ALTHEA'S POV
(Dreaming)
The dark wasn't peaceful. It was a theater, and I was the unwilling audience to a play starring a younger girl who wore my face.
Smack!
The sound was crisp, shocking, echoing in a sun-drenched music room that smelled of old wood, lemon polish, and something bitter like resentment made into a cologne. My hands, small and pale, were flat on the polished surface of a grand piano. A red weal was rising across the knuckles of my right hand.
"Again," a man's voice said. It wasn't loud. It was calm, precise, and it froze the blood in my veins. "From the top of the arpeggio. And this time, think. Your fingers are not sausages. They are instruments. Your mother's fingers were like hummingbirds. Yours are like dead sparrows."
I looked up, tears blurring my vision. The man was tall, elegant in a way that felt sharp and cold. He had silver-streaked dark hair and eyes the color of a winter lake. He held a thin, wooden ruler. My mentor. My tormentor.
"I… I'm trying," whispered the girl who was me.
And there, in the plush armchair by the window, sat a boy. A few years older than me, maybe sixteen to my thirteen. He wasn't practicing. He wasn't reading. He was just watching. His legs were crossed, one ankle resting on his knee, and there was an expression on his face that even then I didn't have a name for. It wasn't sympathy. It wasn't boredom. It was a quiet, focused interest. His lips were curved in the faintest, most unsettling hint of a smile. He met my tear-filled gaze and the smile didn't fade; if anything, it deepened slightly, as if sharing a secret joke only he understood. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod, as if encouraging me to take my medicine.
He likes this, the thought sliced through my childish confusion. He likes watching.
"Trying is for the mediocre. Your mother did. She didn't try." Elion tapped the sheet music with his ruler. "Your breathing is wrong. You're reaching for the high C from your throat. From here." He poked my sternum, not hard, but the invasion made me flinch. "It should come from here." His touch moved lower, to my diaphragm, and lingered a fraction too long. "You carry her voice in your belly, but you're too weak to let it out. Disappointing."
Smack! The ruler came down again, this time on my left hand as I fumbled a transition. The pain was bright, electric. A sharp cry escaped me.
"Stop, it hurts, Sir Elion," I whimpered.
So that's the name of the person, I thought to myself, the adult consciousness trapped in the memory.
The mentor leaned down. He had no scent, a beta, but I could smell his rage anyway—a dry, papery scent of old anger. His lips were near my ear. "Suffering is power, dear. How can you succeed if you don't suffer first? All great art is born of pain. Your mother understood that. She suffered beautifully." He straightened, his gaze distant, almost hungry. "You see, your mother was amazing. A true prodigy. I just can't believe she settled for a Vale. A merchant. If I hadn't been a beta… if things were different… you could have been my daughter instead."
From the corner of my eye, I saw Elias shift in his chair. He was leaning forward now, elbows on his knees, chin resting on his interlaced fingers. His grin was no longer faint. It was a clear, bright thing of amusement. He was enjoying the performance. His father's cruelty was a show put on for his benefit, and my pain was the main act.
The scene dissolved, swirled, and reformed.
I was fifteen, standing in a grand, echoing hallway after a particularly brutal session. My hands were throbbing, hidden in the folds of my skirt. Elion had dismissed me with a flick of his wrist. As I turned to leave, Elias appeared from a shadowed alcove, blocking my path.
"Rough day, songbird?" he asked, his voice a smooth, mocking melody. He reached out and, before I could pull back, took my wounded hand in his. His grip was firm, unyielding. He turned it over, examining the fresh red marks with a clinical detachment that was worse than any taunt. "He's hard on you because he sees her potential in you. You should be grateful." His thumb pressed deliberately on a bruised knuckle. I gasped, tears springing back to my eyes. "The pain is a gift, Althea. It means you're special. Don't waste it on self-pity." He released my hand with a slight shove, his grin back in place. "See you at dinner. Try not to embarrass us with your sniffles."
He walked away, whistling a tune I'd been struggling to master.
The dream fast-forwarded, the colors darker, the air thicker with a different kind of tension. I was seventeen, at a Chase family gala. I was to perform. A test, as always. My hands, though healed from visible marks, ached with phantom pains. In a quiet, tapestry-lined corridor, Elias cornered me.
"You look nervous," he purred, stepping too close. The scent of his alpha musk amber and something metallic was overwhelming. "Don't be. Just remember what he's taught you. Pain into power." He lifted a hand and traced a line down my cheek with his knuckle. It wasn't a caress. It was a claim check. "After you perform, we'll talk. Father thinks it's time we discussed the future. Our future. The joining of our families, properly this time. Wouldn't that make sense? You belong here, with us. Not with those... Hartwells."
I recoiled, my back hitting the cold wall. "I... I haven't agreed to anything."
His smile turned chilly. "You will. You know, in a way, he's preparing you for me too. Teaching you discipline. Teaching you how to bear things gracefully." He leaned in, his voice dropping. "I won't be as patient as he is, Althea. But I'll appreciate the results more."
He left me there, trembling, the echo of his threat mixing with the distant sound of the chamber orchestra.
The final memory-dream was the worst. I was in my early twenties, sitting in Elion's opulent, stuffy study. I was a ghost of myself, hollowed out by grief. Elion stood by the fireplace, his back to me, his silhouette sharp against the flames.
"Are you really going to marry into the family that was the reason your family perished?" His voice was like silk wrapped around a dagger. "I expected many things from you, Althea, but not this. The Hartwells? Are you truly so naive to believe they had no hand in the 'accident' that conveniently cleared the Vale heirs and left their business in Hartwell custodianship?"
The adult me in the dream felt a cold dread, the same confusion I felt now. "The investigation… it was ruled an accident. A terrible tragedy."
"Tragedies are often manufactured by those who stand to gain." He turned, and his winter-lake eyes were full of a possessive, wounded fury. "Why not marry into my family instead, Althea? Elias adores you. He always has. We could protect you. We could honor your mother's legacy properly, not sell it to hoteliers and corporate sharks."
The door to the study opened silently. Elias stood there, leaning against the frame, arms crossed. He wasn't grinning now. His expression was one of intense, smug satisfaction. He was listening to his father dismantle my world, and he was approving. His gaze locked with mine, and he gave a single, slow nod, as if to say, 'You see? He's telling you the truth. Come to where you're wanted. Where you're understood.'
I saw myself wringing my hands, a nervous habit born from years of having them struck. "The Hartwells… the inheritance, the corporate bylaws… they're the ones handling the Vale Trust. Since I've been gone from the business, I just can't—"
"You can!" Elion snapped, the calm shattering. He took a step forward, and I instinctively shrunk back. "You are choosing gilded cages over a home that understands your soul! You are spitting on your mother's memory for the sake of convenience and a pretty, predatory alpha who looks at you like a meal!"
Elias pushed off the doorframe and took a step into the room. "She's confused, Father," he said, his voice a false balm. "She's grieving. She doesn't know what's best for her." He looked at me, and his eyes held a glint of conquest. "We can help her remember. We have time."
The double meaning hung in the air, thick and suffocating. They were a unit. The disciplinarian and the heir. Both saw me as a project, a legacy, a prize to be shaped and claimed.
He was vibrating with a rage that felt years in the making. He pointed a long, elegant finger toward the door. "Get out. You are a greater disappointment than I ever imagined."
As I fled, passing Elias in the doorway, his hand shot out and caught my arm. His grip was vice-like. He leaned down, his lips near my ear, his voice for me alone. "Run to your gilded cage, little songbird. We'll be here when it starts to feel like a prison. And you'll come crawling back. You always do."
He released me with a slight push, and I stumbled into the hall, his low chuckle following me out.
The final scene was soft, a desperate balm sought in the wreckage. I was back in a dormitory common room at Juilliard, late at night, a few years after that study confrontation. My hands were bare, the old aches a constant ghost. I was staring into the fireplace, seeing only Elion's back, hearing Elias's chuckle. The grief for my family and the terror of my future were a knot in my chest so tight I couldn't breathe.
Then, a presence beside me. I didn't need to look. I knew her scent grape and wine and fierce, quiet safety. Haven Hartwell, now a young woman, sat down. She didn't speak. She simply took my hand the one Elias had gripped into her own. Her touch was different. It wasn't claiming. It wasn't assessing. It was anchoring. She turned my hand over, her thumb stroking gently over the unmarked but forever-sensitive knuckles. Then, from her pocket, she produced the same small tin of ointment from years before. She opened it and began to apply the salve with that same solemn, fierce concentration. The coolness was an absolution.
She didn't ask about the Chase men. She didn't ask about my fear. She simply tended to the hurt she sensed, the hurt she'd always seen. When she was done, she didn't let go immediately. She held my hand between both of hers, warming it, and looked up at me. For the first time in that terrible, lonely period, she smiled at me. It wasn't a big smile, just a slight softening at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but in the dream, it was a lifeline thrown across a chasm of despair. It said, 'I am here. I see you. This is real.'
In that moment, the voices of Elion and Elias faded. The memory of the ruler's sting dulled. There was only her hands on mine, her quiet strength, and the first fragile shoot of a feeling that wasn't fear or pain. It was the feeling of coming home.
--- Blank.
I woke with a gasp, the phantom sting of the ruler, the crushing grip of Elias, and the soothing cool of Haven's ointment warring on my skin. I was tangled in Haven, my face pressed against the solid warmth of her chest, her arm a heavy, possessive weight around me. The sobs came immediately, silent and wrenching, shaking my shoulders.
He hit me. He let his son watch. He wanted me to be his… his replacement daughter? His son's wife? Elias… he enjoyed it. He wanted me broken.
The abuse wasn't just from one man. It was a system. A father who crafted pain into pedagogy, and a son who saw my suffering as his birthright, a prelude to ownership. They were a team. Elion broke me for art, and Elias waited to collect the pieces.
And through it all, the thread of young Haven—seeing the hurt, silently offering the only true sanctuary I ever knew.
I buried my face deeper into Haven's sleep-warmed skin, inhaling her grape-wine scent, the antidote to the sandalwood-and-ice of Elion and the amber-and-metal of Elias. Please don't wake up, I begged silently, the tears soaking her nightshirt. I don't want you to see me like this. I don't want you to know how weak I was. How I almost let them shape me. I just need to hold on until the dream fades.
I cried until exhaustion pulled me under again, clinging to her like she was the only solid thing in a world of shifting, painful shadows, the memory of Elias's grinning face the last thing to dissolve in the dark.
HAVEN'S POV
Sleep was a luxury I could not afford. Not when she was like this. Not when the ghosts were so clearly knocking she might sleep walk again.
I held her, my body a rigid statue of vigilance in the dark. Her breathing had been uneven for hours, little hitches and whimpers escaping her parted lips. Then the murmuring started.
"Please… that's enough…" she whispered, her face contorted in sleep. "It hurts."
My own hands curled into fists, nails biting into my palms.
"…I'm sorry, mentor…"
A cold fury began to crystallize in my gut. Teacher.
"…Thank you, Haven…"
The contrast was a blade to my heart. My name, a sigh of relief in the midst of terror.
The nightmare deepened. Her body tensed, a low moan of distress vibrating against my chest. Then, clearer than anything before, slurred with sleep but unmistakable, she pleaded: "I'm so sorry… Sir Elion… I just can't… I'm sorry… please forgive me…"
The world stopped.
Sir Elion.
Not Elias. Elion. Elias's father. The revered maestro. The man who had been her vocal coach, her mentor since childhood. The man tied by history and rumored, tragic longing to her mother.
The pieces, jagged and horrifying, slammed together. The obsessive perfectionism. The cruel comparisons to her mother. The proprietary anger at her marriage to me. It wasn't just professional disappointment. It was the rage of a man who believed he owned a piece of herof her legacy, her talent, her very identity and saw me as the thief.
And he had hurt her. Not just emotionally. The nightmares of slapping hands, of bruised knuckles… they weren't metaphors. They were memories.
Then, a new name, choked out in a tone of pure, shuddering dread: "Elias… stop…"
A second blade twisted. The son. The one who'd sent the flowers, who'd watched with smug entitlement at the charity gala. He wasn't just a rival suitor from the past. He was there. In the room with her during the abuse. Not stopping it. Watching. Perhaps participating in his own way.
The beast inside me didn't roar. It went silent, cold, and infinitely deadly.
I felt her stirring, waking. I closed my eyes instantly, regulating my breathing into the slow, deep rhythm of sleep. I felt the moment she fully awoke, the hitch in her breath, the tremble that went through her. Then, the silent, hot tears against my skin. She buried her face in my chest, her body shaking with the effort to cry quietly.
"Please don't wake up… I don't want you to worry…"
Her whispered plea, meant for the dark, was a lance through my carefully constructed control. The need to wrap her up, to demand who hurt her, to promise evisceration, was a physical ache. But she needed this. She needed to believe, for this moment, that she was protecting me. So I played my part. I remained the sleeping guardian, even as every cell in my body screamed to hunt.
I held my torturous pose until her tears subsided, until her breathing evened out once more and she slipped back into an exhausted, hopefully dreamless, sleep. Only then did I allow my eyes to open, staring into the darkness above.
4:03 AM.
With the precision of a predator, I slowly, slowly extracted myself from her grasp, replacing my body with a pillow which she immediately clutched. I stood over the bed for a long moment, watching her sleep-troubled face in the dim light from the hallway. The bruises on her hands in the dream… had there been real ones? Had I missed them? The thought was unacceptable.
In my study, the world was bathed in the cool blue light of monitors. I didn't bother with Chen this time. This was beyond security protocols. This was an excavation.
I entered a name I had previously only considered as a background figure, a cultural icon: Elion Chase.
The public records were a hymn to his genius: acclaimed vocal pedagogue, discoverer of talent, guardian of the "Cross-Vale vocal lineage" (a term he seemed to have coined). He wrote essays on the "spiritual burden of carrying a mother's voice." There were pictures of a young, painfully shy Althea beside him at competitions, his hand heavy on her shoulder. His smile never reached his eyes.
I went deeper, into the sealed archives my family had compiled on the Vales during the merger. Medical reports. Discreet therapist bills from Althea's teenage years, paid from a discretionary fund her father had set up a fund Elion had administrated after the accident. Diagnoses: anxiety, perfectionism, somatic pain in hands and diaphragm. Treatments recommended: a change of environment, a new mentor. Recommendations overruled by her guardian… Elion Chase.
A memo from my own grandfather, Arthur Hartwell, dated around the time of our engagement. "The Chase faction is agitated. Elion sees the merger as a personal betrayal and a cultural desecration. He's making noises about undue influence. Watch him. He's connected, and he's obsessed with the girl."
Obsessed.
I pulled up the few photos I had of Althea from her late teens and early twenties. Galas, performances. I zoomed in, my blood turning to ice. In several, when her hands were visible, there were faint discolorations on the knuckles. Once, a barely-visible bandage peeking from a sleeve. She had always waved it off. "Oh, I'm just clumsy." "The piano lid."
I had believed her. I, who trusted nothing and no one, had believed her pathetic excuses because the alternative that someone was harming what was already mine was too incendiary to contemplate.
I should have pushed her to tell me. We were in high school. Her bruises on her arms that she kept saying were because of her music practice. I should have stopped the man. I should have been there during her training.
And the final, damning piece: a scanned copy of a private letter, obtained by God-knows-what means by our investigators, from Elion Chase to Althea, sent a month before our wedding. I had seen it before but dismissed it as the rantings of a bitter old man. Now, I read it with new eyes.
"…You are trading your birthright, your mother's sacred gift, for the sterile embrace of a corporation. The Hartwells are vultures. They perched over the ruins of your family's tragedy, and now the daughter settles in the nest. Do you think that young alpha's obsession is love? It is the same hunger that consumes her grandfather a hunger for possession, for conquest. She will swallow you whole, and your voice will die in her shadow. Come home, Althea. To where you are understood. To where your pain has meaning. Are you sure they're not involved with the accident of your family? —E."
Your pain has meaning.
He didn't just abuse her. He sacralized her suffering. He made it the cornerstone of her artistry, her identity. And he framed my love my pure, all-consuming need as a vulgar mirror of his own grotesque possession.
The screen blurred with a red haze of rage. This man had laid hands on her. He had twisted her genius into a form of self-flagellation. He had tried to poison her against me, using the same language of "cages" and "shadows" that now appeared in anonymous letters.
And Elias? I pulled his file. Privileged, groomed heir. No formal accusations, but whispers. A temper. A sense of entitlement. Several former classmates, female, had transferred schools abruptly. Nothing proven. All hushed. The perfect apprentice to a monster. He watched. He learned. He waited.
Elias was not just the son. He was the accomplice. The witness who enjoyed the show. The heir to his father's warped crusade. The one who saw Althea not just as a legacy, but as a prize to be won after she was properly broken in. The architect was Elion, but the foreman was Elias.
A new, even more sickening realization unfurled in my mind, connecting timelines with dreadful clarity.
After the accident... Her parents and Theo gone. She was shattered, a minor with a fractured empire as her inheritance. My grandfather, Arthur, as the Vale Trust's executor, had brought her to live with us at Hartwell Hall temporarily. It was supposed to be a sanctuary. She was quiet, hollow-eyed, but she'd still seek me out. We'd sit in silence. I'd bring her books she didn't read. I'd play music she didn't seem to hear. But there was a fragile peace there. A connection in shared, silent grief.
Then, the decision was made for her to finish her schooling in America. Juilliard. It was framed as a fresh start, away from the tragic memories. Away from me. I'd been furious, but my grandfather had been immovable. "It's for the best, Haven. The girl needs to build her own life, not be a ghost in ours and she has been awoken as a dominant omega she cant be here since most of us are alphas."
Now, I saw the chess move. Elion Chase was based in New York. He taught at Juilliard.
Was sending her to America not about giving her space, but about delivering her directly into his control? The thought was a poison. Had my own family, perhaps unwittingly, handed her over to him? Had the "fresh start" simply been a change of venue for her captivity? Had Elion, with his influence and his narrative of being her mother's true spiritual heir, maneuvered to get his prized pupil back under his thumb the moment she was vulnerable?
And the music... God, the music. When she left, the few songs she'd written were playful, full of a young, giddy infatuation. They were about stolen glances in Hartwell Hall, about my scent on the library air, about a crush on the intense girl who hovered at the edges of her grief. Simple. Goofy. Mine.
When she came back from America years later, a rising star, her music had changed. It was all aching melancholy, sharp, tyrannical love songs, lyrics full of beautiful prisons and glorious suffering. I'd thought it was artistry deepening. I'd thought the pain was for me for our separation, for the complexity of our reunion. I'd been flattered by the darkness.
But it wasn't for me. It was from him. He'd taken her natural sorrow and her talent and forged them into a weapon of beautiful misery. He'd refined her pain and called it genius. He'd taught her that to create was to suffer, and that her suffering belonged to him.
And when she finally came back to me for good, to finally claim our long-deferred future… she was so cruel. Distant. Icy. She signed the marriage contracts with the air of someone signing a death warrant. She'd flinch from my touch, then lean into it with a sort of angry desperation. She'd write songs about me that felt like attacks.
Was he feeding her a narrative too? Not just that I was a vulgar corporate heir, but something far more vile? The letter's snippet echoed: "Are you sure they're not involved with the accident of your family?"
The old, bloody feud between the Hartwells and the Blackwoods… the Vales had been caught in the crossfire of a business war a generation ago. Their accident was a tragic coincidence, a faulty private plane, but the whispers never fully died. Had Elion Chase nurtured those whispers into a certainty in her mind? Had he, and perhaps Elias echoing it, convinced her she was marrying into the family that murdered her own? Was that why she looked at me with such hatred? Because she believed, on some level, that she was bedding the enemy?
The pieces formed a masterpiece of manipulation. Isolate her. Control her art. Poison her heart. Position himself and his son as the only "pure" alternative. They weren't just an abusive mentor and a jealous rival. They were groomers, sculpting a broken heir into a weapon against her own salvation, all while pretending it was for her mother's sake, for art's sake. Elias was the promise of a future that continued the cycle a future where her pain would continue to have "meaning" under a new master.
My rage was no longer a fire. It was the absolute zero of deep space, a void where nothing could survive.
A plan, cold, intricate, and utterly merciless, began to form. This wasn't about business leverage or discreet disappearances. This was about systematic, total annihilation of a dynasty of cruelty. I would dismantle his reputation, brick by sacred brick. I would expose the rot behind the maestro's façade. I would take the legacy he coveted Althea's voice, her mother's memory, the very narrative of her pain and I would reclaim it for her. I would wash it clean of his poison and present it to her as a gift wrapped in the ashes of his life's work.
And Elias... He would watch. He would watch as everything his father built, everything he was promised, crumbled to dust. He would understand that the prize he waited for was never his, was never theirs to shape. And then, he would join his father in the ruin.
And then, only when they had nothing left no status, no disciples, no myth, no future would I bring them before me. I wouldn't need to raise a hand. I would simply let them see. See the woman they broke, now shining and whole in the cage they so despised. See her love for her monster. And I would make sure their last conscious thought was the understanding that every blow struck, every cruel word, every lie planted, had only forged her into the perfect key to my vault and driven her deeper into my arms.
He wanted her to suffer for her art? Fine.
They would suffer for their sins. And their suffering would have no meaning at all.
I turned off the monitors, plunging the room into a darkness that was less complete than the one now housed in my soul. I went back to our bedroom, slid into bed, and gathered my sleeping wife back into my arms. She murmured and nestled close, seeking safety in the very beast her ghosts feared most.
"I know now, my love," I whispered into her hair, my voice a silent, iron vow in the dark. "I see the whole picture. The father and the son. And I am going to burn their world down until even the ashes forget their names."