The Alpha King Marked Me. I Still Haven't Told Him I'm A Girl-Chapter 162: XIV

Valka

The infirmary had a smell about it. It wasn’t just the smell of the sick. It was worse. Worse than rot.

The physician, a young woman with a too-bright smile and perky voice joins us at the entrance, ushering us rubbery gloves and masks. "She’s been isolated. You cannot touch her. You may speak to her through the door. Though, she has asked that only the King be granted leave to speak to her."

Evadne steps forward. "And you told her I was here with her brother?"

The woman’s smile becomes something pained. "Yes. However, she insisted that it had to be him and no one else."

"That’s nonsense," Eva blusters, her blue eyes drifting to Lucien’s, placating. My heart clenches tight at the hurt in her eyes and when Sebastian moves forward to place an arm on her shoulder, she shrugs him away abruptly.

Lucien sighs and narrows his gaze at the physician. "We’re family," he says sweetly, and I suspect that even if he weren’t currently compelling her, she’d still have done his bidding. "We’ll be in and out, quickly. I assume you have more work on your hands to attend to."

The woman nods, blinks, hands him the keys and leaves without another word.

The further we walk, the more that smell worsens, and we halt at the entrance of the isolation chamber as Lucien unlocks the door, revealing a barred gate.

"This is a cell, not an isolated room," I murmur. "It’s not like she’s going to escape or something. Is all of this even necessary?"

A soft laugh comes from within, followed by a loud, wet cough. "I should’ve known better than to expect you would respect my privacy."

The chamber is dark. There is a lone figure sitting in the centre of the bed, her head tipped back as she glances out the small window, her legs crossed underneath her.

"Astrea," Sebastian calls, his voice heavy with loathing. Self-loathing. "I... Are you alright?"

She doesn’t respond. "Eva?"

Evadne bristles beside me, her fingers darting to mine and clutching tightly. She’s trembling. Her fingers are cold and clammy.

"Have you been well?" Astrea adds after a moment. "I considered responding to your letters, but as you must have realized by now, I didn’t get the chance to read most of them. Though, I assume they were as entertaining as the first."

Evadne’s lips tremble, but she says nothing.

"We’ve had a long ride," Lucien says and I flinch at the harshness in his tone. "We didn’t come all this way for pleasantries."

Astrea sighs. Coughs raucously. "There were rumors," she starts, voice scratchy and rough. "Missing children. All wolves. Some Lycans. And soon, all the children began to go missing. This was months before they landed on our shores at Averis. My uncle’s village, Erendor, was the closest to shore, with more casualties. We saw them first when they arrived for negotiations with the town headsman. They were strange. Their machines were stranger. They were frail, easily killable, but they had these weapons that killed faster than swords."

Another terrible cough. "Negotiations must have gone terribly, because the attack started shortly after. The humans, they killed, as well as the men who fought back. My uncle was the headsman. He died first. Then, theu burned the fields and houses. Left nothing behind for those who might have survived to feed on. They had detectors for us, wolves and Lycans. It was this terrible screeching of metal that made our ears bleed. It was worse than wolfsbane, ash or silver. It operated on a frequency that a regular human could not hear. Us, it left us incapitated for hours."

There is a long pause. "It was worse for Kara. I should’ve known it, then."

Kara. Her daughter.

Her body moves slowly as she shakes her head, coming back to topic. "They took us. Put us in cages. No matter the age, we were dosed regularly."

"Dosed," Lucien repeats slowly, shoulders tight. It’s like hearing his ordeal all over again. I run a hand down his back in a soothing manner and very slowly, he relaxes.

"Addictive narcotics. Opioids," she says. "Kara, they didn’t have to. She was always quiet when I told her to be. In small doses, it made everyone happy. But increased doses turned us all to raving mad addicts in a matter of weeks, seeking the next fix. We were like dogs being taught to behave or we wouldn’t get them."

Why, I wonder, did they always have to find the most creative of ways to debase us, make us suffer? We thought it ended with Rafael, but he had been right. Evil was always sprouting from somewhere. He wouldn’t be the last.

"They took us through every attack, making new steel cages along the way that crackled with electricity if you touched the bars.

"Eventually, they made home in the capital. The lords governing the city realized there was no use fighting them. They came with ships upon ships, armadas of weapons, shuttles that could fly and shoot from an ungodly distance. We were easy prey and he handed them the keys to the city, so long as they didn’t slaughter us all. They reached some form of truce, allowing these invaders to occupy whichever homes they wanted, take wives and whores, willingly or forcefully, divulge in whatever pleasures they wished. They controlled everything. So long as they were happy, the people were alive and fed.

"But all wolves, Lycans and half-breeds were to be rounded up and brought to them. For us, there was no such illusion. They had laboratories built in the matter of months." Astrea raises her hand. "They knew us by numbers, not names. They called us poor souls who had been possessed by evil. And they were hellbent on ’curing’ us. But to do so, they had to take us apart to understand what made us so different."

A chill runs down my spine.

"They had equipments. They had solutions. Figures and letters that were in other languages. They took Kara in a different lab. They injected us will all sorts of things. Things I’d come to learn were viruses. Bacteria. Tumors. To test the limits of our divinity. To see what our blood could heal and what it couldn’t.

"Eventually, they found mine when I stopped healing, eventually. There was only so much illnesses a body could take. But they didn’t find any with Kara. During one of their experiments, she... drank one of them to death. Turned him into a husk. I don’t..." Her voice tracks off. "I failed to protect her. They took her from me. They called her the devil. Hers never stopped. There were no limits and they grew obsessed with finding what made her stand out."

Her voice sounds wet. "They wanted to know who I’d been with. Who her father was. Her family line. Everything. They promised they would let her go if I gave that information."

Fear hammers in my chest as she continues. " Once, when Rafael had been drunk, he told me the King of Ebonheart was his grandfather. I didn’t believe it until Kara killed that man. Until I saw her teeth. Until I saw that even in a room full of grown Lycan men, she was simply stronger. I already failed to keep her safe. Kara was a sweet girl. She loved sweet things and flowers. She was a constant ray of sunshine. She was nothing like her father. I thought her the universe’s gift to me and I would’ve done anything to keep it that way. But I failed to protect her and my daughter became a lab-rat and a murderer, doing the bidding of the doctors.

"Kill him, they’d tell her, and she would. Without flinching. I thought... I thought I might save her before she was truly lost." She swallows. "So, I gave away your name and location."

Lucien exhales slowly. Down the bond, there’s not even a tinge of anger. Just pity.

She turns to us, then. Her sockets her hollow. Her skin, once soft, smooth and luscious, is sagging. Her hair is thinned out so terribly, there are only two to three strands on her peeling scalp. She’s missing a lot of teeth. She is bones and ribs, and when she coughs, it is mucor mixed with blood.

And it doesn’t stop for a very long time.

I understand now, why she didn’t want us to see her. She’s drying from inside out.

Eventually, Astrea sits on the bed. "They’re coming. It’s inevitable. You may fight, win the first war, but it’ll only be because they’re too busy scoping out Ebonheart. They will win the second war. It is important that you flee."

Her eyes drag slowly along each of us. "We’ve all been broken, altered by war in so many different ways. The least we could’ve hoped was that we shielded our children from it." She lifts her gaze to Lucien’s. "I want her to have a normal childhood. I cannot give her that. But you can. You can make her forget any of it ever happened."

"No," Lucien says. "Strong as I may be, there are certain procedures you do not perform on children, for good reason. Extricating memory is complicated. One word wrong in the command and it may very well break her mind, or take more than just a few memories from her. She may not recall you, at all."

Astrea laughs. "I’d hoped not. I do not want her to remember me this way--"

A child’s shriek echoes from above and Lucien and I jerk on impulse. No one cries as loudly as Drustan. I’m already running out of the infirmary when I run into Melene, whose eyes are wide with fear.

She’s rambling again. "They were fighting over nothing. Drustan pulled her ear and asked why they weren’t pointed. She slapped him. He pulled out her hair in clumps. And goddess, she bit him."