Chapter 453
Four hundred and fifty five
Veronica POV-
The second time I got pregnant, I didn’t tell a single soul.
I tucked the test in the bathroom drawer and covered it with my things. A strong instinct kept my mouth shut. That instinct had started the night I saw Elizabeth and her women chanting in the courtyard.
Around that same time, I started noticing a specific symbol carved into the estate. It was an arrow cutting straight down through a circle. I saw it etched into Elizabeth’s ring. I spotted it stamped onto the service entrance. When I checked the bottom of the ointment jars, the exact same arrow was burned into the wax seal.
Zachary and I had been lying in bed. In the sleepy haze after intimacy, I decided to test the waters.
“The ointment your mother gave me,” I murmured, staring at the ceiling. “I think… I think it contributed to us losing the baby p>
Zachary lay silent for so long that I thought he had drifted off to sleep. Then he turned his head and looked down
at me.
“You’re grieving, Veronica, and you’re confused p>
He kissed my forehead and added, “Don’t say things like that to anyone else. People will think you’re losing your
mind p>
He meant it to sound gentle, but it felt like a door slamming shut in my face. He wasn’t going to investigate.
I stopped eating anything prepared by the estate’s main kitchen.
When the cooks looked at me sideways, I claimed I was on a diet and wanted to cook my own meals. I took over a corner of the pantry, where I washed and hand-picked my own vegetables. The head cook grumbled about it behind my back, but she let me have my space. I couldn’t trust what they put in the broths anymore.
Months passed, and my belly began to round out. One evening, Zachary noticed and pressed his hands against my stomach with a proud grin.
“Please don’t tell your mom yet,” I pleaded, catching my breath.
Zachary frowned and dropped his hands. “Why not p>
I shrugged. “I don’t want another accident p>
“Accidents happen, Veronica. Stop being so superstitious,” he said.
To my horror, a new jar appeared in my dressing room a week later. The cream inside was thick and green, and the arrow symbol was stamped right onto the lid. I wore gloves and scooped out a small amount of the cream to keep as evidence, hid the jar, and dumped the rest into the sink.
This pregnancy was brutal. I vomited every morning, my ankles swelled into thick pillars, and my lower back burned with constant pain. The doctor warned me that my blood pressure was dangerously high.
Elizabeth pounced on that warning like a wolf on a carcass. She insisted I wasn’t using her herbal remedies properly. One night, she actually let herself into my bedroom and tried to force me to let her rub the ointment on my skin. I refused, clutching my stomach until she retreated with a hateful smirk.
I begged Zachary to let me go home to Silverbrook so my mother could look after me. He brought it up at dinner.
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Elizabeth scoffed over her teacup. “She stays right here where she can be properly monitored. I won’t watch her
n-off to those backwoods doctors and lose another one p>
Zachary nodded along, repeating his mother’s words. “Here is safer, V p>
Safer. That was a sick joke.
Maids I had never seen before began appearing in my hallway at odd hours, watching me through doorways. Then the nightmares started. Night after night, I dreamed of a nursery. A thin figure stood over a cradle, wrapped in layer upon layer of gray veils. I could never see a face. I only saw long, pale hands reaching into the blankets and pulling up a crying infant, followed by the sickening sound of someone tearing into raw flesh.
I would jerk awake, gasping for air and drenched in cold sweat.
Zachary would groan and roll over to toss an arm across my waist to calm me down.
After six nights of hearing that sound in my sleep, I snapped.
“I am losing my mind here!” I shouted at Zachary on the seventh morning as I threw my clothes into a duffel bag.” I am going to Silverbrook p>
Zachary stared at me, baffled. “Silverbrook? To give birth p>
“Yes p>
“Little packs have their little customs, I suppose. We must make allowances for primitive habits,” Elizabeth said dryly.
“Let her go, Mom,” Zachary muttered, rubbing his temples. “It’s only a few months p>
I didn’t care what they said. I finished packing and drove straight to Silverbrook.
Being back in my bedroom with my mother feeding me homemade meals chased the nightmares away instantly. In the last week of March, after fourteen hours of labor, little Jake was born at four in the morning.
He was red and screaming his lungs out. When the nurse placed him onto my chest, he stopped crying instantly, his tiny mouth rooting against my nipple. I had never loved anything so fiercely in my life.
Zachary arrived that morning. He knelt on the rug and gently kissed my forehead before brushing his knuckles against the baby’s cheek.
“Hello there, little man,” Zachary whispered, his voice cracking. He looked up at me, blinking back tears, and mouthed “thank you.” I smiled back, believing our family was going to be okay.
Jake and I stayed at Silverbrook for a month before returning to Iron Wells.
Elizabeth didn’t visit us once during that first month back. When she finally saw Jake in the hallway, she didn’t ask to hold him. She stared down at him with visible disdain.
“He’s small,” she said coldly. “Overly small p>
That set the tone for everything that followed. As Jake grew past six months old, people in the pack began whispering about when Zachary’s Luna would take her official place by his side. But Elizabeth refused to step down. Whenever someone brought it up, she publicly dismissed me as spineless and unfit for the crown. She stopped acknowledging my greetings entirely and walked right past me as if I were empty air.
To protect my son, I refused to put him in the estate nursery. I kept his crib pulled tight against my own bed. That decision drove Elizabeth into open hostility.
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When I tried to talk to Zachary about it, he brushed me off and called me spoiled and paranoid. “My mother is just old-fashioned. Stop trying to pick fights p>
Curiosity or desperation pushed me past my fear a few weeks later.
Elizabeth had left the estate for a meeting. I used the quiet window to walk down the corridor toward the restricted wing. The oak door was perfectly oiled and swung open silently.
A narrow staircase spiraled downward. I descended four steps and found a large chamber illuminated by dozens of tallow candles. The air was filled with a golden-yellow glow.
Three figures stood in the center of the room. They wore identical gray veils that cascaded in layers from their heads to the stone floor. They swayed back and forth, humming a chant. A silver bowl sat on an altar right in front of them, surrounded by scattered bones.
My breath caught in my throat. I backed away slowly, desperate to escape. When my heel clipped the edge of the top step, I turned to run and bumped straight into a solid chest.
I gasped and looked up. Elizabeth stood right behind me, wearing a knowing smile.
Hours later, she sent a maid to summon me to her study for tea.
I stood by the door, refusing to sit down. Elizabeth took a sip from her cup, looking entirely too relaxed.
“Secrets are so tiring,” she said smoothly, setting her cup down. “The Meridian is a very old sect. We keep this world strong. Every harvest, every secure pack, and every Alpha on this continent has our order’s hand in it p>
She looked up at me. “I want you to join us, Veronica. You will have a real place here, and your son will be raised with power and protection. It is an honor most girls are never offered p>
My stomach churned. “I don’t need any extra protection p>
Elizabeth tilted her head, a cold challenge in her gaze.
“And who do you think you are to refuse me p>
“What will you do? Eat me like you ate my baby p>
She seemed baffled by my response, and I almost regretted speaking my thoughts out loud.
“Are you accusing me of eating my own grandchild p>
“I… I didn’t mean that,” I said, turning toward the door. “But your hot and cold attitude toward me is questionable.
11
“If you do not join us, Veronica, I will make your life a living hell,” Elizabeth called out behind me. “And nobody
in this world will ever believe a single word you say. I’ll crush you like a leaf and not stop until you’re unrecognizable. You have seen it, so you must pay for it, willingly or not. The ball is in your court p>
I ran out without answering. That night, I told Zachary everything.
He laughed in my face. “You accuse my mother of running a cult now? First you hallucinate monsters eating our baby, and now this p>
True to her word, Elizabeth began her retaliation immediately. She denied ever asking me to join her cult. I screamed at Zachary at the top of my lungs, but he defended his mother, who had made me look crazy.
Within a week, my skin broke out in massive boils that covered my arms and chest. The pain was so severe that I
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couldn’t hold Jake without crying, terrified I would pass the infection to him.
acked a bag and went home to my parents for the weekend. When I told my father what was happening, he rubbed his face in exhaustion.
“Every young bride goes through a rough patch with her mother-in-law,” he said, dismissing my fears. “Your mother faced the exact same thing with my mother p>
He forced me to return to Iron Wells.
When I got back, a strange woman was sitting in the parlor with Elizabeth. She looked to be in her early twenties and wore her dark-blonde hair in a bob.
Elizabeth leaned across the table and pressed her lips against the young woman’s mouth in a deep kiss, openly, in broad daylight.
I backed away and hurried up the stairs.
Over the next few weeks, that woman, Mina, became a permanent fixture in the house. She visited constantly, and Elizabeth treated her with a warmth she never showed her own son.
Then I found the feathers.
One afternoon, I pulled back my bedsheets and found hundreds of gray bird feathers scattered across the mattress, releasing a foul odor that made me vomit. I screamed and ran into the hallway, yelling that someone was trying to poison me.
The doctor was called, but instead of checking the bed, he exchanged a quiet look with Elizabeth.
They diagnosed me with postpartum psychosis,
Elizabeth played the grieving, patient mother-in-law to perfection. She sat in our living room with my parents, explaining that she had only ever tried to help me heal from my grief. My own father and mother sat there and apologized to her for my behavior.
Months blurred past. There were weeks of normalcy when Zachary acted like a loving husband again, joking about giving me another son to satisfy my father’s succession rules. But then the distance returned.
A year later, the truth finally dropped like an axe.
I caught Zachary coming out of the guest wing early in the morning, buttoning his shirt. Standing right behind him in a silk robe was Mina, his mother’s lover.
“Are you sleeping with her?” I demanded, staring straight at Zachary,
He didn’t even try to deny it.
“If you’re a coward, then just say our marriage is over!” I screamed.
After that, Mina walked the halls like she owned them. Even the house staff whispered about it. Elizabeth adored her and treated her like the daughter she never had.
When I tried to pack my bags to take Jake and leave for Silverbrook permanently, Zachary hit me.
“If you take my son out of this pack, I will charge you with child abduction,” he warned, his voice emotionless.” You will be arrested at the border p>
I called my parents, sobbing into the phone and begging them to help me. My father insisted that all marriages
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have ups and downs.
Don’t let some outsider steal your home. Stay and fight for your husband,” my mother said.
The final piece of the nightmare clicked into place one afternoon when Mina walked past me in the courtyard. As she raised her hand to tuck her blonde hair behind her ear, the sun light glinted off a familiar piece of jewelry on her pinky finger.
It was a thick black ring carved with an arrow cutting through a circle, the exact same ring Elizabeth wore.
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