The Human Among Wolves (Aurora) novel Chapter 275

Chapter 275

Cecilia

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I sit there long after the door closes, listening to the echo fade into tone.

Nothing comes to explain it.

No sense settles. No understanding arrives late and apologetic. The pom remains exactly what it is–too warm, too still, too real. The air tastes unfamiliar, sharp at the back of my throat. I test my magic again, carefully, quietly.

There is nothing.

It isn’t blocked. It isn’t resisted. It simply… isn’t there.

That realization lands deeper than fear. Magic has always been part of me, threaded through breath and blood, as natural as thought. Its absence leaves a hollow space where instinct should be, where reflex should answer. I feel unfinished, like something

vital has been scraped out and left behind.

I breathe anyway. I force my lungs to remember their work.

Time loses its edges after that.

I don’t know how long I’m kept there. I don’t know where there is. The days do not mark themselves. There are no windows. No sun. Only stone, heat, and the sound of doors opening and closing a intervals that refuse to form a pattern.

Sometimes there is food. Sometimes water. Sometimes silence stretches so long it presses against my skull until my thoughts blur.

I am not hurt.

That is the strangest part.

No pain greets me. No violence announces itself. My body remains intact, tended even. Clean clothes appear. Wounds never form. If this is captivity, it is meticulous–controlled in a way that makes resistance feel pointless before it ever begins.

I search my memories constantly, afraid they will begin slipping without my permission.

At first, they hold.

I remember the woods. The dawn. The decision to stop waiting. I remember Theron’s eyes, the weight of his hand, the way he

looked at me as if I was something irreplaceable. I remember the life growing quietly inside me.

That memory stays.

Everything else begins to blur.

There are moments–flashes–that don’t attach to time. Stone corridors. The sensation of movement without walking. A pressure

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behind my eyes that makes thought slow, syrup–thick. I sleep often, r perhaps I lose consciousness. It becomes difficult to tell the

difference.

And then my body changes.

It happens gently, the way it should have. My stomach rounds. My blance shifts. My breath comes shorter when I climb unseen

stairs or move too quickly. I know what is happening without anyone needing to tell me.

I am pregnant.

That knowledge anchors me when nothing else does.

I talk to the child in whispers meant only for myself. I count heartbeats. I trace circles over my skin and promise things I do not know how to deliver. I imagine faces I have never seen. I imagine freedom because imagining despair feels too dangerous.

Then–another blank.

A longer one.

When awareness returns, it does so through pain.

It is sudden, overwhelming, consuming everything. My body takes over completely, ancient instincts surging to the surface while my

1. am. I thi mind fractures under the weight of it. I scream. I think. I don’t think I am nowhere and everywhere all at once.

And then-

Silence.

Not empty silence. Full silence. Heavy. Final.

They place her in my arms.

She is warm. Slippery. Alive.

The world narrows to the sound of her breathing, her small body pressed against mine. The moment feels fragile, unreal, like it could dissolve if I blink too hard. I memorize her weight, her scent, the way her tiny fingers curl instinctively.

A name rises to my lips without thought.

“Aurenya.”

It feels right in a way nothing else has for a very long time.

I don’t know how long I hold her. I don’t know how much time I am allowed to exist inside that moment. But I know–without

doubt–that it is real.

Then-

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Chapter 275

Nothing.

Not darkness.

Not sleep.

Nothing.

The next thing I know, I am standing at the edge of the northern coven’s wards.

The air is cold.

Sharp.

Familiar.

I stumble forward, knees buckling as if my body remembers something my mind cannot. Magic rushes back into me all at once, violent and overwhelming, flooding every hollow place until I gasp. drop to the ground, palms pressed into frost–dusted earth,

breathing like I’ve just surfaced from deep water.

Voices rise around me.

Hands grab my shoulders.

Someone says my name.

They tell me I have been gone ten years.

Ten years.

I laugh at first. I think it’s shock, or grief, or the aftereffects of whatever spell was used on me. I wait for the truth to follow, for

someone to correct themselves.

No one does.

I look down at my body–unchanged, unaged, untouched by time–and understand why they stare at me like this. Why some of them

cry. Why others look afraid.

They thought I was dead.

In some ways, they were right.

The days that follow are a blur of questions I cannot answer and silence that grows heavier with each attempt. They ask where I’ve

been. Who took me. What happened.

I don’t know.

There is a wall inside my mind where those years should be. Solid. Seamless. Unyielding. When I press against it, pain blooms

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Chapter 275

behind my eyes, sharp enough to make me recoil.

But there is one thing I know.

I had a child.

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The memory of her exists separate from the rest–bright, untouchable, impossible to erase. I remember her warmth. Her cry. Her

name.

And she is gone.

That realization nearly breaks me.

I search.

I search like a woman possessed.

I cast spells until my hands bleed and my vision swims. I draw blood circles into the earth and call to magic older than the coven

itself. I beg spirits, bargain with shadows, chase rumors across lands that don’t remember me.

Nothing answers.

It is as if Aurenya never existed.

When Theron learns I have returned, the world tilts again.

He comes to the north without warning, without ceremony, without crown. The moment our eyes meet, something in him

fractures open–relief so intense it hurts to witness. He reaches for me without thinking.

I step back.

I can’t do this. Not with so much missing. Not with grief I can’t explain and memories I don’t have words for. I don’t trust myself

not to shatter if I let him close.

He comes again.

And again.

Each time, I refuse.

Eventually, he stops.

Years pass. I hear that he marries. I am glad he found something that looks like peace.

I leave the coven not long after.

The north holds too many ghosts. I move east, close enough to feel the land that knows him, far enough to remain unseen. I build a

small house at the edge of the woods with my own magic, my own hands.

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He doesn’t know I am there.

At night, I sit beneath unfamiliar stars and whisper a name into the dark.

Aurenya.

I don’t know where she is.

I don’t know who took her.

I don’t even know who took me.

But I know–deep in the place memory could not erase–that she is real.

And I will find her.