Page 27 of Mated Exile

After days of wandering, he'd grown hungry and dehydrated. Melted snowfall wasn't doing much to quench his thirst. He tried more than once to turn around and go back, hoping by now the cave entrance would be open to him, but he'd lost his way in the darkness.

So he went deeper still, into the bowels of the mountains, where none dare wander.

It was in one of the deepest reaches of the mountains that he found a cave covered in beautiful paintings, with a fountain of crystal clear water, and a larder of food. He took what he dared and meant to go back, afraid of what he'd find, but a voice called to him in the darkness. The voice was sweet and young, singing an old bedtime tale, and he was drawn to it.

When he got to the source of the voice, he discovered that the cave he'd found was one of many, all connected and carved with a purpose. In the middle of a large, open area was a young woman who'd lived in the caves for years—seemingly all her life. She welcomed William, and gave him food and drink, then tended to the wounds he'd gotten scraping his way through the darkness and fighting off cave bats.

Once he'd rested, eaten, and had his fill to drink, he found it was hard to make himself leave the cave and go further still. There was light in the woman's home: candlelight, glowing lichen, and even a strange, soft sunlight, though there was no sky to be seen. Of course he'd realized quickly that she was a witch, but he didn't have the time or energy to care.

She was kind, too. He didn't speak of her, but he said that much. I know he spent weeks with her in the darkness. While we were searching desperately for him, he found something like respite.

And there was a connection between them, I think. Call it fate. All I know is that there was a hole in him where she should've been, and Laura—well, he was mated to her, but theirs was a bond of ceremony and tradition alone. The witch was different.

When the time came that he had to leave, he tried to convince her to come with him, but she refused. There was magic in the mountains, and she needed it to survive. He promised he would come back to her, but I think they both knew that he wouldn't. As soon as he left her caves, he found a route upwards, towards the sunlight—and when he looked back, he couldn't find the path to her home at all.

He returned to us, and explained that he'd followed the injured stag to a cave in, and survived off its meat. We believed him, because it was the easy story to tell. But things were restless between him and Laura afterwards. She was already unhappy because she hadn't been able to give him a child. I think she sensed that his heart wasn't with her, and resented him for it.

Spring came. Then summer. As the sun set on the world and the trees turned orange and crimson, William forgot the witch. Or at least, he tried to. I'll never really know.

Nine months after he'd left the mountains, there was a knock at his door. She was there, and she had a baby with her. But there was blood as well—so much blood. A river of it, almost like... well, like a curse, I suppose, or a forewarning.

He took the baby from her arms. The instant the woman saw that she was safe, she collapsed, and she didn't get back up again.

You can imagine how Laura felt about the discovery that her mate had sired a babe while he was gone from her. I don't think it went over well. All I know is that he convinced her, somehow, to keep the child.

Maybe it wasn't hard. She'd always wanted a child, and there you were. Besides, she'd been sick all that year, suffering and alone because of her last miscarriage. It was easy enough to convince the pack that she'd hidden her blessing because she was afraid it would turn out to be another curse. And you were so small—like a babe born before her time was up. They didn't look too hard, or if they did, they never told William.

He loved you so much. You have to know that, Delilah. Even though it wasn't enough in the end, it was the most love I've ever seen.

I think that's why it was hard for him to learn what would happen to you. What you would become.

* * *

I hold my breath, eyes on Niall's face, refusing to think too hard of the father he describes. Of the man—thecheater—who almost left his pack behind for a woman who wasn't his mate. It churns my stomach just to think of it.

In a shaking voice, I ask, "What was my father afraid I would become, Niall?"

"A wolf-witch hybrid," he says succinctly. "Which he didn't, for the record, think was a bad thing. At least at first. Your father had known about the curse for a while—the knowledge of it was passed from alpha to alpha, and he knew to be prepared for it. When you were born, fourteen years and change before the next cycle, it seemed lucky. He thought he'd pair you with an intended when you were fourteen, see you mated at eighteen, and there'd be no more curse to speak of. He was sure it was fate reaching out a hand to bring you to him."

A humorless laugh escapes me, and I shake my head, hands clenched beneath the table. "Fate or a wandering dick. Pick one."

Niall winces. He murmurs, "I won't pretend to explain away what your father did. But it's not as if he thought of it as cheating. That time in the mountain, I really think the magic took some of his senses away, and it was as if the world outside no longer existed. He always spoke of it as another time and another place."

Looking down and away, I take a deep breath, then glance up. There are too many people in this room hearing this story, I realize. But if I make them leave, that just means I'll have to tell them all over again. And there's something reassuring about knowing I don't have to go through this alone.

I clear my throat and lick my lips. "So why did my father put the chip in me, if he thought I was going to survive the curse?"

"He thought you wouldbreakit, not just survive," Niall corrects me. "That was until he discovered more about the origins of the curse. At the time, he'd been taught that it was the product of a vengeful witch—I suppose the retelling of it got diluted through time, or an alpha along the way messed up. It wasn't until he found that journal that he discovered a wolf-witch hybrid was responsible, and found out why she'd been exiled in the first place."

Reaching into his jacket, he pulls out a slim, leather-bound volume with cracks of age across its surface. My eyes land on it, and without asking, I know that it's the journal that the photocopied page I have came out of. One in many entries that must explain how the pack came to be in the sorry state it's currently in.

"There's more in here," Niall says, holding the journal in his hands, which hover just above the surface of the table. "But I'm not sure that you'll want to know all about it."

"It'smylife and my fate," I argue back at him. "Surely I should know."

Roarke speaks up, his clear voice cutting through the tension in the room. "If William didn't think Delilah would die because of the curse, then he had another reason for putting the chip in her neck, correct?"

"Exactly that."

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