LYSANDER

The silence pressed against my ears like water.

I stood over Hazel’s body and felt nothing. That should have alarmed me. It should have triggered something human buried beneath the wolf, but there was only the mechanical understanding that she’d stopped breathing. That her chest no longer rose and fell. That the pillow in my hands carried the weight of what I’d done.

I dropped it.

The fabric landed on her face with a soft sound that strangely echoed too loud in the stillness. My father’s corpse lay sprawled several feet away, one arm stretched toward where Hazel had been when I first grabbed her. The hole in his chest gaped like an accusation. Blood had stopped flowing from it sometime during her final moments, cooling into something that looked more like paint than life.

Two bodies... Two lives... I had done this.

I’d killed two people.

The thought arrived distant and just as factual. It was as if I was reading about someone else’s crimes in a report. Still... My hands were steady. My breathing remained even. Everything inside me had gone quiet in a way that felt wrong.

I turned away from them both and walked toward the door. My legs moved without conscious direction, carrying me through motions I couldn’t quite feel. The hallway beyond stretched empty and dark which I guessed weas good for me. I needed time before anyone found this. Time to think. Time to—

"Lysander..."

Her voice froze me mid-step.

I knew that voice. Knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, even though I hadn’t heard it in years and the only moment it now resided in was in my dreams or delusions.

I turned in the direction of the sound.

My mother stood in the hallway behind me.

She strangely did not look like a ghost or some translucent specter from stories. She looked solid. Real. Exactly as I remembered her from the days before father’s mental games had made her sick and carved her down to bone and desperation. Her dark hair fell in waves past her shoulders. Her eyes held the same warmth that used to make everything feel safer when I was much younger.

She smiled at me.

The expression cracked something in my chest that I’d been holding together through sheer force of will. My knees buckled. I didn’t fall, but it was close. She moved forward and wrapped her arms around me before I could decide whether to run or stay.

Her embrace felt real.

Warm... Solid... Everything a hallucination shouldn’t be. I breathed in and caught the scent of lavender and woodsmoke that had clung to her always. My throat closed around words I couldn’t form.

"You did well," she whispered against my hair.

I shook my head. The movement felt sluggish. "I killed him. I killed her. I murdered—"

"You did what needed to be done."

"That doesn’t make it right." My voice came out hoarse. "There might have been... There were other ways. Better ways. I could have found something that didn’t require me to become this."

She pulled back enough to look at me. Her hands came up to cup my face with a gentleness I’d forgotten existed. "You saved your sisters. You saved your brothers. You saved her and you protected your pack from a man who would have destroyed everything even he himself built. You saved my Wenzel from himself."

"By destroying myself." The words tasted like ash. "I have two people’s blood on my hands now. That’s not leadership. Nothing I did was about justice. No matter how badly I want to frame it as that. This was just murder. It does help that it can be dressed up in noble intentions."

"Is it?" She tilted her head slightly. "Tell me something. If you hadn’t done this, what would have happened to her? Fia?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The images came anyway. My father dragging Fia before the pack in metaphorical chains. How he would have used her until she was dried up and had no light to give. She would have ended up like mother or worse. Because at least, he had loved mother.

"And Hazel?" My mother continued. "Would she have stopped after this failed? Would she have simply accepted defeat and moved on with her life?"

No. The answer settled into my bones with absolute certainty. Hazel would have schemed again. Plotted. Found new ways to climb over whoever stood between her and what she wanted. She’d proven that pattern again and again and I did not even know her for that long.

"You’re trying to make me feel better about murder." I said it flatly. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"I’m trying to help you understand that sometimes the choices we’re given aren’t between good and evil. Sometimes they’re between terrible and worse." Her thumb brushed across my cheekbone, wiping away moisture I hadn’t realized was there. "You chose terrible to prevent worse. That’s what leaders do."

"Leaders shouldn’t have to make these choices."

"But they do." She said it simply. "They do, and it breaks them a little each time. The question is what they build from the broken pieces."

I wanted to argue. Wanted to push back against the absolution she was offering like it was something I’d earned. But the weight of what I’d done pressed too heavy for words. My father was dead. Hazel was dead. I’d killed them both with my own hands, and no amount of justification would change that fundamental truth.

"I don’t know how to come back from this," I whispered.

"You don’t come back." Her voice held a sadness that made my chest ache. "You move forward. You take what you’ve done and you let it shape you into something better than what made you do it in the first place."

"How?"

"By being the leader this pack needs. By protecting the people who depend on you. By making sure the blood on your hands purchases something worth the cost." She paused. "Imagine the people you saved. Not just Fia. Every pack member who would have suffered under Wenzel’s continued rule. Every future victim of Hazel’s schemes. You stopped that. You paid a terrible price, but you stopped it."

The logic made sense in a twisted way. I could see the path she was laying out. I could understand how someone might take these deaths and forge them into motivation rather than letting them become anchors dragging me down into darkness.

But understanding wasn’t the same as accepting.

"And if that ius not enough, you can pay for your crimes," my mother said softly, "by being the best kind of leader this pack has ever known. Nobody is perfect or unblemished. But you can do more than your very best to be honest and fair. Someone who remembers what it costs to make hard choices and never makes them lightly."

I looked at her. Really looked. Tried to memorize every detail of her face because some part of me knew this moment was temporary. That whatever force had brought her here wouldn’t last. If I had not gone mad.

"I miss you," I said.

"I know." She smiled again, but it carried grief this time. "I miss you too. But you don’t need me anymore. You never really did."

"That’s not true."

"It is." She stepped back. Her hands fell away from my face. "You’re stronger than you think, Lysander. Strong enough to do what’s necessary. Strong enough to live with the consequences. Strong enough to build something good from terrible foundations."

The air around her started to shimmer. It started as a slight distortion that told me our time was ending.

"Mom—"

"Make me proud." Her voice came from farther away than she looked. "Not by being perfect. But... by being honest about your failures and working every day to be better despite them."

She then started to fade.

Not all at once. More like she was walking backward into fog that grew thicker with each step until I couldn’t see her anymore. The lavender scent lingered a moment longer, before it too, then vanished entirely.

I stood alone in the hallway.

The silence returned. Heavier now and more oppressive. I breathed in and out several times, waiting for something to shift inside me. Some grand revelation or sudden clarity about what came next.

Nothing came.

All that really stayed with me was the cold understanding that I had work to do. Evidence to destroy. A story to sell. A performance to give that would determine whether I could completely protect Fia and this pack from the consequences of tonight.

I moved.

My father’s study sat at the far end of the second floor. The door creaked when I opened it, a sound I’d heard thousands of times that now felt ominous. Everything about this room screamed Father. His scent clung to the furniture. His presence saturated every surface despite his body cooling in another room entirely.

I went to the fireplace first.

The wood had been laid already because my father liked things prepared. I found matches in the desk drawer and struck one. The sulfur smell cut through Father’s lingering scent for a moment. I touched the flame to kindling and watched it catch.

The fire grew slowly. Tentative at first, then building into something that pushed back the darkness with orange light that danced across walls lined with books I’d never see him read again.