Page 10 of For Her, He Falls

He throws the Alpha's dead body off of him with a hiss and then leaps toward Vanessa.

My mother.

I'll find a way to believe it later. Right now, I need to find a way for us to get out of here in one piece.

Vannesa's strawberry blonde hair is tattered, and it clings to her to the filth on her face. Her eyes are closed, and she's not moving. But as my father desperately falls to his knees and reaches for her, relief washes over his features.

Still breathing.

'How touching,' Viktor coos, his lips curling back to reveal glinting fangs in a smile that's more of a snarl on his ferocious features.

I ignore him, reaching for my father's mind so Viktor won't hear. 'Get her out of here.'

There are too many of them, and while we're still under cover of clouds, the sun has gotten brighter by the hour. I don't know how long the battle has been going, but we can't count on the mist. Marco needs to get inside the keep, and he needs to take my mother with him.

Viktor's voice draws my attention back to him before my father can reply. "Such a moving family reunion," he taunts.

I look back at my uncle, anger unlike anything I've ever known boiling the blood in my veins. I force myself to swallow it down and look at him evenly.

'I won't leave you, child,' Marco says, his voice urgent, but I do not turn to face him when I reply.

'I'll be right behind you. Trust me; just go.'

I need him to leave first. He's injured, but he can use his shadows to carry Vanessa away with him to safety. I just have to distract Viktor long enough for my father to shift and get off this bridge.

'So, you know who I really am,' I tell Viktor, and it's not a question. He knows where I come from, there's no doubt of that left.

'Stupid girl. I've always known.'

Well... I didn't see that coming.

My breath catches in my throat as I look at my uncle in horror. How did he know? When did he find out exactly? What was his plan?

'I realized it the moment you were born. When I saw your eyes, I knew what you were. My sister had brought a half-breed mutt into the world. As you grew older, it only became more obvious. The ethereal pale skin, the unnatural quiet way in which you moved, the way you survived in hunger and darkness. Everything about you was wrong. I thought I'd be rid of you, but when I received reports that you were taken in by the vampires, I knew my time had come to set things right once and for all.'

His villainous monologue is interrupted by a ruffling sound behind me. Viktor's eyes shift away from me as shadows unfurl around my father like black ink seeping into the air around him. My mother hangs limply in his arms, and suddenly, they're no longer solid but rather a cloud of bats and blackness.

'No!' Viktor yells. He moves to pounce on them as my parents dematerialize into a haze of wings and blackness. The Night King will take Vanessa away from here just as he did with me that fateful night by the lake.

He can get her out. I can save them both.

I leap in between Viktor and my parents, and we topple over one another once again as I knock him off balance. He snarls and snaps at me in a rage, but it's too late.

They're already gone.

'You think you're so brave, but you're a fool! Such a noble sacrifice to save your mother, but in the end, it won't matter. You'll never get to meet her anyway.

I duck his bite, slipping between his legs to try and put some distance between his teeth and my neck.

'She's your sister!' I cry, my thoughts broken with sorrow. 'You were supposed to be family. How could you?'

'My sister died the moment she dirtied herself by sharing her bed with a filthy bloodsucker. She was broken. The only reason I didn't put her out of her misery is because losing her mind after fucking a vampire was punishment enough. I locked her away to live out the rest of her miserable days in secret. Letting the world think she died of natural causes was a kindness.'

So he doesn't know everything. He believes my mother actually lost her mind.

Vanessa's act of insanity may not have allowed her to escape the Banes as she'd hoped, but it kept her alive.

Still, sparing her had not been a mercy. If she was just crazy instead of in love, Viktor must have believed he could still control her. Besides, wolves look after their own. If the pack found out their Alpha had killed his own sister for loving a vampire, it could lead them to question his morality and authority. Locking her up while claiming she went insane and passed away had been the best way to preserve his reputation. The coward couldn't handle her blood on his hands, and so long as Vanessa acted crazy enough to not be a threat, she wasn't worth killing.

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