Chapter 44: Chapter 44

~ NYSSA

I walked the whole way home, hoping that somehow I’d find the strength to fight the inevitable.

The Alpha tone had never been used on me before. I’d only seen it play out a handful of times before, and even then, I always thought the effects were dramatized.

I felt like a puppet on a string. I tried to will my body to move the other way, tried to force my hands to let go of the notepad that I was clinging onto tightly, but I couldn’t. My fingers wrapped around it so tightly that they burned.

Henry’s order rang in my head on repeat, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop until I’d completed it.

Such was the curse of the Alpha command.

I couldn’t even stop to say hi to the people who greeted me. My movements were robotic, like an invisible leash was tugging me.

My home was over an hour away from the pack house on foot, but my steps didn’t falter once. My legs kept a steady pace despite the cramping in my lower back from being seated for too long and the beads of sweat that gathered on my forehead.

Once I was safely in my house, I began writing. I couldn’t stop the words from flowing out of me.

My writing was shaky, the words blurred in some parts because of how hard I was trying to fight the command.

I didn’t owe Rowan any privacy, not after everything that happened, but this was about my integrity. I was a guest, not a spy, and the people in that palace were good to me, they didn’t deserve whatever bullshit that Henry was planning.

The tight feeling didn’t ease until I was done writing.

As soon as I penned down the last word, it felt like the noose around my neck snapped and for the first time since I returned, I could breathe properly.

I gasped, hand over my chest as I tried to drag air back into my lungs.

My eyes welled up with tears and I angrily wiped them away.

I’d never felt so violated before. It was like my own autonomy was ripped away from me. The Alpha tone was not a weapon to be used against the pack members, it was reserved for emergencies; at least, that’s what history taught us.

I stared down at the notepad in front of me detailing Rowan’s pack as well as the routes I remembered. I’d written down everything I’d learned in that palace and I knew instantly that Henry could never lay his hands on this.

Thankfully, he hadn’t instructed me to give him the notepad. He’d only asked me to write it. I ripped it up and tossed it in the trash.

“That’s merely a temporary solution,” my wolf told me. “He can always command you to tell him.”

“I know that,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. “We’ll think about that later.”

“When is later, Nyssa?” she asked in exasperation. “You’re here for the next two weeks-“

“Or longer,” I mumbled. “Rowan never said he wanted me back. He asked me to leave.”

“He’ll ask us back. The mating bond is-“

Her optimism grated on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.

She spoke with so much hope and naivety that it filled me with annoyance and disdain… or maybe it was embarrassment. They felt the same to me.

“I think you should forget about the mating bond for five fucking seconds. If it mattered so much to him then we wouldn’t be here. He doesn’t care, and it’s about time we stopped caring as well.”

She didn’t respond, she just slammed the wall between us, retreating into the recesses of my mind.

I sighed and made a mental note to apologize to her later, but first, I needed to get out of my travel clothes.

After so many days at the palace, my house seemed smaller.

I’d unintentionally gotten used to the luxury of the palace that returning to my own home with a simple twin sized bed and no maids felt like a downgrade.

I sank into the tub, closed my eyes and just let myself drift. It was meant to be for a few seconds, but the exhaustion from the past few days crept up on me slowly and the next thing I knew, I was waking up to the sound of my phone ringing.

I yelped, nearly swallowing a mouthful of my bathwater in the process.

My skin was pruned and my hands looked like they belonged to someone four times my age.

I cursed, dragging myself out of the tub as I blindly searched for my phone. I didn’t even glance at it before answering.

“Hello?”

“Took you long enough,” a familiar female voice drawled and I went deathly still.

Had I known it was Aria, I never would have picked up, not because I held anything against her, but because I was trying to keep the palace and all its problems behind me.

Going to the palace the first time was the biggest mistake of my life and I was trying to fix it.

“I don’t know what happened,” she began slowly. “But Rowan is an-”

“Ass?” I finished for her. “Yes, I know, but Aria, you can’t keep trying to defend him. You can’t say he’s an ass for everything. It gets old after a while.”

She sighed deeply. “I know that. I’m not here to defend him, I want you to make him work for it.”

“Then why did you call?”

“Because I’d like to believe that we were on track to be friends,” she said as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Because I wanted to see if you’d gotten back safely and I was worried. Also because I heard something and I wanted to ask a favor.”

“What did you hear?”

“I need you to know that I don’t blame you. You’re only looking out for your pack, and you probably want to get back at Rowan, but I need you to think about the innocent people.”

At that point, my heart was racing. “What did you hear, Aria?”

“If you haven’t given Henry the details about the palace yet, I’m here to ask that you don’t. You won’t just be punishing Rowan, you’d be punishing everyone else. For the sake of the innocent people, reconsider.”

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