Chapter 162: The Mask

Author’s POV~

The Moonveil wasn’t a place anyone stumbled upon by accident. Hidden beneath an old building on the outskirts of the city, it served as neutral ground for the most powerful werewolf packs and witch covens.

From the outside, it looked like an ordinary private establishment, with tinted glass windows, security cameras, and black SUVs parked along the road. But beneath the modern exterior lay something far older.

The meeting chamber belonged to the coven that had guarded the treaty for centuries.

It was one of the few places where werewolf royalty and the witch covens could meet without risking a war.

And tonight, five people stood around a long table of cold, polished stone.

Dowager Luna Gwen stood at the head of the table, her back straight and her hands folded in front of her. Her face was calm, but there was no warmth in her eyes.

Raven leaned against a pillar with his arms crossed, a dark look on his face. Keiran stood beside him, silent, his jaw tight. Zyran had just finished his call with Blake, and his phone was still gripped in his hand when Gwen turned her head to look at him.

"Tell the healer to stay with Chloe. He must not leave her," she ordered. "Every few hours, he must inject her with the highest dose he has, no matter what he says about the risk. I don’t want her waking up properly. If she opens her eyes, she should be too drugged to understand where she is, what day it is, or who is standing in front of her, before the healer injects her with the salve again."

Zyran gave a single, firm nod. "Blake actually just called me a moment ago, telling me the same thing, so the healer is already preparing the dosage now, I have told him already."

Gwen turned to the woman standing in the room beside the carved wall. Lilith, the witch from earlier, stepped forward slowly.

"I spoke with the coven," Lilith began, her voice low and rough. She paused, glancing at each of them.

"We can’t say for certain that Adeline’s real wolf is a Lycan. We have our suspicions, and there are a few things we’ve managed to confirm."

"But there’s one thing I’m certain of. The omega inside Adeline isn’t her real wolf."

Raven pushed away from the pillar, his eyes fixed on Lilith.

"What the hell does that mean?" he growled. "She has an omega wolf, we all smelled it. Are you actually sitting there telling us that the thing howling inside her chest this entire time is nothing but a lie?"

"Not exactly, my lord," Lilith replied carefully. "The wolf is there, but it’s only a mask."

She slowly walked along the table, running her fingers over the cold stone.

"This is a very ancient, dark curse. It was specifically designed to completely bury a wolf’s true identity, to lock away its scent so deeply that no one in the pack could ever catch it, and to trap the true beast so it can never shift or even wake up. But to ensure no one ever gets suspicious, the curse does something even more cruel."

"It creates a second wolf. A fake one. This false spirit steps entirely into the real wolf’s place. It acts like a wolf, it feels like a wolf, it carries the exact scent of an omega. Absolutely no one can tell the difference, not even the poor girl who has to carry it inside her body every single day."

"Then what about the twins?" Keiran asked, his eyes narrowing as the pieces started to fit together. "Lucas and Logan. When Adeline discovered that she was fated to both of them... she said she felt it... that whole mate bond... she was rejected by both the twins at the same time."

"It was real," Lilith finished softly. "Every single piece of that mate bond, the pull, the ache, the pain of rejection, it was entirely real. But it never belonged to Adeline’s real wolf. It belonged to the fake wolf. The mask the curse wove around her soul."

"Those twin wolves felt a bond with a ghost, with a fabricated scent, not with the real girl trapped underneath and that is how exactly this curse works. The wolf feels so real that no one doubts it ever. It has scent, and as well as fated mate.."

Dowager Luna Gwen finally broke the crushing quiet, her voice sounding strange, tight, and brittle, as if she were forcing each word past her lips against her own will.

"So she carries the scent of a helpless omega, and even that fake wolf was given a fated mate bond," Gwen murmured, her eyes narrowing into dark slits as her mind raced through the heavy implications.

"This magic is far more complex and terrifying than I ever imagined, Lilith. Whoever cast this spell wasn’t just trying to hide a little girl or keep a secret from the world. They were meticulously building an entire fake life around her, step by step, lie by lie, just to make everyone believe she was someone she was never meant to be."

Raven let out a harsh, bitter laugh that echoed sharply off the high stone walls.

"An entire fake life?" Raven growled, his long fingers curling into tight, white-knuckled fists at his sides.

"Are you sitting there telling me that everything she went through, every single cruel rejection, every ounce of humiliation, every night she cried believing she was a broken, useless omega, was built on a lie designed by some sick bastard?"

Zyran stepped forward, his eyes burning with quiet fury. "And who in your coven actually possesses the power to cast something like this? You said yourself this kind of magic is rare."

Lilith’s face drained of what little color it had left. "It is far more than rare, my Lord. It is practically forgotten. Most witches can’t even read the ancient runes used in the spell, let alone cast it. In fact, only one witch in our entire history ever mastered it. But..."