Chapter 226 - 0226

Kaelen POV

It took every ounce of strength I had left just to force those words out of my mouth.

I, the great Alpha King, a man feared across continents and a warrior who had been built for war, had once been nothing more than a powerless child who was subjected to something far worse than death.

Tears burned hot against my cheeks, and I hated every fucking one of them. I didn’t even understand why I was crying.

Maybe it was because it had been ten long, agonizing years since I had allowed myself to look directly at those memories buried in the darkest corners of my mind.

Or maybe it was because of how terrifyingly vulnerable it felt to finally lay the most shattered part of my past bare before someone else, trusting another person with the ugliest truth about me after the devastating betrayal that had followed the last time I had made the mistake of doing so.

My pulse hammered against my ears as I finally forced myself to look at her.

I watched her face carefully, waiting for it, that inevitable shift in her eyes.

The coldness.

The disgust.

The moment she would finally see me differently.

But then her breath caught sharply. Her green-flecked eyes widened, and the color slowly drained from her face as the full weight of what I had just confessed finally sank in.

My mind immediately flashed back to Seraphina.

To the day I had made the mistake of trusting her with the same dark secret.

She hadn’t reacted like Lorelei was reacting now. Seraphina had simply stared at me with that emotionless expression, her eyes vacant, almost bored as I told her about the trauma I had spent years trying to bury.

And later, she had taken that same secret and used it against me, turning the most painful part of my past into nothing more than another weapon to bind me to her.

But Lorelei...

Lorelei didn’t look bored.

She didn’t look disgusted.

She looked completely and utterly horrified, but not because of me.

She was horrified by what had been done to me.

Before I could even figure out what to make of that, she reached for my hands again. Her small, warm fingers carefully wrapped around my bruised knuckles, and she gave them a gentle squeeze.

"I’m so, so sorry that happened to you," she whispered, her voice cracking around my name, the sound so fragile that something inside my chest tightened painfully.

While I sat there frozen, watching as fresh tears spilled over her lashes and rolled down her pale cheeks.

She was crying.

For me.

She wasn’t pulling away. She wasn’t looking at me like I was damaged goods or some monster she needed to be afraid of. She wasn’t looking at me with disgust.

Instead, she swallowed hard through her own tears, her thumb moving slowly over the back of my hand in soft, soothing circles as she held my gaze.

"How old were you?" she asked softly.

I opened my mouth, but the answer caught in my throat. The word felt impossibly heavy, trapped behind the thick wall of shame I had carried for years. I had to force it past my lips, and when I finally managed to speak, my voice was barely more than a whisper.

"Ten."

Hearing that, Lorelei’s breath hitched sharply, a ragged gasp escaping her as fresh tears spilled down her cheeks.

Every instinct inside me screamed to reach for her, to wipe away those tears and somehow comfort her, but I couldn’t move. Instead, a cold, suffocating panic suddenly tightened around my chest.

My gaze darted around the room.

The dark curtains.

The empty doorway.

My mind was no longer here.

She’s listening.

The irrational thought clawed through my mind, feeling terrifyingly real.

She knows I’m talking about her. She’s going to appear out of nowhere and drag me right back into that room.

My chest heaved as my breathing became heavier, shallower, and faster. The phantom memory seemed to tighten around my throat all over again, dragging me backward into a place I had spent years trying to escape.

I don’t know how, but Lorelei noticed immediately.

Without saying anything, she moved quickly, reaching for the heavy velvet blanket on the bed. She pulled it completely free before draping it around both of our shoulders, covering us until we were almost completely enclosed beneath it.

"When I got scared as a child, I used to hide under the sheets," she whispered, her voice soft and warm against the cold air. "I was told it acted like an impenetrable barrier, that it could stop the monsters from ever reaching you. And... it always worked."

A bitter, rational part of me wanted to tell her that I wasn’t a child anymore. That I was the Alpha King. That a piece of fabric couldn’t protect me from ghosts that had followed me for most of my life.

But the panic was too overwhelming.

So instead, I found myself pulling my legs fully onto the mattress and curling inward beneath the blanket, allowing the darkness to surround us completely. I cast one last anxious glance at the shadowy outline of the room through the small opening in the fabric before letting my gaze settle on Lorelei beside me.

Her presence was solid.

Real.

She was here.

Only then did I finally release a shaky breath, the tension in my chest easing by the smallest fraction. The air beneath our makeshift sanctuary was warm, carrying the faint scent of rain and sweet vanilla.

"My mother had already abandoned me," I began, the words finally spilling out after being buried inside me for far too long. "I’m sure you already know how much my father, the former Alpha King, hated me," I added quietly, my voice barely carrying through the warm darkness beneath the blanket.

Lorelei gave a small nod, her eyes never leaving mine. She was listening so intently that it almost made this harder.

"My stepmother, the former Queen Luna, hated me just as much," I continued, forcing myself to keep going even as something inside my chest tightened. "And after she died from the grief of being betrayed by her mate, my father couldn’t stand having me around. I was a constant reminder of everything he had lost, so he sent me to the farthest outskirts of the territory to live in a small, isolated cottage with a woman who was probably in her late twenties at the time."

I paused, my jaw tightening until my teeth began to ache as those memories came rushing back. I swallowed hard, fighting against the nausea rising in my throat.

"At first, she seemed kind. She would bathe me, feed me, tuck me into bed at night. I was young enough, and desperate enough, to mistake that attention for affection." A bitter laugh slipped from my lips, hollow and humorless. "I was so fucking grateful to finally have someone who actually seemed to want me around."

Lorelei’s fingers tightened around mine, and the small gesture made my chest ache. It was almost as if she could sense the darkness waiting beneath every word I had just spoken.

"But then..." I stopped, my voice catching as I stared into the darkness for a moment before forcing myself to look at her again. "It started."