The Female Hybrid Everyone Hated Chapter 16

The Female Hybrid Everyone Hated Chapter 16

The door opened.

Two vampires with cold, expressionless faces walked in. Between them they dragged a brutally beaten werewolf across the stone floor, leaving a trail of blood behind them. They threw the body into the center of the hall like it weighed nothing.

A second rogue followed – barely conscious, head hanging.

Then Brian walked in behind them, he waved his hand and the door slammed.

BOOM!!!

I stared at him from wherever I was hovering.

This was not the Brian I knew. The trembling, coin-counting, perpetually retreating Brian who had muttered prayers under his breath while setting up ritual circles and tried to run the moment things got complicated.

This Brian walked into the hall of the Ashburn pack with his hands loose at his sides and his face completely still and not a single trace of cowardice anywhere on him.

What had happened to him?

Dorian was on his feet immediately. “What exactly is going on here? Why are your vampires in my kingdom?”

“I told you I have proof,” Zane said. “Those are my proof.”

Dorian looked at the two bloodied rogues on the floor. “You called two beaten werewolves proof?”

“These are the rogues that were sent to assault, beat and almost rape Yara.” Zane’s voice was flat and absolute. “She told you about it. She told all of you. And every single one of you looked her in the eyes and told her she was lying to protect Rose.”

The hall was very quiet.

Zane moved in vampire speed, there and then simply elsewhere – appearing in front of the barely conscious rogues. He grabbed the nearest one by the hair and dragged him upright.

“Dorian.” He looked across the hall. “Check his memories and find out the truth yourself..I’m sure you know how.”

Dorian’s jaw tightened. “I don’t take orders from-”

“Then I will.” Tyson stood up from the floor interrupting him.

He was still holding my body. He set me down carefully – more carefully than he had touched me in twenty years — and then he crossed the hall with his eyes glowing red and his claws extending.

In great speed he appeared behind the man and drove his claws into the back of the rogue’s neck.

The rogue screamed.

Tyson went still. His eyes went distant – the look of a wolf reading memory, sifting through someone else’s past with his claws as the key. It lasted only seconds.

Then he pulled his claws free and fell to the ground like something had been cut loose from inside him.

“I should…i should have believed you,” he said. His voice came out wrecked and hollow. “Yara. I should have believed you.”

Zane looked at him for one moment. Then he grabbed the rogue whose memories had just been read and drove his hand into the man’s chest. He pulled out the heart and tossed it aside without looking at it.

He turned to Brian.

“One should be enough for you right?,” he asked.

Brian stepped forward and cracked his knuckles.

“It is,” he said in a very serious face.

He placed both hands on the second rogue’s head and began to cast. The spell unfolded slowly at first — then faster, the air in the hall thickening, the torches bending sideways – and then the entire environment shifted.

Then the hall disappeared and everything around changed.

Everyone in it witnessed what had happened that night.

–

They didn’t just see it. They lived it. Every person present felt what Rose had felt in those moments – her cold calculation, her contempt, her satisfaction. They heard her ordering the attack on herself. They felt her rehearsing her tears. They experienced her watching Yara suffer and feeling nothing but strategy.

“Watch carefully and see for yourselves what your precious goddess is really like.”

I leaned in to look.

Rose was talking to a bald man, and she gave out her order: “Rape Yara. Destroy her precious body and I’ll give you fifty thousand coins when it’s done.”

The rogue werewolf grinned lewdly. “You got it.”

Then the scene cut to the attempted rape itself.

I watched myself struggling with four rogue and fighting. The rogues did not letting go.

My hands curled into fists. My eyes burned.

They saw me running for minutes in the forest until I was caught. The rogues surrounded me,

outnumbering me, my weakened hybrid strength not enough – the beating, the terror, the moment they had me pinned and what they were about to do-

And then a figure appeared.

Moving so fast it was barely visible. Snapping the neck of the first rogue in a single motion. Tearing the heart from the second before he could react. Grabbing the last two and vanishing in a blur – all before I had even registered that help had arrived.

That memory was the worst thing I’d ever lived through.

I was the victim. I was the one in pain but none of them had believed me despite all I said.

Only a stranger had sent me a letter, telling me to stay strong.

I never thought the truth would come out. But Zane had made it happen.

It was all Zane all along.

I stared at him from where I floated above everything.

That was him. That night. He was the one who saved me.

I remembered waking up on the ground with two dead rogues beside me and the others simply gone and no explanation. I had thought I had somehow fought them off in a blackout, I had never known.

He had been there. He had been watching. And he had saved me and disappeared back into the shadows without saying a word – because getting close to me was the one thing he couldn’t afford to do.

Twenty five years of that.

Twenty five years of saving me from a distance and walking away.

The projection was still playing. Dorian lunged forward and tore up the head of the rogue..

Tyson and Aldric stood frozen, their faces had turned white filled with regrets.

“Did you all see that?” Zane glared at them. “That’s your foolish goddess.”

“She said something, and you believed it.”

“Meanwhile She’s the one who hired someone to rape Yara and beat her up!”

“And Yara tried to tell you. Do you remember how you reacted?”

They didn’t say anything.

They remembered.

When Rose lied and said I’d done it to her, Tyson had attacked me. Aldric had abandoned me. Dorian screamed at me to die and nearly killed me that day if not that I had great regenerative abilities.

“Thump. Tyson slammed his fist on the ground while he was still on his knees in front of my body. His voice broke. “I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Now you’re her brother? You’re the one who locked her in that hospital!” Zane spat.

He turned to Aldric and Dorian.

“And you, Aldric. You’re a warlock and a healer. You of all people should have seen she needed help from you. But you helped Tyson lock her away.”

“And you, Dorian. She stayed with you when you had nothing. She gave you the cure to your injuries by draining her blood to the last and you thanked her by marrying another woman.”

Every word landed like a hammer.

For the first time, I saw guilt on their faces. Pain filled their eyes

and body.

I didn’t know how Zane knew so much about me. But I was grateful.

He’d helped me escape. He’d told the truth. And now, even in death, I could watch them regret.

None of them left my body that night.

They each tried to make amends in their own way.

Tyson bought my artifact and asked me which one I liked.

Aldric brought the paintings we’d made together and talked about our memories.

Dorian held my hand tightly, his eyes red, begging me to come back.

Only Zane focused on planning my funeral and I saw his face showed no grief.

But I knew he was hurting the most. The truly heartbroken ones don’t always show it.

I went to the hospital to see Mom.

She’d just been resuscitated and was demanding to go home to see me.

The doctors said she was too unstable to leave.

I went to her bedside and said, “Mom, please rest and get better. I’ll come back to you in my next life.”

I didn’t think she could hear me.

But she looked up, and her eyes met mine.

Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“I understand,” she whispered. “Take care of yourself over there, okay?”

The funeral was a day later.

It was was a bright and cold morning. Everyone was in a black outfit.

My ashes in a carved stone vessel that Tyson had commissioned himself, it was not ceremonial obligation, but something he had chosen carefully and paid for with his own hands.

I watched from the edge of the treeline.

Tyson carried me to the grave himself. His face was the face of a man who had not slept in three days and did not expect to sleep again for a long time.

Aldric walked behind him. He had not spoken publicly since the rogues’ memories were revealed. He had not cast a single spell. He just walked and looked at the ground and carried whatever he was carrying with the same iron control he applied to everything except there was nothing controlled about his eyes.

Dorian came last. Alone.

Rose was not at the funeral.

I noticed that.

–

After the burial, after the words were said and the ashes were laid and the three of them had stood at my grave in silence for a long time

The treeline moved.

Zane stepped out first, walking with a determined look that told me he was about to do something bad.

He was not alone.

He had Rose by the throat.