Chapter 82
“Do you know what the worst part is?” I said.
Gabe lifted his head, took slow steps across the floor to get closer, and dragged the wooden chair behind him.
He turned the chair and took a seat facing me.
I don’t know if it was the fear of me snapping at him or his own insecurity about the situation we were in but he didn’t speak, didn’t answer my question, instead he waited for me to continue and just listened.
“When I laid in the bed after Darian left, the pain and the memories subsided for a moment. At that moment all I could think about was how in a few years it could be my baby sister lying in my position after mating with whoever marks her. They aren’t all as bad as mine, I know that, but most of them aren’t good either. I can’t let that happen to her, she can never experience the pain I went through tonight, any of it. My fear of her one day experiencing the Hunt and being marked by a possessive Alpha who treats her like she is nothing is enough to overcome any pain that Darian inflicted on me. It only lasted for a moment but that moment scared the living crap out of me,”
Gabe nodded and leaned his arms on his knees.
“Our mother hated the Hunt. As a king, our father couldn’t have more than one mate by law but that didn’t stop him from renting every Bell that ever entered MarryBell.”
I felt my eyes widen and my interest was peeked. This was the first I ever heard about their parents.
*Darian doesn’t realize it himself but he’s turning into the man he hated more than anything else in this world. More than humans even,” Gabe continued.
“Why did he hate your father?” I asked calmly even though I wanted to shout the question.
“Our mother was the nicest, sweetest woman you ever met. She would’ve loved you. She wore her emotions on her sleeve and her heart was nothing short of the materialization of love and kindness. She wanted only good for the people and she hated the slum, much like you did but our father was different. He thought rogues were the cockroaches of our kind-”
“Like you do,” I said somewhat cheekily and Gabe grinned.
“-Yes, like I do. A lot of the worst parts of myself are things I’ve inherited from him but I was a kid and I looked up to him. It always pissed me off that Darian refused to let me go away alone with our dad, he always had to be there and follow along on any trips and meetings. It took for me to sneak away with my father alone when Darian was busy with his classes and get my ass beat to a pole for refusing to fuck a Bell when I was eleven to understand why my brother never left us alone. Whenever Darian came back with bruises they said it was from training, and our father would say ‘ This is what it takes to be a man and twice of that to be a king’. It was really just him taking out his anger on his kid and justifying it as discipline,”
I swallowed the burning lump in my throat and forced out the words.
“The Bells?” That was all I could get out.
Gabe nodded slowly, reliving it in his mind and I couldn’t imagine what horrific memories were stored in there.
“Darian was nine or ten the first time our dad rented him a Bell, he said that it was as important to know how to fuck a whore as it was to sign a treaty. Everything in the name of being royalty. The one thing he never taught us was how to love a woman and it was because he didn’t know how. Whatever he had left when he didn’t almost kill Darian was taken out on our mom,” his voice dropped an octave when he mentioned her.
“Did he touch you again?” I whispered.
Gabe scoffed and sucked his teeth.
“Nah, I locked myself in my room right after it happened, and when I didn’t answer Darian’s calls he kicked the door down and busted in. He saw me curled up in the corner, beaten black and blue and I remember his eyes turning into a color that still hasn’t been invented, something darker than black, you know? Then he just left and stormed off down the hall and that was the first time he had it out with our dad, Darian was fifteen and gave it a good go- for that he was locked in the cellar, forced to go a week without food or water,”
“Oh my god,” I gasped.
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Chapter 82
I wanted to ask but didn’t know if it would be too much. He’d already shared more than I think anybody else knows if they weren’t there to witness it themselves.
Something in me stirred and a chill surged through my body and stretched my fingers.
I wasn’t heartless, I knew that everyone came from somewhere and monsters weren’t born but I guess this was my confirmation on that. It wasn’t adult Darian that I felt bad for, my heart ached for the child that was tortured, and seeing him in front of me- imagining how Darian’s baby self had to take all of that brought tears to my eyes.
“What happened to your mom?” I asked when I gathered the courage.
“Darian was seventeen, he had just stepped into his Lycan form for the first time and when he came home he heard her scream. She screamed, Darian pushed me behind him and then the screaming stopped. Everything stopped. At that moment the small pecks of happiness that we had in the palace, were sucked out and everything turned cold. I can’t explain it, we just knew that when her screams stopped that day, so did her breaths and her heartbeat. After having beaten and raped her he put her head through the wall,” Gabe’s voice broke but the anger was alive on his face.
I turned my head and looked at the wall, everything was stone, I don’t know about a Lycan but no werewolf could take that. We can’t heal from a broken neck or a crushed skull.
“Gabriel,”
He looked up and I saw something sinister in his eyes, the same one I’d seen in Darian’s.
“Darian went up, and his Lycan was stronger than our fathers, we learned that that night. Our dad felt a pain he didn’t know existed and he experienced it over and over until the fortieth day when Darian finally took his life,” he said with a shadowed smile when he remembered it.
“Why forty days?” My voice was even lower than before.
“That’s how old our mom was turning that year, forty. We already had her gift picked out,”
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The Alpha’s Hunt
