Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna-Chapter 18: Plans_Part 1

He never came back.

Viola became aware of that gradually, the way she became aware of everything in those strange hollow days, in fragments, through the fog of pain and sedatives and a body that was healing at its own pace and nobody else’s.

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t open her eyes. Couldn’t speak. She could only lie there and register the world in pieces, careful hands cleaning her wounds without roughness, warm soup fed through a straw, quiet efficient voices doing their jobs around her without cruelty.

No cruelty. That alone felt strange enough to notice.

One time the doctor’s voice came close, calm and unhurried.

"The swelling in her eyes is from the blood gathered inside them. She may not be able to see clearly again without glasses or surgery." A pause. "Unfortunately we cannot operate. Werewolves have never needed specialized eye medicine, our healing manages such things naturally. There are simply no doctors trained for this in our world."

His voice softened, directed at her now.

"You will be fine. Once you recover from everything else, the Alpha will handle the rest. Or so I am told."

Viola lay still and said nothing because she could say nothing.

Her eyes were genuinely the least of her concerns. What kept her breathing shallow and her chest tight had everything to do with the word the doctor had just used so casually.

The Alpha.

Sebastian Kade, who had bent close and whispered that she didn’t have to be frightened anymore, and then stood in this very room and told someone she was being sent away the moment she recovered. That Alpha. The one who had stayed through her surgery, given her water, talked her down from the edge of panic, and then made his position perfectly clear in the same breath.

She had no wolf. No bond pulling her toward him or softening her view of him. She saw him with complete, unobstructed clarity, a powerful man who had acted on instinct and obligation, and who had already decided what happened to her once that obligation ran out.

Every time the thought surfaced the anxiety flooded in, filling her lungs until breathing felt like work. She pushed it down the same way she had always pushed things down, not by making it disappear but by filing it somewhere she could function around it.

She focused on surviving the next hour. Then the one after that.

---

The day her eyes finally opened, she was not ready for the white.

Pure, flat, absolute, filling her right eye completely no matter how many times she blinked. Her fingers seized the sheets and held on.

She waited.

Her left eye adjusted slowly, the white thinning into shapes, blurry and indistinct but present. The ceiling. A window with light coming through it. The vague outline of furniture at the edges of her limited vision.

Her right eye stayed white.

She released a slow breath.

She was not completely blind. That was more than she had allowed herself to hope for in the dark hours when she had lain here certain that her eyes would open to nothing at all. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

She became aware of other things gradually. The mattress beneath her, soft in a way that felt almost offensive after everything. Clean air carrying the sharp scent of medicine, but clean. Genuinely clean, carrying none of the smell of unwashed bodies and damp stone she had breathed for four years until she had stopped noticing it.

Four years without a proper bed. Without a pillow or clean sheets or air that smelled of anything other than suffering.

She let herself feel the full weight of that for exactly one moment.

Then she set it aside. Because it was not useful right now.

What was useful was thinking clearly. And her situation was this, the moment Sebastian Kade knew she was conscious and recovering, the clock started. She had no wolf, no leverage, no allies in this place. She had nothing except her own mind, which had always been her sharpest tool even when everything else had been taken from her.

She despised him. She wanted to be honest with herself about that, not the complicated despising of someone you have feelings for, but the clean and simple despising of someone who had looked at her and decided her life was not his problem. He had saved her and intended to discard her and she saw that for exactly what it was.

And yet.

Pride was a luxury she could no longer afford. She had watched it sustain people and then watched those same people break when pride turned out not to be enough to eat, not enough to sleep warm, not enough to protect you when someone more powerful decided you were disposable. She had been that person. She knew exactly what it cost.

What use was dignity when you had been stripped of it completely? What use was pride when a single meal felt like a miracle?

Only someone without sense would cling to pride in her position.

Viola had many flaws. Lack of sense had never been one of them.

A brief thought of Ivy moved through her, sharp and guilt-soaked as always. If Viola had been reduced to this, what had her twin endured alone all these years? The thought made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with her physical injuries.

She clenched her jaw and swallowed it down.

Ivy needed her to get up. To get strong. To get out.

And the only door available to her right now was a man she hated.

Alpha Sebastian Kade.

She turned the thought over slowly. He was powerful. He was her only access to power. He had already decided to send her away, which meant she needed to reach him before that decision became action. She had no bond to appeal to, no supernatural pull working in her favor, nothing except her words and whatever remained of her mind after everything it had survived.

It would have to be enough. It had always had to be enough.

With that resolve settling into her chest like something solid and permanent, Viola began to work. Carefully, painfully practicing sound with her ruined throat, just breath at first, then the faint shape of words. Moving her fingers against the sheets by degrees. Willing her legs to respond one small increment at a time.

She didn’t have the luxury of healing slowly.

She had a man to convince, a sister to find, and a list of people to make pay.

She had work to do.