Chapter 177: Sorry For Your Loss
Selene’s POV
They started reviewing the camera footage of everything that had happened before the explosion.
The weight of it all was still heavy on my neck ... and people were not making it any lighter.
"Luna, my daughter died. I told her not to go to the mating festival, but she wouldn’t listen to me, and now..." A middle-aged she-wolf stood before me, cradling her dead daughter in her arms.
I almost cried. But I had to hold it together ... I represented leadership here, and leadership didn’t break down in public.
My husband, the Alpha, was in recovery. He had survived the gunshot and come through surgery, but he was still down. That left me as the one who had to attend to everything.
"We’re so sorry for your loss. We will make sure the people who did this pay dearly with their lives," I said, trying to offer her something ... anything.
But it didn’t help. If anything, it made it worse.
"That can’t bring back my daughter, Lunaaaaa!" She broke into a scene right there, and I still had an entire room of grieving people waiting behind her.
The remaining guards ... the ones who hadn’t been blown up or shot down ... came to carry her out of the council chambers. She wept as they led her away, her daughter still in her arms.
"I’m deeply sorry," I said as she went.
The words felt hollow even as I said them.
The next one came in immediately. A male wolf, carrying his dead son.
"Luna, it’s like the curse of Icefang has fallen on us ... they want to wipe out all our young ones. Look at my son." His voice cracked on the last word.
The blast had torn through the boy in a way that was difficult to look at directly.
"This was unexpected. They will all pay, and we will make sure every family is compensated," I said.
But there was no excuse that could truly account for the number of lives we had lost. Our security should have been tighter. We should have had broader, more thorough surveillance in place ... something that could have protected everyone. We had let our guard down, and now we were paying for it in the worst currency there was.
The wolf went on lamenting. He said the boy had been his only child.
I had never felt more helpless in my own skin.
After he left, I instructed the guards to stop letting people in one by one. I would address the parents of the deceased all at once ... a speech, not an endless line of individual grief I couldn’t adequately absorb.
"Damien, how is the transport of the surviving guests looking?"
"They’re on the next available planes, trains and buses. No casualties in those areas," he said.
They had been lucky.
Because they’d been staying offshore of Icefang, the bomb blast had had little to no impact on the hotels out there. They were from Bloodmoon and Winterwood ... they would go home and return to their normal lives while I stood here picking through the wreckage of mine.
That meant Astrid would be alright. And her husband too.
I was genuinely glad. Even if Astrid ever had to die, it shouldn’t be here in Icefang ... and certainly not just after she had given me that heartfelt apology.
I made my way back to the surveillance room.
"Luna, we were able to pull some information," the chief operator said.
"Their leader was Draven Blackstone. There were six of them in total."
I was already losing patience. I nearly reached out and smacked him across the face.
"I know Draven. That’s not complete information ... what the fuck is wrong with you?"
"Luna, please..." He flinched, bracing himself.
"We have more. We tracked where they came from. A place called Bernia," he said.
"And Bernia is a city of...?"
"Humans," the operator said.
"So this was a deliberate plan ... humans orchestrating the killing of wolves, using werewolves to do their dirty work." The rage simmering inside me pushed closer to the surface. We hadn’t seen any of this coming. Maybe it had been what those dreams and visions of mine had been trying to warn me about.
"Not just any werewolves, Luna," he continued.
"They were convicted criminals ... all six of them, tried at Valdris for offenses including murder, kidnapping and trafficking. They broke out of prison and fled to Bernia, where they were recruited to carry out this attack."
Draven. Into all of this.
The exile had clearly destroyed whatever was left of him. In my wildest imagination I had never pictured him becoming this ... a criminal, a weapon pointed at his own people.
But he had made his choices, and those choices meant he was ready to face everything that came with them. Whatever he met on the other side of this, he had signed up for it. Fuck Draven. Not everyone who was alive deserved to be. I had once believed that about myself ... but if I were dead, there would be no one left to hold him accountable for what he had done here.
"If my count is right, they should be seven. Who is the seventh?" I asked.
"We have nothing on her. She’s like a ghost ... no name, no database record."
"Oh, it’s a she," I said, and smiled despite myself.
"The one who was convicted alongside Draven and the others but wasn’t present at the attack ... that’s Lucas."
"Can you track Lucas’s location and bring him to me?"
"Yes, Luna." He got to work immediately.
"I want to know why Lucas wasn’t with them. He might be useful to us," I said.
I left the surveillance room hoping the answers that followed would give us the thread we needed to unravel the whole thing.
Fuck. I had so much to rebuild.
Monuments had been reduced to rubble. The beautiful Icefang that I knew looked charred and ancient, like something from a history of ruin.
"Damien, get as many labourers as you can. We’re going to rebuild every single one of these places. I will not let Icefang look like what was done to us," I told him, and he nodded without a word.
Even my own company had taken some damage.
Everything would be fixed. Bernia was not going to win ... I wouldn’t allow it. I had stopped believing in the goddess a long time ago, but I was fairly certain even she wouldn’t let that happen.
I went straight to see my husband. He was still connected to apparatus, still unconscious, still fighting battles inside his own body.
"You’ll be fine, dear," I said, and pressed my hand gently to his head.
He had done everything he did to save me. What were you thinking? I asked him silently.
And now I had to be what he would have been if he were awake.
"I have to go give a speech now, husband. I’ll be back."