Greymoor Academy: I Accidentally Bonded With Four Lycan Royals!

Chapter 217: 217. Hate

Maisie

When I opened my eyes again, I was sitting in a wheelchair by the window.

I didn’t remember being moved. I didn’t remember the days that had passed. Time had become something soft and distant, like static. Outside, the sky was a dull gray. Rain traced slow paths down the glass.

Or maybe it was snow.

I couldn’t tell anymore.

I learned over the last couple of days that I had been in a coma for three weeks. And it had taken just as long to pump my blood free of ash. And even then, Dr. Levi wasn’t sure I’d ever be fully free of it.

He thought it was the reason I hadn’t healed yet.

My body was covered in bandages. I didn’t know initially because I couldn’t see myself. The bandages needed to be changed often. They bloodied too often.

The routine of the nurses attending to me while Gruer dropped by to tell me how much debt I was wracking in by wasting away in this room had become normal. I barely noticed anything anymore.

I also learned I wasn’t in Ashbourne anymore. I was in a human town in Germany.

Dr. Levi also informed me that from the development of my dead baby, it was about a month old.

Mercer’s, possibly. From the castle. Or Quinlan’s, from a couple of days before that at the theater.

Didn’t matter. I’d lost it.

The television in the corner was on.

My face was all over the news. Sometime in the last five days, Gruer thought it might move me, if I heard the news. Give me some motivation to... try.

”You can rot in this room if you like,” he had said. ”Die here. Let them write whatever story they want about you. Or you could stop being so damned pathetic and do something about it.”

At the time, I had stared at him listlessly, knowing he was wasting his time.

I had just wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

But now, I knew all the charges by heart, because every news channel carried the same name. Maisie Adeline Adams.

Liar. Thief. Murderer. Wanted.

Conspiracy with rebels. Treason. The explosion that took out an entire hall at the Night Shade Pack and killed thirty members. Four children included. I was so hateful of Lana Braxton, jealous, vindictive, that I did all of that to get back at her and Cole.

”I knew she was hurt,” Lana sobbed in front of the camera, perfect looking in her pink tweed jacket and skirt and her perfectly gelled ponytail, with Cole’s arms wrapped around her. ”I begged for her forgiveness. I didn’t know she would take things this far.”

There were also blurred photos of me all over the screens.

Cheat. Lying whore. Filthy adulteress.

Wife of banished and disgraced Princes caught in compromising state with dead lover.

They were dragging his name through the dirt even in death.

And my mates, they were my victims.

They had been manipulated by a vile, power-hungry girl who had used them and discarded them. There was a bounty on my head. Dead or alive. The price for my death was five times more than bringing me alive.

Whatever Gruer wanted to get out of me, it worked at some point.

I couldn’t tell which day it was. Or when it all stopped being background noise. Or when I grew sick of the view outside the window.

Or when the mental drain became rage.

But it was just another day like any other.

I sat very still and listened to the news.

There was a disquiet in my head. And I thought for the first time.

Why?

Why me? Why Lyon? WhyWhyWhyWhyWhy!Why?!

I didn’t realize I was screaming the words until my right hand rose from where it had been unmoving for days and jammed into the wall in front of me, shattering it into dust and concrete.

The wheelchair tipped. I hit the floor hard, my useless legs folding beneath me. Pain shot up my spine. For a long time I just lay there, breathing through it.

When the nurse, Clarisse, who Gruer was always flirting with whenever he came around rushed over to help me, I gasped, ”No. If I can’t get in my chair myself, I might as well die on this floor.”

My right hand was twitching and trembling and hurting. I reached forward with one hand and dragged myself forward.

I had no strength in my arm. I scraped by only by half an inch.

Sweat poured down my face as I gritted my teeth and pushed.

Another inch.

So maybe I didn’t have strength. But I had rage. Hate. So much of it to choke on.

I slept on the floor that day. The day after that, I crawled.

At first it was only my arms, dragging the dead weight of my body across the cold hospital room floor until my palms were raw and my nails split.

My aim was the door.

And I had just reached it when the door creaked and my lips skimmed Gruer’s boots.

”You know, where I come from, kissing feets is the highest act of worship,” he drawled.

”Get the fuck out of my way,” I growled.

He dropped to his haunches in front of me and patted my head three times like I was some dog. ”There you are.”

****

When feeling began to return in weak, painful flickers, I forced my legs to move too. The progress was so slow it felt like punishment. Some days I made it only a few feet before collapsing. Some nights I lay on the floor and shook with the effort of not screaming.

But I kept going.

I stopped thinking like Maisie. That girl had died at the ridge. What remained had to be harder. Colder. She had to stop expecting the world to be fair. Had to fight back. Had to take back.

Two months passed.

The day I stood on my own for the first time, my legs trembled so violently I nearly fell. I held onto the edge of the bed and breathed through the pain until the shaking stopped.

And one day, I left the hospital on my own two feet.