Chapter 231: Close to Death
Enzo
When I saw my father’s gaunt, pale body and his glassy eyes, I reacted purely out of instinct. My eyes went wide and I stumbled backwards, clamping my hand over my mouth in order to keep myself from yelling out.
We had gotten here too late. Whatever Selena was doing to my father had already run its course, and he was going to die soon. I knew for certain from the way that Nina froze while she was looking at him, then slowly turned to look at me with an apologetic look in her eyes. If anyone was going to be certain about these sorts of things, it would be Nina. She knew what happened to the body shortly before death.
“Enzo, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “We’re too late.”
I couldn’t speak. The knot in my throat was too thick and heavy for me to get any words out. All I could do was stare, wide-eyed and in shock.
Selena got what she wanted. My father was going to die, right in front of me, and there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it. All I could do was stand there and watch in abject horror as Selena’s poison worked its way through my father’s veins, causing him to have a slow, painful death.
At first, I didn’t understand why she wanted to do this to me. My father had never done anything to her. He was always supportive of our union, and only helped me that one time when he opened a portal for me. He should have been considered innocent in her eyes; I was the one who pushed him to help me. She should have punished me instead.
But now, as I saw my father laying there limply while his chest struggled just to rise and fall, I realized that she had punished me after all.
By refusing to be her mate, Selena had killed my only living parent. She used him to punish me, and therefore his death was all my fault. Even years from
now, assuming Selena didn’t kill us all, I would never let go of the guilt associated with this. And in the end, she would still win. Even if she died, she would still win because I would still live with that guilt.
Selena was far more evil than I had ever even thought possible.
That must have been part of the reason why she wanted to take me back to Mountainview. If she really didn’t want me to remember Nina or my friends, she would never have taken me back to Mountainview. She easily could have kept me hostage in the mansion, and eventually I would have succumbed completely to her spells and would
have never remembered my past. But she decided to take me back to Mountainview as a test, and when I failed that test, she made my father wither away.
“Enzo.”
Nina’s voice was stern. I hadn’t realized it, but she had walked over to me and was now standing in front of me, her hands firmly wrapped around my wrists. When I finally broke out of my daze and looked down at her, she was staring up at me with fire in her eyes. “Lori texted me. Selena is coming. We have to go now.”
Nina’s words broke me out of my haze and I nodded. I walked over to my father’s bed and scooped him up; even if he was going to die soon, I didn’t want to leave him here. As I picked him up, his eyelids fluttered slightly and he looked up at me through his milky eyes. He was so light now that he was practically a skeleton.
“Enzo…?” he muttered.
“It’s okay, dad,” I whispered, even though I knew that it was a blatant lie. ” I’m taking you home.” Another lie.
My father nodded weakly. I turned to see Nina and Luke standing in the doorway, waiting for me, and I followed them. We quickly and silently made our way through the corridors to leave the way we came, and thankfully no guards spotted us even in our haste. I held my father close to my chest, not wanting to shake him around too much, but I knew that there was no way he would be comfortable anyway.
Selena had made sure to poison him with something that would cause him the most pain. I was able to use a bit of my healing abilities to ease his pain, but it would never be enough and I knew that. We made our way back over to the narrow steps that we walked up before and ran down them, taking a little less care this time to be quiet. Luke led the way through the maze-like hallways with Nina between us. I made sure to keep her in my line of sight the entire time as we ran, because there was something else that scared the hell out of me tonight.
I knew that Nina planned on fighting Selena. And part of me realized, from the look in her eyes, that she knew that she wouldn’t survive it.
Nina would kill Selena. I was sure of it. But there was also a good chance that Nina would die, too. I didn’t want that to happen; screw the Alpha King. Of course I didn’t want to come back here now that we had my father out, and I just wanted to run away with Nina and our friends and get away from all of this forever. But at the same time, I knew that it wouldn’t happen like that.
There was a legend about two twin sisters. One made of light, and the other made of darkness. One could not live without the other, one could also not live with the other. They would be fated to die together. The death of the dark sister would bring about the end of the apocalypse, but a little bit of innocence the light sister – would die, too.
I had always thought that it was just a myth, but the story of Selena and Nina. was too similar. It was bound to happen, and I think that both of us knew that it would happen tonight.
But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t determined to change the course of fate. I had a plan of my own for when that time came, and I wasn’t going to tell Nina about it.
I just hoped that it would work. Finally, we managed to make our way out of the winding corridors and into the servants’ quarters. We then sprinted through the hallway there, and finally burst out into the cool night. None of us cared at this point if anyone saw or heard us; within just a few moments, Nina would open a portal and we would get out of here.
We sprinted across the road to meet our friends, who were supposed to be waiting for us just inside the edge of the forest. But as we ran, I sensed already that something was off.
And when we reached our meeting point, all of us stopped in our tracks when we saw that our friends were not waiting for us… Not like they were supposed to be. Instead, all three of them laid motionless on the ground.
Above their bodies stood two cloaked forms Selena and the witch.
