Chapter 563

Olivia

My hands shook uncontrollably as I stepped up to the edge of the pit, clutching the metal grating until my knuckles turned white. A thick, cloying stench wafted up from the darkness below—the unmistakable reek of death and decay.

Despite the waves of nausea already roiling in my gut, I leaned forward for a closer look.

“Liv, I really don't think you want to see this,” Nathan warned, his voice strained. He reached out as if to pull me back, but I shrugged off his hand.

“I have to,” I murmured, swallowing hard against the rising bile. “As Luna, it’s my duty to bear witness.”

Nathan paused, blinking confusedly at me for a few moments, but said nothing. We had already had this conversation before, when he had come out into the garden with his phone clutched in his hand. He had insisted on coming here alone to see what had happened, but I had refused to stay behind.

Drawing in a steadying breath, I willed my eyes to adjust to the dim light filtering down into the pit… and immediately wished I hadn’t.

A visceral sound of horror and revulsion tore out of my lips at the sight that awaited me—a picture of carnage and madness stared up at me. It was all I could do to not gag upon the sight of the blood and flesh that laid at the bottom of the pit.

“I told you that you wouldn’t want to see,” Nathan muttered from somewhere beside me. But his voice sounded far away, muffled by the sound of blood rushing through my ears.

At the center of the pit lay two bodies—or rather, one body and something that used to be a body. Montgomery, his clothes tattered and his wrists cut open, and what was once Dan.

“We’re not exactly sure what happened, Alpha,” one of the pit guards said, shame covering his face. “One moment, it sounded as if they were having an argument, but whatever they were saying didn’t really make any sense.”

“And then what happened?” I blurted out before Nathan could speak.

The guard shook his head. “I don’t know. We just heard screaming. Came back here and found them like this.”

Nathan swallowed. “It looks like Montgomery tore Dan to shreds, then cut his wrists with one of Dan’s bones,” he said, nodding toward an especially bloody shard of broken-off bone beside Montgomery’s limp wrist. “A murder suicide.”

“Some cannibalism, too, from the looks of it,” the guard added.

It all made sense now—the blood on Montgomery’s mouth, the wild look in his still-open eyes, the absolute mess of entrails and viscera all over the pit.

Montgomery hadn’t just killed Dan and then killed himself. He had likely shifted into his wolf form, brutalized him, then shifted back and killed himself with a matter of minutes before the guards could even see.

Madness. Utter madness. Had we caused this, by putting them in the pit and leaving them here? Were we any better than them now?

I felt sick as I looked down at the nightmarish scene in front of me. I couldn’t look anymore, not even for a second longer. With another wave of bile rising in my throat, I whirled around and clamped my hand over my mouth, but it was no use. I retched before I could even stop myself.

Heaving and gasping, I felt Nathan’s steadying hand on my back as he held my hair away from my face. For several agonizing moments the retches continued to wrack my frame, until finally only hollow dry heaves remained.

“Easy, easy,” Nathan murmured, guiding me back to lean against the nearest section of chain link fencing. Retrieving a water bottle from his pocket, he uncapped it and pressed it into my trembling hands. “Take slow sips.”

I did as he instructed, the cool liquid soothing my raw throat inch by inch. Drawing in a ragged breath, I lifted my haunted gaze to meet his sympathetic one.

“I guess you did warn me,” I rasped out, ashamed at how childishly my voice quivered as I spoke.

Nathan simply shook his head. “You have nothing to apologize for, Liv. I know why you felt it was necessary to see it with your own eyes.” His jaw tightened grimly. “And trust me… I understand the desire to bear witness to the darker sides of the world we live in.”

A tremor passed through me at his words, my mind flashing back to the horrors I had just glimpsed lying in that pit. “Did they...? H-How could they...?”

“A month in the pit will do things to people that we can’t comprehend,” Nathan said softly, sinking down onto the grass beside me. “And sometimes, it awakens things in people that were simply dormant.”

Dormant. I supposed Nathan had a point; Montgomery was a monster, and perhaps he had had this propensity for evil acts like this from the beginning.

But still, it made my stomach churn. Thankfully, I managed to force the queasiness down through sheer force of will this time, although I knew the image would haunt both of us forever.

“Was this our fault?” I managed after a few moments of silence.

Nathan didn’t respond for some time, and eventually, I began to wonder if he might respond at all. But as the lights of the police cars and ambulance approaching began to color his face in reds and blues, he shook his head.

“I wish I had the answer to that,” was all he said. “But I’d like to hope that it wasn’t.”

Over the next hour, statements were made, crime scene pictures were taken, and a constant stream of officers and EMTs came in and out of the pit.

They ultimately came to the conclusion, since confinement was not a practice solely used by our pack but was still in use by some others, that this was nothing more than a murder suicide—that Montgomery had given in to his primal urges and killed Dan, then killed himself. They had no family to press charges, and no one that cared.

The world already saw them as monsters. Not that that made it feel any better.

Although, if I was being honest with myself, some deeply buried, primal part of me felt a bizarre sense of… satisfaction? Vindication, maybe? That these men who had so casually exploited and brutalized innocent women, my own mother included, had, in the end, succumbed to their own most savage, animalistic urges.

They had seen women’s bodies and lives as little more than pieces of meat to be consumed. And in their unhinged, detached-from-reality state, they had ultimately turned on one another in a frenzy of literal consumption.

An eye for an eye, one could say—although of course, I would never voice such a disturbingly morbid thought out loud.

“We’ll need to handle this properly,” I said as we watched the police work in the pit below. “We can’t do—” I gestured at the scene around us— “this again.”

“You’re right,” Nathan agreed with a curt nod. “This should be the end of it. No more confinement, no more archaic traditions.”

“And for what it’s worth, I’m already planning on sending out the orders to fill the pit with concrete as soon as this is all said and done,” he added, turning to me. “We’ll abandon it, leave it alone. Let nature take over.”

A small yet profound sense of relief settled over me at his declaration. Over. Finally over. I could live with the ghosts of the past if it meant that no more blood would be spilled here.

“Come on,” Nathan said softly as my gaze wandered back toward the pit. “Let’s go home. The others are still waiting.”