Chapter 258

Ava

I awoke to an eerie silence, my head throbbing and tender from where I had been struck. The once lively party had now come to a deathly silent standstill, and I found myself being roughly thrown at Olivia’s feet.

As my vision cleared, I saw Chris, Leonard, and Ophelia kneeling beside me, their wrists bound tightly. Chris looked up as I struggled to my knees, his eyes wild and his jaw tight. But he remained still, silent, too afraid to move for fear of more harm coming to his mate.

“Obey,” I heard him growl through our mate bond. “Patrick called for backup. Just do whatever she says until it comes.”

I swallowed hard around the lump in my throat, sending my understanding along our Mindlink. Chris was right; within minutes, backup would be here.

But would we have minutes before Olivia got what she wanted?

I looked up, and there she was: Olivia, still seated in her throne, her face twisted in a triumphant sneer. “Did you really think I would be so stupid?” she asked, her voice dripping with disdain.

As my consciousness fully returned, the horrifying truth dawned on me. Olivia and Elise had known about our plan all along. They had been playing us like fiddles, letting us think we had the upper hand.

Olivia leaned one elbow on the arm of her throne and crossed her legs. “Thank you for the party,” she crooned, checking her nails. “I quite like this throne, too. I think I’ll keep it.”

We remained silent. Waiting—waiting for backup. The moments ticked by like an eternity.

“Aren’t you going to ask how I knew?” Olivia barked, her eyes like daggers as they slashed back and forth between me and Chris. “How I knew about every step of your plan—how I knew exactly what you were doing, from beginning to end?”

“Ignore her,” Chris said through our Mindlink. “Don’t give her the satisfaction.”

When we didn’t respond, Olivia sighed and waved her hand, leaning back in her throne. “Come,” was all she said.

There was a soft murmuring in the crowd, pack members—all still wearing their masks—parting to allow one individual to step forward. A man in a fox max.

No… No, it couldn’t be.

Betrayal coursed through me like ice in my veins as the man lowered his mask, revealing an all-too familiar face.

Patrick grinned almost sheepishly as he strode up to where we knelt. “Surprise?” he asked.

The growl that ripped through me was guttural, instinctual. We had trusted Patrick, believed he was on our side. He had become our… friend.

But he had been Olivia’s rat all along, hadn’t he? Feeding her information while pretending to help us?

“You…” Chris growled, struggling against his bonds. “How could you?”

Patrick shrugged, an infuriatingly smug smile on his face. “It was just business, Chris. Nothing personal.”

“You slept in my home,” I hissed. “Dined with us. Drank with us… Bastard.”

No response.

Olivia, still seated, leaned forward. “Did you really think one of my own would turn against me so easily? You must be even more foolish than I thought.” She cocked her head toward the man with the scar on her cheek and said, “He’s no longer of use to us. Dispose of him.”

Patrick’s eyes widened in shock, and he took a stumbling step backwards, only to stagger right into the sturdy frame of another one of Olivia’s goons. The henchman grabbed Patrick’s arms, holding him fast while he struggled.

“What?” Patrick barked, his voice quavering. “But... but you promised me money, status! Olivia!”

“Oh, you poor, naive little man,” Olivia cooed mockingly. She snapped her fingers, and before anyone could react, the man with the scar stepped forward, cocking a gun in his hand.

The sound of the gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space. Patrick’s body crumpled to the floor beside me, his eyes wide and lifeless. Screams erupted from the crowd, and I felt bile rise in my throat, threatening to spill over.

Killed him. She had killed him. She had brought a human-made gun to our world, and Patrick had never called for backup, and she was going to kill us all, and—

“Calm,” Chris sent through our mate bond. “We can get out of this. Breathe, Ava. Breathe.”

I sucked in a shuddering breath, a pitiful attempt to quell my fear as I looked away from Patrick. I could feel his lifeless eyes boring into me. Goddess, he had fallen right beside me, and they just left him there—

“It’s funny, you know. For all your talk of integrating with the human world,” Olivia said, her voice calm amidst the chaos, “you seem to have forgotten about the beauty of human warfare. It’s so simple. So much cleaner than our barbaric ways.”

I felt like I was about to retch. This wasn’t Chris’s sister anymore—this was a monster wearing her skin. The real Olivia had been dead for a long, long time.

“Olivia,” Chris said, shockingly calm, “this isn’t you. Stop this madness.”

But Olivia’s eyes were cold and empty. “If only you had taken my offer to go to the human world,” she said bitterly. “You could all be living in luxury right now. But no, you insisted on staying in Moonstone, clinging to leadership of a pack you’ve been destroying from the beginning.”

“You’re the one who wrought the blight upon us, Olivia,” Chris spat, jutting his chin toward the artifact at her throat, “when you stole the moonstone.”

“You mean this moonstone?” Elise’s voice cut in. She pulled something from her robe. It was nearly identical to the one around Olivia’s neck, but…

Dammit. We had been fooled by a fake again. But how? Did Elise have the real one this entire time?

“The blight was never a punishment from the Moon Goddess,” Elise explained, unlooping the moonstone—the real one, its ethereal glow refracting the flickering candlelight as she handed it to Olivia. “It was a mutated species of fungus, brought to Moonstone the very night that Chris landed his helicopter in the alfalfa field. Do you remember that?”

I swallowed hard, remembering that night clear as day. Chris’s helicopter had crushed some of the alfalfa; I had scolded him for it.

“An invasive species that he brought himself,” Olivia finished as she tossed the fake moonstone aside and clasped the real one around her neck. The fake went skittering across the floor, through Patrick’s growing puddle of blood, and landed inches from where Chris knelt—soaked red and cracked down the middle. “All thanks to my brother’s carelessness.”

Elise’s eyes locked onto mine then, two poisonous arrows through my whirling haze. “Olivia was never so careless. She was also not the one who started a war with Full Moon on a whim.”

Finally, slowly, Olivia rose. She looked so tall from here, standing on top of her dais. Her golden gown glittered in the light of the braziers, making her look as if she were made of flame herself.

“Elise is right,” she said, picking up her skirt and slowly stepping down from the dais, one step at a time. “All this time, you were fighting a blight here in Moonstone, and all the while, you were the blight.”

She paused less than a foot from me, her skirt carefully avoiding the blood on the floor.

Then, slowly, she bent until her face was inches from mine. She smelled sickly sweet, like rotten roses and ash.

“But not anymore,” she hissed. “I will be the one to eradicate the blight—starting with you.”

Before I could process what was happening, Olivia grabbed me, dragging me toward the nearby brazier. The scene was sickeningly familiar—just like that day when she had tried to burn off my tattoo. But this time, I knew her intentions were far more sinister.

I struggled against her grip, grunting and shrieking for her to stop, but she was surprisingly strong. As my face was shoved closer to the flames, I could hear the screams of my friends, the horrified gasps of the pack. Chris’s voice cut through it all, desperate and pleading.

“Olivia, stop! Please! She’s pregnant!”

Olivia didn’t falter. If anything, Chris’s words just fueled her. The heat of the fire seared my skin, my hair, my dress, and I closed my eyes, a sob escaping my throat. I was going to die here, and my child—our child—would never even have a chance at life.

But then, just as I was about to give up hope, a strange sense of calm washed over me. I squeezed my eyes shut as the flames began to lick at my hair, and in my mind's eye, I felt her. No—I saw her.

The Moon Goddess.

She was more beautiful than I could have imagined. Not only beautiful, but kind, and just, and powerful but in the gentlest of ways. She was the warm breeze that blew through Moonstone on a hot summer day. She was the glowing lichen on the cave walls. She was the little frog that flitted beneath the surface of the water.

She was the moondeer who had shed her tears onto my mate’s wound, healing him when no one else had answered my cries for help.

The Moon Goddess had never wrought this blight upon us. I had cursed her, hated her, thinking that she had caused it out of her own righteous anger. But she had only ever been there, watching me, guiding me. She was a part of me. Of all of us.

“Ava,” she said, and her voice was like a thousand different voices all at once—my mother, my father, Degas, the wailing woman, and so many more who I had heard and not heard yet— “you are the True Luna. My strength is yours, if you need it. You cannot let this tyrant take over Moonstone.”

With those words, I felt a surge of power unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It coursed through my veins, set my skin alight. With a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I broke free from Olivia’s grasp, knocking over the brazier in the process.

Olivia fell to the ground, her eyes wide with shock as flames engulfed the floor around my feet and began to lick at the hem of her golden dress.

But the fire didn’t touch me. Instead, I felt a pale glow emanating from within, spreading outward until my entire body was illuminated with a bioluminescent light.

Just like Moonstone’s forests. Just like Leonard had said.

I stood over Olivia, feeling the power of the Moon Goddess flowing through me. My claws extended, and for a moment, I was overcome with the urge to end this—to rip out Olivia’s throat and put an end to her tyranny once and for all.

I could do it. I knew I could; I had the strength now. I was invincible, as powerful as the Moon Goddess.

But as I looked down at her, I saw flashes of the girl she used to be. My best friend, the one who used to laugh and lay in the sun and tell me her secrets...

Even now, after everything she had done, I couldn’t bring myself to harm her.

My claws retracted, and I took a step back. It was over. She had lost, and she knew it.

But before I could say anything more, smoke began to fill the air, and I was wrenched back to reality.

The fire from the overturned brazier had spread, flames licking up the walls and across the floor. Panic had erupted as pack members rushed for the exits, masks discarded and children screaming.

I felt hands on my arms, and Chris’s voice cut through the chaos.

“Ava, we need to go!”