Awakening The Silver Wolf

DARIUS POV 

Ravenna has been silent for too long. 

I resisted the urge to put my shirt back on and just stood there. Let her see what a lovely man my father was. 

Eventually, I heard her move. She took a few steps forward and stopped before she took another step and then she was standing behind me, just a few feet away from my mutilated flesh. 

I clenched my fist to stop them from shaking as she just stood there and observed. 

Lucian was the only one that has seen me like this. All my lovers over the years have never. When I fucked, I fucked from the back. That way they couldn't claw at my back. And sometimes I stay fully naked. 

Showing my back to Ravenna was like baring my soul to her. 

"Your father did this to you?" Ravenna whispered, her voice small.

My anger had left me, leaving me empty. "He did." 

I inhaled deeply when I felt her finger tracing my back. "Ravenna." Her name was a warning, a plea, a call. I wasn't sure. 

"God," she choked out. I could hear the tears in her voice. 

I could only imagine the view she was getting. I didn't need to look to know she was studying me. 

I felt her gaze on the deep scars—some pale and healed, others darker, still angry, as though they had never truly closed. 

They were all my father's doing. 

The stab wound just beneath my shoulder blade. The whip marks that crisscrossed down to my lower back. The burn scar where hot iron had once pressed against my skin, left an imprint of my father's rage. The knife slashes—random and cruel, like the marks of someone trying to carve their own hatred into me. 

I knew each and every one of these scars because I had stood in the mirror for hours, asking myself what I did wrong. I was only just a child. I was only just ten. 

I swallowed, but the dry ache in my throat wouldn't fade. The silence stretched long between us, but there was no need for words. She now knew. 

"This is me, Ravenna," I said, my voice rough. "All of me. It's not pretty, but it's mine."

I clenched my fists at my sides, bracing myself. I wasn't ashamed, not anymore. But it felt like opening an old wound, like letting it bleed all over again.

The faint rustle of her breath was the only sound for a long moment, and then, finally, her fingers brushed against my back again—tentative at first, as if testing me, testing the scars. 

I held still, not breathing, feeling the warmth of her touch spread through the coldness that had always clung to me. 

It should've hurt, but it didn't. The touch was gentle, almost reverent, as though she could see beyond the violence, beyond the man his father had tried to make me. Who was that man? 

"Did it hurt?" she asked, her voice still shaking. 

I snorted, but there was no humor in it. 

I thought about the times I'd screamed, the way my body had shaken under the weight of my father's fury and pain. 

How each strike had carved deeper, not just into my skin, but into my soul. But I had learned to bury it, to swallow the pain.

"Not as much as you'd think," I said, my lips curving into a bitter smile. "After a while, it's just the skin. The rest of you… you learn to deal with it. You don't let it break you." But it did break me. My father has left his mark on my flash, my soul. That bastard did break me. 

"Oh Darius," Ravenna whispered. And then she hugged me. She wound her arms around me and hugged me, her face pressed into my back. Then she sobbed a full sob that shook both of us. Her tears wet my back, rolling down. And it seemed like she was cleansing my father's touch off me with her tears. 

A strange feeling filled my chest. Maybe it was comfort. Or maybe, for the first time, it was the recognition that I wasn't alone with my scars anymore. That somehow, in this quiet moment, they weren't just mine.

I squeezed my eyes shut to keep the tears at bay, but a stubborn one slipped out anyway. 

"Don't cry for me, sweetheart," I whispered. "I don't deserve your tears." 

That only made her cry harder, her arms tightening around me, her tears rolling down my back. 

I unclenched my fists and brought them up to hold her arms around me, squeezing them gently.

"Why?" Ravenna asked, her voice choked. "Why would he do that to you? Why would he do this to his own son?!"

If only she knew how many times I had asked that question, how many times I had begged him to give me a reason, just one, for why he would punish me like this.

But all he'd say was, "You will become a beast, you will kill them all. She did not deserve to die like that."

Those words had never made any sense to me, but as I grew they became clear. My father wanted revenge for his wife, his mate, and my mother. 

He was a coward, hiding under the pretense of being a good leader, so he turned his son into his weapon and drilled into his head that he must get revenge. He did it so perfectly, that even when he died, all his son could think of and do was to carry out his father's will. 

That was what I was made for. To kill them all, those who had killed my mother. That had been the plan in the beginning but that plan changed. Why kill them all for nothing when you could rule them? That would be a worse fate than death. 

"To make me the perfect weapon," I answered Ravenna. 

"A weapon," she repeated. "A goddamned weapon." The sound of Ravenna sniffing was the only sound in the room. "How old were you?"

"Ten." 

Ravenna made a choked sound, and her arms around me trembled. No, her whole body trembled. 

"If he was alive I would have killed him," she growled. "He would have suffered ten times the pain you suffered."

My heart clenched and I smiled softly. I turned around and took Ravenna's tear-streaked face into my hands, cleaning her tears with my thumb. "He died painfully." 

Ravenna looked up at me with red and swollen eyes. "How?"

I smiled. "Poison. A very, very slow and painful type of poison." 

Ravenna mirrored my smile. "Good." 

She sighed deeply and long before her arms came around me once again. They fitted perfectly like they were meant to be there. She pressed her face on my naked chest and I shuddered. Fuck. This was the first time Revanna was touching my bare skin. 

My dick threatened to raise but I forced it down. Ravenna was too close, she would feel it. Fuck fuck fuck! I'm not supposed to be having thoughts like this right now. 

"I'm sorry, Darius," Ravenna said, dragging my mind out of the gutter it had crawled into.

I frowned down at her hair. "Why a—"

"Shush."

I kept my mouth shut.

"I'm sorry," she said again, and I buried my face into her hair, inhaling her soothing scent. "I'm sorry for what your father did to you. I'm sorry for what you had to go through. I'm sorry that your childhood was messed up. I'm sorry I ever judged you." 

"Hey." I pulled her away to look at her face. Fresh tears were forming in her eyes and I wiped them away. "You have every right to judge me, Ravenna. Every goddamn right. Judge me, curse me, hate me. It's all justified. Okay?"

"I don't hate you," she said, her voice small, her shoulders slumped. 

I pulled her back to me and hugged her tightly. "I know, baby."