25. Horror from within

Aleida’s POV

I wake up and can’t move; there’s something heavy on me. When I manage to open my eyes, I see that Kian and Miliano each have their legs over mine and their hands on my bare breasts. They look so peaceful and relaxed when they sleep- my men. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. I pat them on their cheeks and get no reaction at all, trying to get away from their grip, to no avail. They sleep far too deep; I poke at them and get no response. I try talking to them, and I don’t get a result. Nothing I do works, and it’s now starting to annoy me. I take my hands down to their crotch and squeeze their balls until they jump while screaming. Then, finally, I can get up and quickly run to the bathroom. I don’t like to have to hurt them knowingly, but the contents of my stomach are very close to flying out of me, down on them. God, that would have been embarrassing. I sit with my head in the toilet and cough out the vomit. My throat is burning, and my vision blurs by tears from the power my stomach use. I hear knocking on the door and weak voices saying my name. The fatigue inside me makes me unable to answer. When my gaze lands on the contents in the toilet, my heart almost stops. It is blood in there, and a lot of it! What’s happening to me? My stomach hurts, and my whole body aches.

“Help me,” I croak to the voices behind the door, which I know are my mates.

“We want to help you, but you need to open the door, lepa!” Kian says with a voice full of concern.

“Please open up, baby girl!” Miliano’s voice is louder than Kian’s, and the only thing I can hear is his anxiety when he can’t help me.

I try to move towards the door without success. As soon as I release the toilet, I fall back down to the floor. My stomach again makes a craze that makes me get the blood taste back in my mouth. I’m lying on my back, and I can’t move. The air doesn’t come down into my lungs; I have to move my head for the liquid to drain out, or I’ll choke. Gurgling and coughing up blood, I make every effort to move my head. Somehow I manage to turn my head, making the liquid flow out, and let me tell you, it’s a lot of it that surrounds me on the otherwise white tile floor. The blood from my mouth spread between the gaps in the tile, just like a water system.

“Aleida, beware of the door; we’ll kick it in now!” Kian yells.

Shortly after that, the door flies open with a loud bang echoing in the room. At first, my mates just stand there, shocked at the sight before them before they run up to me. They talk to me, but I can’t understand what they say or answer them. My eyes are heavy. Miliano rises and replenishes a glass of water that he gently helps me drink while Kian holds my upper body up in a sitting position. It’s self-evident that they don’t know what to do. The panic in the room spreads, and I can cut the tense mood with a knife. My ears continue to thump, and all the sounds drown by my heartbeats. What’s happening?

Third-person POV

Aleida’s eyes fall back in her head, and Miliano desperately tries to make her talk to him. Kian lifts her and runs out of the bedroom. Miliano opens the front door and runs next to his brother, with the only thought in his head that their princess needs help. Miliano opens the pack hospital entrance with a loud bang and screams at the staff to help her. Gina quickly arrives at the brothers’ side, who have Aleida’s unconscious body in their arms. She yells an order to the nearest nurses and is quick to escort them into a room. Aleida’s breath begins to subside and is now coming out in little puffs like she gets no air. Aleida lies on the hospital bed with all sorts of hospital machines connected to her body, and her skin is similar to bleach with its paleness.

“What happened?” Gina asks while taking a blood test from Aleida’s pale arm.

“Aleida ran into the bathroom and started vomiting. She couldn’t open the bathroom door, which led us to kick the door open. There was blood everywhere...” Miliano answers with pain when he remembers the sight before them.

“She vomited blood!?” Gina exclaims in horror.

Kian and Miliano nod their heads with a terrified look on their faces. Gina works fast and doesn’t slow down. Aleida’s mates can’t do anything else than stand there and pray to the moon goddess that she’ll survive. The heart monitor finally releases stable beepings. Everyone in the room is breathing out a sigh of relief.

“She’s stable for now, but I’ve got to tell you, I have no idea why her body reacts like this. I’ve never seen anything like this. All her organs are fine, and there’s nothing wrong with her physique at all. I don’t know what to do!” Gina exclaims with pure frustration written over her face.

Before she walks out of the room, she tells Kian and Miliano to call her if something happens. The door clicks shut, and they sit down at the side of their mate’s bed.

“What do you think of this?” Miliano asks after a couple of minutes of silence.

“I don’t know, brother, I don’t know,” Kian answers with a sigh. “Something is obviously wrong with her.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what it is.”

“We should probably call Nathan and Jason.”

“Yeah, you do that, and I call the betas in here; maybe they know something of this.”

Aleida POV

The void, this fucking stupid void! I’m back here again and can’t do shit about it! Every time I finally manage to relax, believing that I won’t have to come back here, it happens. I’m drawn into myself and believe me, it’s a pain in the ass every time. It feels like my whole body is on fire. Everything hurts, and there’s no one to help me. The worst thing about being inside this void is that I don’t have anyone to talk to. I have myself, and it’s not an entertaining company. However, this time it feels different. I can feel a force somewhere around me without successfully locating from where it comes. An icy laugh echoes in the void until she suddenly stands there in front of me—the woman who brought me here several times and also took over my body once before.

“Who are you, and what the hell do you want!?” I scream at her.

She’s standing in front of me, giving me an innocent look. However, her entire aura is dark, and her facial expressions show pure evil. She has black hair and almost yellow eyes staring at me.

“What are you talking about, Aleida? I just want to play a little,” she answers in a tone that sounds playful.

“Cut the bullshit! Who the hell are you, and what do you want!?” I repeat; she sighs and looks bored.

“I want to play a game with you.”

“A game? What for?”

“For my own sake. I was never enough for any one of your precious ‘boys,’” she answers.

What? My boys? Who the fuck is this woman!?

“Confused?” she asks and laughs again. “I can see why since you don’t even know the story. I guess you weren’t important enough for them to tell you.”

“Or you weren’t important enough to be told about,” I answer her, angry, which makes her snarl at me and slap me across the face while I cough blood, and she just sighs.

“Poor little Aleida, always so weak and unimportant. You don’t even know the story, and still, you dare to judge me. You must be more stupid than I first thought. But don’t worry, you’ll know everything soon enough.”

She walks around me in circles with a faraway look on her face.

“First, let me tell you about when I met your brothers... Both these beautiful males were pawns for me to take over the whole werewolf population. Unfortunately, both of your stupid brothers rejected me, said that it was more important to find their baby sister,” she smacks her tongue with disgust. “That made them weak; you make them weak. That’s when I met Miliano’s beta, Killian. Oh, did I have fun with that one? I played him from the beginning, and the poor baby didn’t even know it. But he did what I asked of him; he took me to the alpha twins.”

She chuckles at her memories, and I give her a scared look; is she talking about...

“That’s right. I planned to make the alpha twins my puppets and do everything I wanted. The problem was that I fell in love with both of them. They had started to fight more and more about finding their stupid mates instead of being with me. I’m their destiny; they just don’t know it at the moment. So I tried one last thing, and that was to sleep with both of them.”

Her words break my heart because I can tell she’s telling the truth. Both my mates gave the finest and most important thing they had to someone else. In the world of werewolves, there’s a shame not to save yourself for your mate. It’s a gift you give to each other, to be the first and the last to ever have sex with. So for me personally, it’s essential, and now that I know the truth, that they did not wait, I feel betrayed.

“Yeah, that’s right. Your mates fucked me, and they loved it. They will forever compare your sex time with me. You’ll never be their first, and you’ll never be their best. They were praying on their knees to get to put their dicks in me. I was just happy to be helpful. Their wolves didn’t even have to give in for their animal needs; Kian and Miliano did that without them. Do you understand now, Aleida? They don’t need you because they have me, and they’ll never get rid of me! You’re just a toy. Something they can bring out and play with when they have nothing else to do. You’re dirt for them. Your flabby little pussy can’t even take care of them properly. Both of them were thinking about me when they fucked you last night. Oh yeah, don’t think that I don’t know when they put their dicks into some whore!”

The woman jumps me and hit me. She has her knees over my arms, which make me motionless. I can’t get her off me; thank God and the goddess that she gets off me shortly after. She begins to walk away but stops and turns to me.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Stay away from my mates or suffer from my wrath.”

“It’s you who made me vomit, wasn’t it?” I ask in a menacing voice while she laughs again.

“No, dear Aleida; I didn’t. It’s your body reacting to the marking.”

“But that doesn’t make sense!”

“Yes, it does. I fixed it so that neither Miliano nor Kian will ever be able to mark anyone else than me; if they try to mark someone else, then that person slowly will die,” she answers, and her words make my heart stop. “That’s right, Aleida. You’re dying, and no one can nor will help you!”