Mated To The Crippled Alpha

Chapter 463: Come With Me

Wisteria.It had been over a year since I’d last seen her, and yet there she was — standing at my wedding like a ghost that had decided, on its own terms, that it was done staying buried.

So she hadn’t died after all.

The moment I saw her, unease flooded through me, cold and immediate, the kind that bypasses thought entirely and goes straight to the body. Every person at this ceremony had been personally invited by Lewis. There was no way she had slipped through on her own. Someone on the inside had helped her — someone with enough influence and access to clear the space and create exactly the right opening at exactly the right moment.

Eleanor.

It had always been Eleanor. She had never stopped, not for a single day.

"Riley." Wisteria’s voice was all silk and slow poison, calibrated to unsettle. "Still standing, I see. How fortunate for you. After everything, you’re still breathing — and now you even have two precious little ones."

Kids.

Ice moved through my veins before I could stop it. Eleanor had taken my children once before. The thought arrived without warning and wouldn’t leave.

"Don’t worry about them," Wisteria said, reading my face with the ease of someone who had been studying it for years. "I only have one target today, and that’s you. Come with me now, quietly, and nothing happens to them. Refuse — and I start cutting off their fingers, one by one, until you change your mind."

"Don’t." My voice shook despite every effort. "Don’t touch them. I’ll go."

She smiled — slow, satisfied, thoroughly cruel. "Good girl."

She walked me out through the back of the venue with the calm of someone executing a plan they’ve rehearsed many times. A car was already waiting, engine running, positioned exactly where it needed to be. This had been planned down to the last detail, and the fact that she had chosen today — my wedding day, the day I had fought through two lifetimes to reach — was not accidental. It was the point.

She shoved me hard into the back seat. The driver was a woman I recognized from the Hudson household, almost certainly the same one who had helped Wisteria disappear the first time. Before I could steady myself, something cold and sharp pressed into my side.

A knife.

This was it. The same shape as before, the same ending circling back around. The last time, Wisteria had been the one to finish my life. No matter how many times the world reset itself, it always seemed to find its way back to this — her, and a blade, and me running out of road.

The car moved fast through streets that blurred past the window. It didn’t take long before I recognized where we were heading.

A cemetery.

She hadn’t killed me on sight because she needed a stage. She had been saving this for Silas’s grave — intending to finish things where she’d always imagined finishing them, with the kind of theatrical cruelty that required an audience even if the audience was only the dead. We pulled up in front of his tombstone. The plot was clean, well-maintained, tended to with a care that spoke of regular visits. Someone had been coming here, keeping it as though it mattered, as though the grief were still fresh.

"Kneel," Wisteria said, her voice stripped of everything except the command.

"Where are my children?" I demanded.

She answered by driving her foot hard into the back of my knee. I dropped to the cold ground, teeth clenched, refusing to let the pain register on my face. "I owe you nothing," I said, steadying my voice against the impact still ringing through my leg. "From beginning to end, I never wronged you. It was you and Silas who took from me — everything, every time. You want me to kneel before him? Tell me honestly — does he deserve that?"

"You still dare—" She raised her hand.

I caught her wrist. And felt it immediately — how little strength remained in her grip, how much Lewis’s blow had taken from her without any of us fully realizing it at the time. She was upright on spite alone, and spite was the only thing still holding her together.

"If it weren’t for you, our child would still be alive!" The words came out cracked and ragged.

"You think that’s unfair?" I held her gaze without flinching. "What about me? I loved you like a sister. That was real — every bit of it. And you used it as a tool to destroy me, deliberately and completely. Wisteria — I don’t deserve to die. You do. Both of you."

Before I could finish the sentence, the maid grabbed the back of my neck with both hands and drove my head forward into the gravestone. The impact rang through my skull like something breaking, and the world tilted sideways, time going strange and slow. I barely had time to breathe through it before Wisteria crouched directly in front of me, knife in hand, her eyes burning with something that had moved entirely beyond reason.

"Do you know why I hate you?" Her voice cracked at the edges, the silk finally fraying. "The Sanders handed me everything once — I was their treasured girl, treated like I was made of glass, like I was irreplaceable. Then you came along. Why you? Why does someone like you — sinful, unworthy, with no right to any of it — get to be loved by everyone who matters? I dragged you through the mud. I turned people against you. I tried to make you ugly and broken beyond recognition. And no matter what I did, no matter how far I pushed, you never shattered." Her face twisted into something I barely recognized. "Do you understand how maddening that is? To destroy someone over and over and watch them keep standing?"

Her voice dropped to something quieter and more frightening. "The Blackwells are gone. My life is ruins. I’ve wanted to die for a long time, Riley — but I refuse to go alone. I will drag you down with me. That much, at least, I can still take."

"You’re insane," I said.

The word landed in the silence between us and stayed there — plain and accurate and entirely insufficient for what was standing in front of me.