Page 92 of Alpha Exile

And so Delphine lived with an overpowering fear of death so strong that one day, she woke up and decided she wasn't going to let herself die at all.

Pulling deep into her mind, I find myself amidst her fears and regrets. Here's the day she stole a grimoire about black magic from a witch who never should've had it in the first place. Next, the fateful night when she slipped into one of her mate's beds, put her hand on his chest, and stole the life force from his body. She slept peacefully afterwards, without dreams.

The next morning, there were no spirits. No sign of Roman and his jeers. No painful fingers dragging through her spirit, or visions of begin tortured for eternity the moment she died.

So she did it again, and again, until one day it stopped working, and she needed more. More than energy from the pack could demand—a trick she'd been using for years before it ran out. She searched for more spells, expecting to find a new way to drain her mates' strength, only to find something new.

A way to gain immortality, in exchange for the souls of those she was closest to in the world.

I feel my own heart curdle at the thought, but Delphine didn't share the same compunction. She knew now that her mates would die; she'd seen it when she pierced the veil. Their afterlives, unlike hers, were easy and free of misery. After all, Roman only wanted to torture her spirit for eternity. He had no feud with her other mates.

So she reasoned that she was exchanging their eternal peace for her own immortality, which seemed a fair enough price at the time.

I shudder as I'm jerked through her brief memories of killing them. They don't seem to be strong, emotion-filled memories. Maybe she buried them deep, or maybe she's lived so long that she barely remembers their faces. All I know is that I'm glad I don't have to watch them die, and imagine what it would be like to do the very same thing to my own mates, who are my world.

"A betrayal large enough to buy me time," Delphine says, staring at her own young, too-perfect face in the mirror, "and that is the most worthwhile thing of all."

But her betrayal was discovered, because before she killed her mates, one of them went to the pack alpha to tell him what she'd been doing. How she'd started to use mind control on the pack, slipping into their thoughts. First to make them treat her better—then to steal their vitality, so that she could use it to augment her own powers.

After her mates were killed, the pack rose up against her. I see this memory from a distance, watching Delphine race out of the territory, only to be caught, held down, and have her wolf form purged from her by magic.

She screamed the final words of a curse against the land as the witches tore her wolf from her. Once the spell was done, she was truly alone—without her wolf, without her pack, and without her mates. But at least she knew others would suffer as she would. The pack would know what it was like to have the mate bond torn from them, and with the death of the female wolves, she would drain their energy from the land and keep her own body going so that she would never have to die.

As the memory fades away, I hear her voice echo in the sky above me.

"You see, don't you? How I never had any other choice." I find myself standing in an empty part of her mind, endless white in every direction. "In a way, I'm a victim of my own circumstances."

"Far from it." Spinning around, I search for her, and find nothing but vast emptiness. "Even if your early actions were justified, nothing excuses the fact that you took my mother from me, then tried to take my mates. All because you wanted more power."

"What I wanted," she appears out of nowhere, stalking towards me, "was to finally have a life of my own. One where I lived beside the only people who ever really understood me—the Spirits of Power, Beauty, Wealth, Youth, and Sex.Theyunderstood what it was to be abandoned. They helped me when no one else would."

The emptiness disappears again, replaced by the twisting caverns I've come to know so well this past week. Only this time they're full and well lit, women in blue and white robes stalking past witch lights set into the recesses, voices floating in the air. I blink, and I'm standing in the cavern where I found Kerry, only this time, I'm inside the cage.

"I suppose this will do just as well as anything," muses a redheaded woman in a blue robe with white shoulders, holding up an iron rod with a sharp tip that glows with heat. "Perhaps you're right, Esmeralda. Burning her heart may do the trick."

Then she turns the iron rod towards me and shoves it into my chest.

I scream, my voice echoing in the cavern, the pain overwhelming. The iron rod sears my flesh and burns through my organs. Suddenly the air is full of the scent of crisp skin and smoking blood, and the pain is never-ending.

Until the woman pulls the rod from my chest, frowns at the wound that closes slowly, and mutters, "We'll just have to try everything, until something sticks."

Though I want to leave the memory, I find that I can't. This death flows into the next, then the next. They fill my stomach with iron balls and drown me in a lake. Cracking my ribs open, they remove my organs one by one, ending with the heart, as my brain short circuits from the lack of oxygen.

Acid. Boiling water. Knives, daggers, poison. Later, guns and bombs, uranium and anthrax. Everything that can kill is used on me, and each time somehow my body knits itself back up.

But not before I see a glimpse of the afterlife waiting for me in Roman's hate-filled eyes. Because as I've lived year after year, my life nothing but a cage and a series of tortured deaths, he's grown more and more mad with desire for revenge.

I don't even know if he's real anymore, or a figment of my imagination.

It seems like it will never end.

Until one day, the witches try something new.

They decide to drown me in a pool they keep secret deep inside the depths of the mountain. Bold and brash, this new generation of witches have decided that those who came before them were fools for keeping secrets from others. They've been cast out from the wolf pack's protection, seen their numbers dwindle, and wish to try something new.

So they take me to a place where witches like me were never allowed to wander, and they shove my head deep beneath enchanted waters.

I fight it, for a while. Then give in, and breathe the water into my lungs.

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