Eleanor stood behind, her arms and body in stitches, her wavy dark hair ssed up along her face.
Her skin was dark and dirty.
She looked a ss.
Like soone who had been under the ground for over a hundred years.
If you didn’t know her, you would believe she was the one.
At first, Xaden had been in disbelief.
He knew that face, the arms, the hand, the body.
He knew everything about her.
She was the one who had raised him.
His very own mother.
But he had seen her head decapitated.
Hanging by the spikes of the pack walls.
He had done her funeral rites for her.
So why was she now standing in front of him, looking as though she had been through the valley of death and returned?
She was holding a silver dagger in her hand.
The very sa thing that he could tell, she had used to stab Cherry.
"I told you your day of reckoning was finally going to co bitch." She spat at the dust on the floor.
Everyone just froze, unable to say a word.
Xaden knew that voice anywhere.
"Eleanor?" He asked, his voice barely a whisper.
She slowly turned around from the heap of dust she had been looking at and saw him.
She paused as she watched him.
For a minute, it looked like she couldn’t believe it was him.
As though she was seeing double.
"Xaden?" She said, in response, in the softest voice one could wish for.
He shifted back to his human form almost as imdiately as he had transford into his wolf.
He walked past everyone, still dazed and transfixed by the incident that had just occurred.
He walked up to where she stood by the throne, and he very slowly touched her dirt-stained face.
"Mum?" He said, his eyes filling with tears.
He cupped her cheek, and she closed those beautiful brown eyes.
She was the one.
He was so stunned for a second that he didn’t know what to do.
There, he threw his arms around her and gave her a tight hug, even though she slled and was, in fact, dirty.
He held onto her so fervently it was as though he was dreaming.
Even if he were, he didn’t want to wake up.
She rubbed the back of his hair and softly said in his ear.
"My boy." She said.
She kissed the side of his cheek and held him closer again.
"You haven’t called mum since you left to go build your pack." She whispered into his ear.
And then guilt overca him.
He rembered how cruel he had been to her when he said he had wanted to avenge his family.
Even the last few days before she had died.
The God awful things he had told her.
How nasty and hurtful he had been.
How terribly guilty he had been when he found out she was dead, wishing he could take back all the terrible things he had said and done.
Xaden wept.
The tears flowed down his face.
"I’m sorry for all the things I said." He apologized amidst the hug. "I thought I was never going to see you again."
She rubbed his back as her warmth coddled him.
He didn’t want to let go.
He was scared that if he did, she would vanish and he would see that it was simply a fignt of his imagination.
"Are you real?" He asked, his voice breaking.
The mask that he usually held to protect his feelings was gone.
He no longer needed to hide under the facade of being the incredible Alpha.
It was though he had broken free and was now back to being the little boy she had raised.
"Are you real?" He asked through the hug.
He felt her smile, and then she let go. "Is this real?"
And she pinched his cheek.
He made a soft ouch, and she laughed.
If I weren’t real, you wouldn’t feel that.
"How... how... di... how?" He managed.
She gave a tight smile. "I can’t die, Xaden. Not in the sense you understand. I can only have my body parts severed from limb to limb and be buried."
Then she looked back down at the heap of dust that lay a few inches from their feathers.
"That bitch did that to . I would have stayed hidden if I didn’t feel the tremors." She said. "I found out about Jasmine. She must have co to the royal pack because the entire earth shook a month ago."
And then Xaden rembered the night she had been so dazed.
The night that she had literally fainted, the walls had shaken, the windows had shattered, and all fire had beco dark.
"It woke up." She explained. "That was why I was able to get up and stitch my body back together. I couldn’t stop by because I had to find Jasmine. If she were in the royal pack and Cherry were here. They were going to kill her. I had to stop her."
And Eleanor turned to look at everyone in the room.
She bowed to the King and Queen and looked around the ss. "What the hell happened here?"
Rose rubbed her face with her palm and seed restless.
"What are you doing here?" She asked him, her eyes lost.
"I ca to avenge you and take Jasmine away." He announced.
There was an eerie silence.
He turned to the Queen.
"Where is she?" He asked. "I’m here to take her away from this godforsaken place."
"You have no right. She is my granddaughter." Rose warned him.
"And I’m married to her." He said.
"Jasmine is gone," Hildegard said. "Have you all forgotten. She is gone and not coming back."
Xaden paused.
The hair on the back of his neck stood.
"What?"
"She ran away from the cells," Hildegard explained. "You can hold hostage for as long as you can, but those mories were wiped off. I don’t know where she is anymore."
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