Sacrificed To The Triplet Alpha Kings

The main path through the eastern forest was faster, it would have taken at most fifteen minutes for them to get there. The route he took now added another ten minutes to the journey.

She wouldn’t know the difference.

Because she’d never been this far into the territory before.

He took the ridge road and felt her lean in slightly as the bike curved with it, instinctively shifting her weight the right way without being told.

The ridge opened up on the left side and below it the territory fell away....the whole of the Blackwood lands visible in one sweep. The forest. The river cutting through it silver in the moonlight. The distant lights of the pack village. The mountains behind it all, enormous and dark against the sky.

She gasped taking in the scenario before her.

He slowed down the bike slightly, giving her a moment to truly enjoy the scene around her.

She belongs here, Kael said quietly.

****

Lilith POV

She had never been on a motorbike before.

She’d grabbed onto him the second the speed hit her and she was not ashamed of it.

She pressed her face into his back and held on.

Few minutes into the ride, the tight air of the estate was gone. Everything that had been bothering her for days.....the mark, the post, all of it was still there but it felt less frustrating.

She lifted her head.

The road was cutting through a forest that went on forever in both directions. Trees so old and so tall they made her feel like she was at the bottom of something, looking up through a cathedral of wild trees. The stars above them were so bright it was almost offensive. She had never seen stars like that. Not once in her life. Growing up in pack housing in Shadowmere you saw the orange glow of streetlights and maybe three stars if you were lucky.

These were not three stars.

This was everything.

She turned her head slightly and the changed around her. Ancient and dense and utterly indifferent to her existence in the best possible way.

The bike curved onto a ridge road and her body moved with rotation of the bike, and when the ridge opened up on the left. What came into view was a gigantic waterfall

It was enormous.

The forest stretching out below them silver-black in the moonlight. A river cutting through it, catching the light. Lights in the distance....the pack village, she realised. Small and warm from up here. And behind all of it, was the mountains, dark against the sky, looking immovable and ancient.

She looked at the back of Nicholas’s head. The silver at his temples catching the moonlight. From the back she could see the way his shoulders looked more relaxed in a way she had never seen inside the estate walls.

He slowed slightly.

Like he knew she needed a moment, and she took that moment to enjoy the scenario.

She looked at the territory until it disappeared behind them as the road curved back into the forest, then she pressed her face back into his jacket.

And this time she held on because she wanted to.

****

Nicholas POV

He heard it before she could possibly see it.

That was how he always knew he were close. The sound of the waterfall, low and constant beneath everything else.

He stopped the bike at the edge of the tree line and turned off the engine of the bike.

She got off behind him.

Nicholas looked at her standing there looking like a lost child, he wanted to say something but instead he gestured to her to follow him.

He didn’t offer his hand.

But he walked slowly enough that she could follow.

The road he took didn’t look like it was often used, but It was a route he knew from memory....seventeen years of memorising exactly where to step, exactly which roots to avoid, exactly where the ground dipped and where it rose. He’d walked it in pitch black so many times his body knew it without his mind having to do anything.

She kept up.

He glanced back once, saw that she was picking her way through the roots and the undergrowth with her arms slightly out for balance, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her face lifted like she was tracking the sound of the water.

Tracking it the same way he had the first time he came here.

The sound got louder.

The trees thinned.

And then they stepped through the last line of the trees and he heard her foot steps stop.

***

Lilith POV

She stopped walking.

She couldn’t help it. Her feet just....stopped as she took in the scenario before her.

A waterfall.

And it is not a small one.

It dropped from a ledge maybe thirty feet above them....she had to tilt her head back to follow it up....a solid sheet of white water falling into a pool that caught the moonlight. The pool was dark and wide and perfectly still at the edges, and where the water hit it, it churned white and silver and threw up a mist that floated in the air around the whole thing like something alive.

The forest wrapped around three sides of it. Ancient trees, their roots going into the water at the edges. Moss everywhere, thick and dark green even in the moonlight. Flat rocks along the bank worn smooth by water and time.

She walked toward it as if drawn to it by an invisible force.

Her feet moving across the mossy ground, around the roots, toward the bank, and she couldn’t stop looking at the way the water fell....the way it caught the moonlight at the top and broke into a thousand pieces and then came back together at the bottom. The way the mist drifted. The way the pool held all that movement and stayed perfectly calm at its edges.

She reached the bank.

Crouched down and put her hand in the water.

It was cold and so clean that it didn’t feel real. She pulled her hand out and looked at it and a smile appeared on her face.

She stood up and threw her arms out slightly at her sides like she needed to be bigger to hold all of it.

She was aware that she probably looked ridiculous but she did not care at all.

She turned to look back at Nicholas.