Mated to Her Alpha Instructor (Eileen and Regis) novel Chapter 199

Mated to Her Alpha Instructor

Chapter 199

Eileen

‘I don’t remember much, she said, and her voice was hoarse, rusty with disuse and weighted with old pain. “Most of it’s just… fragments. Impressions. I was so young when I got away, and I think maybe my mind protected me by letting the details blur. Her hands twisted together, knuckles going white. ‘I remember the cage. The cold. My mother’s voice when she sang to me at night, trying to keep me calm. A pause, breath shuddering. “And I remember men coming to take her away, and the sounds that would follow, and knowing that I couldn’t help her, that I was too powerless to do anything but hide in the corner and pretend I couldn’t hear.”

The raw honesty of it hit me like a physical blow, the casual mention of horrors that should never have been visited upon a child delivered in that flat, distant tone people used when the alternative was falling apart completely. I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand, to offer physical comfort, but I held myself still, sensing that touch right now might shatter whatever fragile composure she was maintaining.

“How did you escape?” I asked gently.

“The river.” Nina’s gaze had gone unfocused, seeing something far away and long ago. “There was flooding one spring–unusual for that region, the farmers said later, an act of the moon goddess perhaps. The dungeon where they kept us was old, built into ruins of something older still, and when the water came it found every crack and weakness. I remember my mother screaming at me to swim, to let the current take me, that this was my only chance. Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “So I did. I let go and the water carried me away, and I don’t know how long I was in that river, half–drowned and freezing, before some farmer pulled me out of a flooded field miles downstream.”

The image her words painted–a five–year–old child tumbling through cold water, separated from everything she’d known, more terrified of what she was escaping than what might lie ahead–made my chest constrict with vicarious horror. “The farmer who saved you, I prompted carefully. “Did they know what you were? Did they help you?‘

Something shuttered in Nina’s expression, her walls slamming back into place with almost audible finality. “They helped me survive,” she said, the words :lipped and final in a way that communicated clearly she would not elaborate further. “But when I was old enough to leave, I did. And I discovered that my nother was gone–dead, I assumed, though I never found confirmation–and that there were no other witches I could find, no community to take me in, no safe harbor where someone like me belonged.”

The desolation in those words, the absolute aloneness they described, resonated with something deep in my own experience–the years I’d spent believing I had no place in wolf society, that my lack of transformation made me fundamentally unwelcome, that I would always be on the outside looking in at a world that wasn’t built for people like me. We’d arrived at our isolation through different paths, but the destination was hauntingly similar.

You tried to find them? I asked. “Other witches?‘

‘Of course I tried. The bitterness in her voice was sharp enough to cut. “I spent years following rumors and old stories, traveling to places where witch covens were supposed to have hidden, searching for any sign that I wasn’t the last of my kind. Her laugh held no humor. “But whatever magic I might have inherited from my mother, it’s mostly gone now. Dormant or destroyed, I don’t know which. She met my eyes directly for the first time since beginning this conversation. “So even if I found other witches–assuming any survived–I wouldn’t belong there either. I’m too diluted, too broken, too much a product of what was done to us to ever fit into whatever their world might be.”

1/2