Chapter 145: The wry

LYCAON

I should have looked out for number one. That thought arrived clean and unbothered even as my daughter’s power lifted me six feet off the ground by the throat, my borrowed feet kicking uselessly at empty air.

I’d thought I could take the risk and walk away from it clean. Popping that Delicate’s head had felt satisfying enough in the moment, one loose thread neatly cut before it could unravel anything further. I’d genuinely believed myself untouchable in this particular game, a god wrapped in a witch’s borrowed skin, moving through this estate like smoke through a keyhole. But a High Beta who wouldn’t stop sniffing at every wrong detail, paired with a Blossom bloodline witch who actually knew what she was doing rather than simply talented enough to look competent, had turned my satisfaction into something far more infuriating in the space of a few short minutes.

Now every careful plan I’d been quietly building, every thread I’d spent days weaving through Edelina’s ambitions and her son’s foolishness, threatened to drown entirely, assuming Bonnie didn’t finish the job herself first. She seemed remarkably keen on that particular outcome, her eyes blazing with something that looked, from this angle, distressingly like conviction.

I could still fight, technically. She was running on raw power stitched together with grief and fury, untrained, unrefined, and exactly the kind of storm that burned itself out fast if you knew how to wait it through patiently enough. Beating her down properly wouldn’t take much effort on my part. But beating her down while also contending with a second healer standing at her shoulder, and an actual Blossom witch positioned somewhere behind me with her hands still glowing, that particular math didn’t favor me nearly as cleanly as I would have liked.

I glanced sideways at the second healer standing beside my daughter, the one with dark, almost sinister-looking eyes and a stillness that suggested experience rather than luck. Who was she, exactly? Had my mother started manufacturing more of the very thing she’d driven to near extinction centuries ago, out of guilt or strategy or something else entirely I hadn’t yet accounted for? An interesting question. One for another day, assuming I survived long enough to actually ask it of anyone qualified to answer.

My mother herself.

Time was thin now. I had seconds, not minutes. I could feel Willow’s borrowed lungs starting to fail beneath the pressure Bonnie’s grip had already applied, the body’s own survival instincts screaming louder than my patience preferred.

I had to make the choice now.

So I turned my attention fully toward the would-be King, standing several feet back with barely restrained fury written across every line of his face. My valiant future son-in-law, though he had no idea yet how thoroughly he’d already earned that title in my private accounting. Our eyes met across the wreckage of that ruined infirmary hall, and I let my sight slide sideways into the threads of what waited, depending entirely on the choice I made in the next handful of heartbeats.

If I remained in the girl’s body, one future unspooled clearly enough. The truth of my body-hopping eventually surfacing regardless of how carefully I tried to bury it, the witch would spill all over me the moment she found her voice again, her testimony damning and complete. Another thread showed me clinging stubbornly to this vessel through prolonged, methodical torture, Bradley’s particular specialty apparently, until the real Willow finally clawed together enough scattered strength to reclaim herself entirely and flee with everything she’d absorbed while trapped beneath me.

I checked Bradley next, curious what his hands had in store for me if given the chance. Every single thread running through his grip ended in torture, extended and thorough, methodical in a way that suggested he’d had considerable practice extracting exactly what he wanted from people who didn’t want to give it.

I checked the alternative path too, the version where I abandoned Willow’s body entirely, right now, and fled straight back to my own prison beneath this estate. That path ended just as poorly. Discovered regardless of my haste, and worse, the very witch families who’d originally helped the former Alpha King seal me away in that tank would be summoned immediately to reinforce the runes I’d only just managed to loosen enough to dream walk through at all. Years of patient work, undone in an afternoon. I couldn’t allow that. Not now. Not this close to everything I’d been building toward.

I looked at my daughter last, hoping desperately for one clean read on her future, some thread I might exploit or avoid or simply understand better than I currently did.

I got... Nothing.

A wall met me instead, smooth, total and utterly without seam, and I actually laughed somewhere inside my own borrowed skull at the sheer novelty of it. Did she simply not have a future for me to see, some blank space where fate itself hadn’t yet decided her shape? Or was something else entirely shielding her from my sight, some protection I hadn’t accounted for, hadn’t even known to look for. I pressed harder against that block, testing its edges. But I still got nothing. Fascinating, genuinely fascinating, in a way that would have delighted me thoroughly under any other circumstances than currently dangling six feet off the ground by my own daughter’s telekinetic grip.

But there was one thread left worth settling on now, the actual choice sitting directly in front of me, unavoidable and pressing.

Losing this body. Losing whatever freedom I’d carved out riding around inside Willow’s convenient, trusted skin. It was a hard trade, uncomfortable in ways that reached beyond simple inconvenience, closer to genuine loss. But necessary. I couldn’t allow the witch to survive this encounter; I couldn’t risk her regaining enough of herself afterward to spill every secret she’d absorbed while I wore her like a favorite coat.

I made the choice somewhere in whatever passed for my heart these days, cold and deliberate, and then checked the thread one final time to see precisely how it would land once decided.

Beautifully, as it turned out.