CHAPTER 189: _ EPIPHANY

Amias’s concern, the genuine, unfiltered alarm in his silvery eyes, is the first such emotion she has seen directed at her from her own son in years.

Clarissa freezes, looking up at him. She opens her mouth to offer a conscious lie, but the sight of his face, the pain, the tears, and the love that had been buried alive she finds in it, overcomes her.

Her rigid expression softens completely. A genuine, unguarded tear slides down her own cheek. She raises a trembling hand and gently touches his jaw, her fingers cool against his feverish skin.

"I’m fine, darling," she manages, straining for the words under the circumstances.

However, the sheer emotion behind them is devastating. "I just... I just swallowed some perfume wrong. Don’t worry about it."

"I’m not a kid, mother. I know when I’m being lied to. No wolf coughs out blood from swallowing perfume." Amias insists, gripping her tighter. "I smell it. I smell the decay! It’s not right. Tell me the truth, Clarissa." He guides her toward the edge of his unmade bed, clearing a space of torn linen and feathers, forcing her to sit down.

She is shaking now. The tears she had held back for a lifetime of fake smiles begin to leak freely. She is no longer the scheming Luna Amias despises, but a terrified woman facing an impossible truth. It breaks him to see her like this. She might not be the perfect mother, but he’s horrible for judging her.

After all, she is but a living being. One with emotions and needs.

Amias sits beside her, letting his rough hand settle on her shoulder. He is the angry son who has suddenly turned protector. "Please, Mother. Tell me. I can handle it. I can fix it."

He begs, his voice shaking with fright, mirroring the brokenness of the man he just humiliated... Corvin. But this time, the begging is born of love, not blackmail. If anything happens to this woman, then he’s completely lost in this world.

After all, she is the only one who genuinely cares for him in this hell where he lives. How can he continue to push forward knowing just how unwanted he’d be in the absence of his Mother?

No. It can’t be. She is going nowhere.

Clarissa leans into his touch, her breath shuddering. The dam of her composure breaks completely. She looks at the wreckage of the room, at the wreckage of their relationship, and finally, into her son’s tear-filled eyes.

"You’re right, Amias. I lied," she whispers, the terrible truth falling into the chaos of the room like another shard of glass.

"I’m dying. My wolf... she’s withering away."

W-what?! A withering wolf? Isn’t that... a dying one? When a wolf dies, it’s like cancer that claims the life of its host. Wolves are a product of a half portion of each werewolf’s souls, borrowed by the goddess to create a better half. From the moment a wolf is awakened, the borrowed part of your soul does, making you whole.

Now, if that part dies, it is no longer in the hands of the goddess to sustain you as what has been taken has been returned. Leaving the job to your feeble human body. One that fails every damn time. One too weakened to fight off the toxin of a dead wolf.

In short, it means his mother is as good as dead, epiphany hits Amias. Time is the only thing keeping her from falling apart now. One that would still go against her.

Amias just stares at the empty space in front of him. The silence is deafening. The confession is so immense, so impossible, it makes the heartbreak over Heidi feel like a child’s scraped knee.

"What?" he breathes, the single syllable a sound of utter devastation and disbelief.

"A wolf doesn’t die of age or sickness, Amias. You know that. She withers from... rejection," Clarissa explains, her voice gaining a strange, brittle clarity. "When the mate bond is truly abandoned for my union with Alpha, when the life the goddess chose for me is permanently tainted, and the wolf cannot sustain the wound... she simply gives up. She’s been giving up for years. I should have been with my mate, but I did what I had to for my family. I kept the existence of my mate from them because he’s... he’s the servant." she sobs, fixating her watery gaze on the floor.

Amias raises a brow. "That servant?"

"Yes," she nods. "But he’s been crucified. The pack had him killed, so there’s no remedy for me. I shouldn’t have acknowledged the bond. I should never have been intimate with him. The moment his mark branded me, we sealed our fate; together, for better and for worse. But he died without a proper resolution. He was killed unjustly, and it sickened my wolf. It..." She breaks off to give way to another round of hot tears.

That servant. The man Amias had always scorned as the pathetic source of his mother’s shame and his own ostracization. He wasn’t a cheap tryst; he was her fated mate. The man the Moon Goddess had decreed was hers, killed by the very Pack laws his father enforced.

The reality of how little he knows of the woman continues to pierce a hole through his heart.

Now, she’s dying for it. Clarissa, the woman he hated for her supposed betrayal, is dying because of his father’s real betrayal.

The knowledge is a cold, final spike driven through his heart. His father, the man he strove to impress, is not just a cheater and a politician; he is a slow-motion murderer. Amias, by siding with his father’s principles and condemning his mother, has been complicit in her death.

I didn’t see it. I was so consumed by the appearance of honor, the fear of my father’s displeasure, and the shame of the scandal, that I never looked at the source of her pain. I saw the crime; I never saw the trauma. I demanded perfect fidelity from a woman who was already living through the betrayal of her husband.

Amias closes his eyes, unable to look at her, unable to look at the guilt that coats him like the dust and ink of his destroyed room. His tears turn bitter and silent again, falling onto the shoulder of the dying woman he finally, truly sees. The real tragedy was never Heidi. It was always here.

He brings his hands up, clenching the soft fabric of his mother’s shoulder suit, burying his face in the space between her neck and shoulder. He can smell the faint, heartbreaking scent of her failing wolf—a mix of her usual floral perfume and something metallic and sick, like withered leaves and rain.

I should have known! I am an Alpha wolf, the highest rank of werewolf. I should have smelled the rejection-sickness. I should have felt the hollowness of her wolf, the slow leak of her soul over years of neglect. Instead, I stood by, an obedient, arrogant son, adding my own icy condemnation to the mountain of his father’s cruelty.

Vark, who is usually so loud and aggressively possessive, is now silent, defeated, and mournful. The wolf’s sorrow over the mate he just lost is nothing compared to the deep, resonant grief for the Luna who is dying because of a shattered bond. The primal tragedy of a fated mate bond being severed by murder and politics resonates deeply within the core of every Alpha wolf.

The floodgates of Amias’s fear, which had governed his entire life, burst open, replaced not by emptiness, but by incandescent hatred.

It starts with his father, Alpha Tobias.

He hates the man. The hate is pure, and utterly consuming. He hates him for neglecting his mother, pushing her to seek comfort with her fated mate, and then punishing her with a lifetime of shame and a slow, agonizing death.

He hates him for the betrayal of the wolf code, for marrying three women, for his womanizing, and for his public displays of disrespect that poisoned Clarissa’s life force.

He hates him for dividing the family, for the twisted psychological game that perpetually pits Amias and his half-brothers against one another. The Alpha created a system where they have to claw at each other’s throats, proving their worth by being "above each other" to earn his elusive "good graces." This wasn’t about succession; it was about Tobias’s cruel ego.

My entire life has been a performance for a murderer! I fought Darien, I despised the twins, I sacrificed my own happiness, all to impress a man who killed my mother with indifference!

The hatred spreads like an infectious disease of the soul, consuming the whole structure that enabled this injustice. He hates the Pack for their complicity, for their judgments, for the humiliation and stigma Clarissa endured after her affair was discovered. He hates the Alpha Council for allowing this political, arranged marriage to destroy a sacred fated bond.

The pain of loss has given way to the icy, focused clarity of a man who suddenly has nothing left to lose but everything to avenge.