Sold as the Alpha King’s Breeder

Chapter 54: What Happened to Seraphine?

Rowan-Valoria

Boy, did things unravel.

We hadn’t been able to sleep for long before Damian’s warriors found us again. Dad led us deeper into

the forest, crossing the river and attempting to back track towards Mirage, but it was too late. The forest

was full of wolves. We were two against an impossible force.

“What pack did that woman say she was from?’ Dad said, his voice cracking over the mind-link as we

began to climb up the base of the mountains, our paws slipping on the uneven, fragile shale rock.

“Greenbriar, I think,’ I answered, my legs sore and hips aching from the exercise. I ran in my wolf from

every single morning and had done so for years. But spending over twenty-four hours as a wolf was

causing an indescribable exhaustion and something I had never experienced before.

Plus, I was watching my dad’s plans fall through, and he was pissed. Especially after we crested the top

of a cliff face looking over the forest and our plane buzzed the top of our heads.

*Damnit!” he said, turning his head to watch it ascend into the clouds.

‘That was us, wasn’t it

‘Yes, obviously. Come on, we have no choice but to keep going. They’re pushing us into the mountains,

and we’re outnumbered-‘

The mountains? What exactly are you planning,

‘I was wrong, Rowan. There’s too many of them. I hadn’t expected Damian to have made alliances with

other packs in Valoria, especially without my knowledge. We have to get home

“By crossing the mountains? Are you insane? That’ll take us weeks!”

.

Howling drifted from the trees below as we continued to climb, and I winced, torn between two

impossible paths.

How did I prefer to die? Being torn apart by wolves, or dying of exposure in the mountains between the

North and Valoria?

‘We have no choice. They’re expecting us to travel through the forest until we reach the Northern Tier.

Stop whining, let’s go.’

I followed him up and over another ridge, padding further and further into the clouds until I finally looked

down, seeing a full view of what had once been Mirage. Fires burned in pockets across the city. I could

see the destruction of the buildings from our perch. And there was the castle, standing like an

untouchable fortress amongst fields of golden grass.

And ahead of us?

I looked up where Dad had stopped and stretched his legs.

Nothing but miles, and miles, and miles of stone.

***

One Week Later

* Who did these belong to?” I asked, pulling the jeans on and tucking in the sweater I had pulled over my

head. Dad was lacing up a pair of boots, grimacing as he pulled the laces taunt.

“Really want to know?” he said through his teeth as he tied the other boot. We were sore and dead tired,

having spent nearly a week trudging through overgrown valleys and over the peaks of snow capped

mountains.

But the terrain we were in now was remarkably changed, the once perfectly sculpted mountains giving

way to deep craters and sharp, uneven peaks. Nothing grew here, and fields and fields of boulders

marked our journey between valleys. This hadn’t been what I was expecting. The mountains were far

east, lined by thick, almost impenetrable forests.

We saw a flag. A familiar flag. Waving in the stiff, unrelenting breeze. The flag of Winter Forest.

The flag had marked the entrance to a narrow cave opening and inside we had found bodies.

Dad had stood at the cave’s entrance for a long time, peering into its depths. We didn’t speak as we

inspected the bodies, still fully dressed under layers of rotting fabric. He counted them, one by one, and

after we found their backpacks, we shifted and changed into the spare clothes they had brought on their

journey.

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Chapter 54: What Happened to Seraphine?

“Who are they?” I asked, running my fingers through my matted, filthy hair. The bodies were nothing by

bone by now, and must have been here for a long, long time. But their clothes were surprisingly modern

compared to how old I thought they must have been.

“The missing explorers. They’ve been here for roughly fifteen years, give or take.”

“You mean the expedition you sent out when I was a kid? Really? This is them?” I looked down at the

bones at my feet, my stomach tightening as the memory of their departure from Winter Forest, all of us

watching and cheering them on as they disappeared into the forest, bound for the mountains.

I remembered looking back at Gemma, who had tears in her eyes as she watched her mother lead the

group. Seraphine had looked back at her, smiling, and blew her a kiss.

They never came back.

“Seraphine? Is she-” I tried to remember what Seraphine might have been wearing, but they had dressed

in a similar fashion for the journey. It was damn near impossible to tell them apart.

“Two are missing. I’m not sure,” Dad said briskly, tossing an empty backpack out of the cave opening. He

turned back, walking deeper into the cave where it was dark enough to swallow his body whole.

“Dad!”

“I’m here. I’m not going to go far. Look through the packs for anything like flashlights or matches. They

had a fire in here, I can see the ash on the cave walls.”

I did as I was told, rifling through each of the backpacks. I collected two matchbooks that were in decent

shape and at least half full, and a lighter that was dry, useless. I also found a compass and popped it

open, noting we were facing exactly due North.

“What were they looking for?” I asked as Dad came out of the darkness. He had his hands tucked into

the pockets of the jacket he had found as he scanned the ground once more, crouching down to

examine the bodies.

*Seraphine convinced me to have a team sent into the mountains. No one had ever crossed the

mountains before, at least as far as we know. Generally speaking, when we travel by land from the

Northern Tier to Mirage, we do so through the forest, but she was convinced there was more to find to

the east, that it could be faster if we found this river. It’s hundreds, if not a thousand miles of mountains

and valleys between Winter Forest and Valoria on the east. This was shortly after the war when our

planes and boats were in disrepair and supplies were short. We were desperate, and Seraphine, she

well. She said halfway through the mountains was a river that she believed linked up with the river that

runs through Valoria, through Mirage. She believed she could find it, it would be faster than traveling

through the forest by land.”

“How did she know there was a river?” | asked. I remembered Seraphine, and she was always a strange

woman. Not in a bad way, but in a way that made me wonder if she knew and saw things most people

couldn’t. My parents trusted her.

“It didn’t matter to me at the time. It sounded plausible. There were warriors that wanted to go, begged in

fact. So, your mother and I gave our permission.”

“I remember them leaving for the expedition. I wanted to go with them.”

“I remember that,” Dad said with a sober smile, “You fought us for weeks.”

Thad only been ten or eleven at the time. The expedition had opened up a whole new world for me and

the other boys in Winter Forest. We were the generation born after the war, confined to one place while

the adults cleaned up the mess. Suddenly, the small bubble we had been living in had opened up, and

we wanted out.

“What killed them?” I asked, moving towards the entrance of the cave.

“Exposure, starvation. I’m not sure. I’d need to inspect them closer, but for now, we need to find a place

to rest and start a fire. Are you hungry?”