to hold me down. I stood on shaky, weak legs, my eyes locking onto Oscar’s. "Where is Oliver? Take me to him. I have to see him, Oscar. Please, let me see him."
Oscar looked at the door, then back at me. "He fell into a coma right after the doctors finished the surgery, Aurora. The poison has spread deep into his blood. The doctors and the healers did as much as they could, but they said it is a fifty-fifty chance. He might wake up tomorrow, or his heart might just stop beating in the middle of the night. My mother is in his room right now, looking after him, trying to use her own blood to keep his wolf alive."
"I have to see him," I repeated, my voice growing stronger with a desperate, wild need. I didn’t care if the guards killed me. I didn’t care if the pack tore me to pieces. I needed to be near him. I needed to tell him that I was sorry, that I loved him, that our baby needed him to stay alive. "I don’t care what you do to me after, Oscar. Just let me see him once."
Before Oscar could answer, the heavy wooden door of the room was pushed open with a violent force, slamming hard against the wall.
The air in the room instantly became twice as heavy, a thick, crushing pressure washing over us that made my knees want to buckle all over again. A tall, older man walked into the room, his presence so strong and powerful that even the air seemed to quiet down around him.
It was Sir Callum. Oliver’s father.
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