Chapter 530: Same One Creature
"You reaaaally don’t want to come out, huh, Brother?" Her voice floated through the door, lilting and playful, riding atop the low, guttural growling like a silk ribbon draped over a snarling wolf’s jaws. "Just to tell me how much I disgust you?"
The voice and the growling intermingled... but they never mixed.
They occupied the same space, came from the same direction, emerged from the same throat, and yet, somehow, they remained separate.
Two entities. Two beings.
The sister who spoke with honeyed sweetness, and the beast that rumbled with hunger beneath her words. He had never heard anything so wrong in his life.
He couldn’t, even now, for the life of him, imagine they ever mix together.
"Why do you hate me so much, Brother?"
"Uuhh...!"
Arkai’s eyes faltered. That voice—!
It was a small, pained whimper cutting through the sweetness and the terrible growl. It was not Sienna’s.
He jolted out of the bathtub. His muscles, frozen from the ice-cold water, screamed in protest. They tore and cracked like meat left too long in the icehouse, like jerky pulled apart by brute force.
Pain lanced through his shoulders, his thighs, his spine, a thousand tiny ruptures that blazed white-hot through the numbness.
But he didn’t care. He couldn’t care. His son—!
His body was a distant, irrelevant thing compared to the sound of that child’s voice twisted in pain—
"Rinne!" He forced his throat to roar, though the sound came out ragged and broken, his vocal cords still tight from the cold. "RINNE!"
"You finally reacted? Because of this little thing...?" Sienna’s voice laughed a soft, self-deprecating sound, as though she had just discovered a mildly disappointing truth about something. But the lilting sweetness never wavered. The growling never stopped. "You care about him, Brother?"
Why? Why did she speak of her own son as though he were an object? The child she had carried in her body, birthed into the world, named, and she spoke of him like—
"I shouldn’t have killed myself, didn’t I...?" Sienna’s voice suddenly shifted, taking on the fragile, trembling quality of tears threatening to fall.
The lilting sweetness cracked at the edges, revealing something raw and broken beneath. "If I knew you liked this thing so much... maybe using it, I’ll be able to make you mine..."
"LET HIM GO—!" Arkai fought against his own body, every muscle screaming, every joint blazing with the cold that still gripped him.
The shivering wouldn’t stop. His legs, frozen from the ice bath, threatened to buckle beneath him. His arms, which had lifted him from the water, shook so violently he could barely clench his fists.
Why? Why was his body fighting against him so much?
He was an Alpha. He had faced down worse than this. He had endured worse than this!
And yet his own flesh refused to obey—
She was just his sister. Just Sienna. He just needed to stop her, throw open the door, wrench the child from her arms. It should have been simple. It should have been nothing!
So why couldn’t he move? Why did his legs feel like they were rooted to the cold tub, like the ice from the bath had climbed up his veins and frozen him from the inside out?
Why did his heart pound not with fury but with terror?
Why—
Why wouldn’t his body listen?!
It felt like a carcass, his body. That was what it felt like. A slab of meat hung too long in the killing cold, frozen through and through until the muscle fibers snapped like icicles under pressure.
"Father... Father Lord... help—"
"Yes... huhuhu... call your father for me, hm? Call him so Mum can be with him..."
"No—let me go!"
His arms, when he tried to lift them, obeyed strugglingly, reluctantly, like limbs that had forgotten what motion was. His legs were like pillars of numb stone, the joints grinding against each other like boulders shifting in permafrost.
"Father Lord—!"
"SCREAM LOUDER! He can’t hear you..."
Every breath he dragged into his lungs was a shard of glass, cold and sharp. He had been submerged in that ice bath for decades, the cold had killed him a long time ago.
"Father Lord... why can’t you love my Mother...?"
Arkai froze all over again.
He was back under water. In that freezing cold tub.
Right. Hadn’t he once yearned to run away to the northern wilderness?
When she pounded on his door, when she leaned her weight against the wood and called his name in that lilting, cloying voice, he had dreamed of escape.
To flee. Bursting through the bathroom window, never mind the glass, never mind the drop, and running.
Running until the estate was a distant speck behind him. Running until the northern winds stripped the scent of her from his skin and the eternal ice buried him a thousand feet deep.
The cold would fix it. The distance. The vast, empty wilderness where no voice could reach him and no heat could find him.
He would let the tundra freeze his useless, treacherous body, the body that responded to his own sister’s heat with a hunger he could neither control nor forgive.
He would kill it. The thing, the monster inside him that she had fed. The wolf that answered her call.
He would imprison it forever under the ice, bury it so deep that not even her sweetest pleading could thaw it out.
That was what he had wanted, right?
"We could’ve been together... Rinne, you and I..."
"Yes, Father..."
The child’s voice was somehow as lilting as hers, changing completely, and Arkai’s heart cracked open in his chest. No—
"I’ll kill everyone in our way..."
Sienna whispered.
"Kill Roarke... kill the man who hurt me so hard, Brother..."
The disgust in her voice...
For Roarke, who had loved her? Roarke, his brother, who had been banished for the crime of falling into the trap she had set for him—?
"Kill that woman... that stupid countryside clinic doctor who is somehow able to stop this madness between us..."
She spat the words.
For the one and only doctor who can free her from her body’s anomaly?
"Kill—!"
She snarled, and finally, the sound was no longer human.
That lilting voice and the growling of the monster merged into one, no longer two entities sharing the same throat, no longer sister and beast existing side by side.
Just one voice. One creature that had been wearing his sister’s face for years.
"Kill that bitch Cecilia Araceli too."