If Abby could swear on her life to vouch for her father about something, that would be the unconditional love he had toward her mother, Riley.
Ryan loved Riley dearly, more than anything in his life, until he spent his life wallowing in despair after she lost her life all those years ago.
It was also because of this love of his toward her mate that he started abusing his younger daughter whom he believed to be the cause of Riley’s death afterward.
Abby could also see how intensely Riley loved her family from what she wrote in her diary.
Every page was a record of the beautiful moments she spent with the three of them and reading them brought back all those memories to the forefront of her mind, making her laugh and cry at the same time. Riley shared her love and affection equally between her mate and her two daughters, whom she adored the most in the world.
She also wrote how she enjoyed training Abby once she awakened her powers of a magic user at the tender age of eight, and how her father worried about the mother and daughter’s special identities. After all, witches weren’t really welcomed in this kingdom, but he never cared about those things. Riley expressed how she was blessed to find a mate like Ryan several times in the book.
Even Abby remembered how Ryan loved both his daughters equally, next only to his mate, though he took it away from her later.
And the more she read her mother’s words, the more pathetic she felt for the cruel hand fate dealt her by taking away Riley, who was clearly the center of their family, forcing them three to fall apart violently. Abby had to wipe her eyes several times to be able to continue reading, because tears kept obscuring her vision, as they gushed out nonstop.
Just like that, she almost finished the small book, but she couldn’t help gasping loudly when she saw Calpin’s name appear in one of the pages toward the end of the book.
“She even wrote about Calpin here?”
She was confused for a moment and then looked at the huge box her father stuffed with her mother’s belongings, feeling her head spinning for a moment.
But then she threw herself back into the book and before she could finish reading it, she staggered to her feet and ran out of the house to find her father.
“My queen, what happened?” Alyssa rushed to Abby’s side when she saw the disheveled state of the girl.
“Don’t ask anything.” Abby left these words as she made a beeline for the dungeons, while Alyssa was still stunned.
Only when she reached the underground basement, did she realize she didn’t know where exactly they kept Ryan and she almost growled in irritation.
A guard approached Abby when he saw someone had run to the dungeon crazily. However, he bowed to her immediately when he realized who she was. “My Queen, do you need something?”
The girl looked quite different from the few times he saw her interacting with the pack memebers the past few days. Her hair flew in all directions while her face was streaked with tears, completely different from the impeccable image she maintained upon her return to the pack.
“Take me to Ryan.”
Ryan? Her father? But there were clear orders he wasn’t allowed to meet anyone.
“But the King…”
“Don’t forget you are talking to the Queen.” Her voice was quite harsh, immediately making the guard swallow his little objection.
Micah seemed to have prevented anyone from approaching Ryan, because he didn’t want any kind of help to reach the ex beta of this pack, after all, he had quite an influence around the pack in his days. But the matter at hand was really important, and Abby was the last person that would want to help Ryan after everything he did to her.
Yes, he had been the best father she could ever ask for during the first nine years of her life, but he didn’t fail to make her wish for a quick death every day the following ten years either. So yeah, her helping him? Fat chance!
The guard only hesitated for a second before leading the way for the girl, who looked like she would really lose it if he even dared to breathe wrongly in her direction. Within no time, Abby was standing before this dark cell, iron bars of which were locked securely.
Abby dismissed the warrior with a silent wave, but then she felt at a loss, not knowing how to start a conversation with Ryan so suddenly.
But the book in her hands felt like a hot potato right now. She had several questions and only Ryan had the answers.
With this in mind, Abby gritted her teeth and called her father. “Father.”
Immediately she could hear the chains rattling inside the cell, before a hoarse voice made it to her ears. “Is that you Abby?”
Abby felt puzzled when her father didn’t start going crazy hearing her voice like he did on the cliff last time they met. “Yes, it’s me, I need to ask you something, can you come near the bars?”
It was quite dark in his cell, and her weak human-like abilities didn’t do her any favor when she tried to squint and look at her father.
But her father didn’t seem to find the idea appeasing at all, as he refused to let her see himself. “Say what you want, I can hear you just fine.”
She didn’t understand his actions at all, but she didn’t dwell on it. “I found my mother’s diary…”
“So?” Abby could hear the confusion in his voice.
“Do you know what she wrote in it?”
“What did she write?”
From his tone and words, Abby concluded that her father never read it. But that wasn’t the problem here. “She wrote about our family, how much she loved us. But also about something else.” Abby didn’t know if she was being paranoid, but she felt like Ryan was retreating from this conversation. So she continued to speak into the darkness before her. “You knew about Calpin long back, right?”
As expected, there was no answer from her father, but she could hear his breathing turn harsher than earlier. And a moment later, he started asking her to go away. “Leave, I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” “Why?” Abby asked, looking colder than Micah when he was livid. “So that you could still feel justified for your own twisted actions toward your daughter?”
“There is nothing wrong in me punishing you for being the monster you are…” Ryan sounded agitated now. “Everyone in this pack knows the atrocities you committed.”
“You punished me for being a monster?” Abby scoffed at the same expletives her father threw at her. She would have crumbled if it was in the past.
But not anymore. Not after she learned her father’s knowledge of a few things. “You know best who is the real monster. Yet you chose to blindly side with that very monster who had killed your mate.”
She thought he would retort by saying she had killed her mother, but his silence was even more confusing now. “You knew, right? Oh my god, you knew the truth! When did you figure it out?”
Even on the cliff he insisted that she was a cold blooded murderer, but now he was behaving very strangely. Even Hanna behaved less crazedly the second time around she met with her compared to the first time.
Calpin’s spell seemed to be quite powerful on the rogues he targeted.
Suddenly, she heard the eerie sound of chains rustling once more, but Ryan didn’t say anything even after the space between them fell silent again.
Abby almost felt like making them
open the barred doors so that she
could go inside and shake her father until he came to his senses.
l.n
Because what was he thinking by helping his beloved mate’s kitler get rid of Abby, his own daughter?
But she forced herself to calm down, knowing she couldn’t lose her composure if she wanted Ryan to start talking.
“What is wrong with you father? How could you help someone like him do so many outrageous things knowing fully well what kind of a person he is?”
Yes, to her utter mortification, when
reading the
tok, Abby actually
found out that Riley had long filled her mate in on all the things related to the very Dark sorcerer who had been locked up by her ancestor, the great witch, just a few miles from the Silver Moon pack. Content
“You knew all about the enmity between mom and Calpin, but you chose to turn a blind eye to it?” Abby was having a hard time controlling her urge to set her own father on fire for his twisted thinking. “Just because you thought I caused her to die, you went ahead and joined hands with a person who swore to kill your daughter? You even tried to kill me because of him…”
Ryan finally chose this moment to cut her off. “I didn’t do it on purpose! I didn’t mean to push you down.”
“But the other rogues say otherwise, father. Do you know where I fell?” Abby didn’t wait for his answer. “It was the very cave mother pledged to keep Calpin locked in.” Hearing this, Ryan gasped at the realization. He even knew Calpin was so dangerous that he had to be locked up like a crazed beast.
Riley really didn’t hide anything from him. Ryan knew she was a guardian, shouldering a responsibility that had been passed down for generations in their family. He knew everything, had his own doubts about that bastard, but went ahead and joined him anyway.
“I didn’t know. I really didn’t know,” Ryan confessed truthfully. At that time, Calpin.only told him to push Abby down the cliff. But when Ryan realized that falling from there would cause Abby to die, he changed his mind and thought of bringing her back with him.
And Abby also vividly remembered it. “Okay, let’s say, you didn’t push me down on purpose. But you still wanted to take me away using force, why would you do that?”
“I don’t know anything, don’t ask me anything.”
She didn’t know what she was expecting him to say, but the more he behaved like this, the more she felt like he was hiding something. She felt her patience run thin. “Father, don’t make me do something I don’t want to.”
“What will you do more than this?” Ryan suddenly came near the doors, pressing his face into the iron bars, seemingly angered by her threats, but his voice was vicious. “Kill me?”
But Abby couldn’t hear his words at all, because she finally understood why her father chose to hide in the dark until now.
Half of his face was scabbing now, from a burn wound, and judging by his words, it seemed she was the cause of it?
Only then she remembered how she burnt him when he tried to strangle her on the top of the cliff. But she didn’t feel any remorse. This small wound, even though it disfigured him, was nothing compared to what he had put her through.
“Father, tell me why you are in cahoots with that bastard!” Abby snapped her fingers and flames covered her entire palm, while she held her mother’s diary in her other hand. “I need an answer, father. Now!” The father and daughter duo stared at each other, and it was Ryan who finally gave in when he realized Abby wasn’t joking with him.
“He promised to bring Riley back to life,” he whispered in a voice so low, Abby thought she heard him wrong.
“He did what?” Abby bellowed at her father and when he repeated his words, she almost felt steam rise from her head. “How?”
“He said there is this dark magic he could use to revive someone who died,” Ryan said, almost looking crazed with the idea. Check my new story: Rejected by the Alpha, Claimed by the King Lycan