Chapter 116

Everly POV

There are no winners in a war. Either way, somebody loses, and even the winners lose. They lose friends, family, humanity, and themselves. We won the battle, but no one wins the war because no one walks away unscaffed after witnessing such carnage, such loss, and it always ends in grief. Grief shows you how valuable life is but also how cruel life is. It shows you the darkness of losing someone. Then it shows you the light in appreciating others more. You realize how precious life is but also how short life can be. You learn how torturous it can be when you lose someone you couldn’t imagine living without, but somehow you do. Somehow, you’re still breathing even when the pain of grief is so intense you believe it will kill you and sometimes wish it would, just so you don’t have to know the pain of losing them.

Standing in this hall with hundreds of peering faces staring back at us, you could see their grief as if they wore it like armor, as if it was branded into their very being like a tattoo, screaming their anguish. You could hear their gut-wrenching screams as they realized the pain they were feeling wasn’t hurt loved ones but broken bonds, and broken families, broken.

Nothing will k**l your soul more than losing a loved one. Nothing will break you down more than realizing you will never hold them again, never hear their voices, never see them.

We stood on a podium while Valen called out the names of loved ones, needing them to come forward to claim their dd sons, dead mates, and dd parents, and while trying to mask my own grief, I witnessed theirs, felt theirs with each broken tether. How Valen called out the names, it was almost as if he was desensitized to deathh, expressionless.

Yet, through the bond, I knew he was barely holding it together as their screams and pain rippled through him like a stone tossed in the lake, that rippling tide on repeat, and I don’t know how he bared it as he tried to keep the bond blocked, though those that sifted through I felt, felt him, felt them.

We won the battle, but we lost too. One hundred seventy-six lives were lost, Ninety-one bonds are broken, meaning a possible Ninety-one more lives to wither away until either they die slowly or their bond does. Most of those deaths were men, she-wolves rarely lived without their mates. Yet seeing my father sitting vacantly ahead, I knew he wished it killed him.