Chapter 23: New Realm, New Rules

Chapter 23: New Realm, New Rules

🌙𝐋𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐡

My heart stuttered to a stop, my blood slowing to a terrifying crawl in my veins. A choked gasp escaped me, the air seeming to press down from every direction.

My gaze shifted shakily to his face, just behind the gun he now pressed to my forehead—the cold metal digging in, making sure I knew just how real this was.

This was no creation of my imagination.

His expression was inscrutable, blank in a way that contrasted sharply with what he was doing now. My body locked in place, so tightly wound in tension and fear that I didn’t dare make the slightest movement.

But within those eyes, utterly void of warmth or feeling, there was a flicker of red—ice crystals morphing into flecks of rubies.

Why was this happening?

Had I done something wrong?

I had refused to fight back against the woman precisely to avoid something like this happening.

I was sucked back into the past—all the times Charlotte and Ajax had hurt me until I could no longer take it; the times I had fought back. I was dragged to the night I was beaten until my body rejected my dinner.

I could taste the revolting sourness again, clawing up my throat as they all watched, laughing until I passed out. Only to wake up in the same place the next morning.

My eyes bulged, silently begging, trying to break through the wall of silence as the tension rose higher with every second. It almost felt like he was pushing the gun deeper into my skin.

"What..." I whispered. "...did I do?"

I was ten again, asking my aunty as she locked me out of the house in the cold. I had never known what I’d done back then, and now—even in another realm—it was the same.

In response to my question, his eyes only darkened, the right one twitching.

His fingers shifted against the gun, my heart lurching into my throat.

The trigger—his finger on the trigger...

Then—

The click was deafening.

In that fraction of a heartbeat, my world splintered, my thoughts scattering like shards of glass. I was no longer in this room.

I was a baby, the knife glinting in the moonlight from the window.

I was seven, clutching a doll with missing arms as Charlotte ripped it from my hands and hurled it into the mud.

I was nine, staring at my reflection in a cracked mirror, tracing the bruise blooming along my jaw.

I was ten, pounding on the locked door as frost bit my fingers, my cries muffled by the laughter on the other side.

I was twelve, curled on the kitchen floor, the taste of blood and bile pooling in my mouth while Ajax counted his strikes.

I was eighteen, watching as the truck’s impact launched my mother into the air before she fell with a cracking thud.

My eyes flew open. There was no strange light, no darkness—I was still in the room. Vladimir was looking at me, his hand lowering along with the gun.

For a moment, it didn’t make sense.

As if reading the confusion on my face, he finally spoke after what felt like a lifetime—which, in a way, it was.

"There are no bullets in the gun, Lilith." His voice was as unreadable as his expression, neutral to the point of cruelty.

I gulped. It felt like I had swallowed a stone. My words burst out. "Why did you do that?"

"Lilith," my name on his tongue again, soft even now, "why didn’t you shift?"

My mouth opened, but the words tangled in my throat, useless. The question hadn’t even settled in my mind yet—it still hovered, sharp-edged and unreal.

Vladimir didn’t give me the mercy of silence. He stepped closer, close enough that the faint scent of cold iron and pine pressed into my lungs.

"When Oyla had her hands on you," his voice was low, menacing, "when she wanted to maim you... why didn’t you shift?"

The question landed heavy, each word weighted with something that wasn’t anger but something far worse—expectation.

My pulse thudded in my ears. "I—" I began, but the thought scattered before it could form.

He didn’t wait.

"When you were falling, when you could have been broken apart on those stairs, why didn’t you let your wolf take over?"

My lips trembled. "Because—"

"Because what?"

I flinched. The sound of his voice wasn’t raised, but it cut like a blade, forcing me deeper into the corner I had made for myself.

My gaze darted to the floor. I began to mumble, the words barely making it past my lips.

"I knew I couldn’t win. I have no power here... I would have been crushed."

The last word stuck in my throat, tasting of defeat.

"So you curled yourself into a ball and let her hurt you?" The accusation was sharp, and so was the disappointment.

He read me through and through.

"She is stronger than me," I blurted, defensive. "Back home—"

"Back home you had no wolf, no power beyond human ability and the smallest trace of your Lycan’s. Here," he took a step, cutting the distance in half, "you have a loaded gun, yet you refuse to cock it—much less shoot."

I despised the way he was making sense, but a man with power this absolute could not begin to understand what it meant to be at the utter bottom of the food chain in everything that mattered in your life.

I crossed the distance between us, staring straight at him, frustration building. "And what if my gun is broken, defective, unusable—or I simply don’t know how to use it?"

He cut me off. "If it were your mother..."

I froze, the words withering on my lips.

He pushed on. "If it was your mother she tossed around like a rag doll..." He brought his face down, those beautiful analytical eyes boring into me. His head descended farther with the precision of a predator that knew its prey would never bolt.

He knew that—whether because of pride or crippling fear—I would let his breath ghost against my face. His head didn’t just dip, it closed in, deliberate, each inch stolen.

Cold pine and iron seeped into my lungs until breathing felt like permission I hadn’t given. My pulse lurched, and my skin prickled with something I hated to name. His proximity tangled danger with an ache I didn’t want to acknowledge.

His voice dropped, brushing my ear—not soft, not harsh, but in that dangerous middle ground where you couldn’t tell if the next sound would be a whisper or a shot.

"If I had a gun to her head, you would have acted. You wouldn’t weigh the risks in your head—you would move, shift, anything, even if it meant she would still be harmed... or die."

The timbre of his words thrummed through me, pulling heat to places it didn’t belong.

"For a sliver of a chance she might survive, you would do something. Still, you refuse to move—you make excuses, you let your past bind you..."

His head crept lower until he was right at my ear, his breath curling along the shell in a way that made my knees want to betray me.

"Yet... you want to destroy an Alpha. Bring him down to his knees."