Roanoke clapped his hands, absolutely delighted. "Ah! There it is! The old magic recognizes the new!"
He thrust the gaudy gold wrapped gift toward them. "Now, my gift! For my one and only daughter...finally she is where she belongs!"
Kieran did not move or react.
Lyla touched her neck, her fingers coming away red. Still, she said nothing.
But her eyes...they finally flickered to him.
And in them, he saw...pity?
Maybe she saw through him now that they were connected...she saw him for who he really was.
The Alpha. The leader. The monster who had shattered the one heart he had sworn to protect.
"You are hurting," she whispered, so low only he could hear.
Kieran’s scoff was a broken thing. "You don’t know the half of it."
Roanoke shoved the gift into his arms. "Open it! It will be a symbol of your union!"
Mechanically, Kieran tore the wrapping.
But it didn’t look normal... or maybe he didn’t feel normal at the moment.
In its reflection...his own face was hollow eyed, blood on his lips.
A king of ashes of his own love.
By this time, the howling seemed to have subsided... but he knew it didn’t stop.
And this apparent silence was worse.
"Autumn," Kieran choked.
Not that anybody would care enough.
The crowd cheered on.
And the Alpha stood perfectly still, screaming where no one could see. Deep inside.
The mirror that he was given...felt heavy in Kieran’s hands. Too heavy to be an ordinary mirror.
It should not have been.
It was just glass, just gilt, just a fragile thing...but the weight of it dragged at his bones like an anchor.
Roanoke’s grin widened,his teeth yellowed from months of indiscipline,glinting in the lantern lights. "Go on, Alpha. Look closer."
Kieran did not want to.
But he was an Alpha. And Alphas did not flinch.
He lifted the mirror and looked at it out of courtesy.
His reflection stared back.
It was pale, lips stained with Lyla’s blood, eyes hollow as a corpse’s.
And then... it moved.
His reflection smiled at him. A slow, cruel twist of lips that he hadn’t made.
"Hello, brother," the Kieran in the mirror purred.
The crowd’s cheers melted away. The world narrowed to the glass, to the thing inside it wearing his face.
He couldn’t tell if he was the only one seeing it or if everyone else could see it as well.
He strained his eyes and realised it wasn’t him. No. Not his face.
The eyes were wrong. Not gold... They were silver.
Kieran’s breath left him in a rush. "This isn’t real! "
Karl laughed in the mirror, the sound echoing like a bell tolling underground. "Oh, it’s real. Just like Autumn’s pain is real. Just like the way her heart splintered when you marked her sister."
His fingers pressed against the glass, as if he could push through. "Tell me, Kieran...did you hear her scream? Or did you just feel it?"
Kieran’s hands shook. "You are not here."
"No. I am dead. You made sure of that." Karl tilted his head. "But she isn’t. Not yet."
The mirror’s surface rippled.
And then there was...
Not as she was now, broken and bleeding, but as she had been the first night Kieran kissed her...laughing, her hair wild in the wind, her eyes bright with a future he had promised her.
Now she was on her knees, hands clawing at her chest, screaming his name like it was a curse.
Now she was silent, empty, a knife pressed to her own wrist.
Now she was about to..
"STOP." Kieran’s voice cracked.
Karl smirked. "Why? You didn’t like it? "
Roanoke’s hand clapped down on Kieran’s shoulder, his breath hot and reeking of wine. "A family heirloom, Alpha! My gift to you...a window to the truth." He leaned in, whispering, "And to the consequences."
Kieran whirled on him, fangs bared. "What the hell is this?"
"A reminder." Roanoke’s grin was a blade. "That every Alpha has a weakness. Yours just happens to be my daughter." His gaze flicked to Lyla, still silent, still staring at nothing. "Well...Both of them."
Karl’s voice slithered from the mirror again. "She is going to die, Kieran. And it will be your fault. Again."
When it cleared, Autumn was there..not an image, but her, her palms pressed against the mirror’s surface from the other side, her eyes wide and terrified.
Something darkened around the place and it became gloomier than it already was.
Then Autumn was, on her knees in a room of shadows, her burned hand pressed to the floor, fingers smearing blood in jagged symbols.Her lips moved as if, chanting words that made the mirror’s edges frost over.
Her voice was raw, scraped down to the bone..but her eyes?
There was nothing but pure and raw fury.
Behind her, the hearth fire roared too bright, too blue, licking up the walls like it wanted to devour the world.
And in the flames Kieran could see shapes.
And they seemed hungry.
A hand that was blackened, skeletal...reached out from the fire.
Autumn did not flinch.
"Take it," she hissed. "Take what is left of me." The thing in the fire laughed.It was a sound like cracking embers.
"Little wolf," it crooned, "we do not deal in halves. Give us all your pain... and we will give you vengeance."
Autumn’s breath hitched.
Then she turned and looked at him... eyes red... tears streaming down... she looked at her lap... she caressed the empty space like caressing a cat. Then there was blood... like a lot of it.
She was sitting in a pool of blood, her clothes soaked. A cry... Faint.Feeble.
Autumn looked up. She looked straight at Kieran.
"Kieran," she gasped, her voice muffled. "Help me...please."
Then she was yanked backward, swallowed by shadows.
The mirror went dark.