Chapter 5 The Weapon

• Silas’s P.O.V
• A dagger stuck out of her abdomen, bathed in her blood. It was the weapon that had taken her life…the reason her body was no longer warm…the reason she was no longer smiling at me with those beautiful lips.
• It was a futile idea ; I knew I couldn't save her, but desperate men often had desperate thoughts. All logic and rational thinking had left my mind; I couldn't care less if the plans that I had come up with to try and save her wouldn't even work. Perhaps that was due to the fact that deep down, I knew that it was hopeless, and trying to come up with a solution, no matter how improbable was just my way of coping with the situation.
• I thought about pulling the dagger out and giving her all of my blood, if that was what it took to bring her back. It was stupid and impossible, but my brain was splintering into pieces, trying to grasp at straws — anything, anything at all that I could do to put her back together.
• In this moment, I wished I was a god. If I were, then I could have breathed life back into Lily. I could have saved her. I could have been able to pull out the knife without worrying that I was killing her even faster by causing more bleeding. If I had such a power, I would not have had to worry about the lack of warmth of her body, or the fact that her heart had literally stopped beating.
• I stared at Lily's lifeless face and, in my hunger for her, I conjured up images, memories, of her, back when she was still alive — her warm skin that used to turn slightly pink when she laughed or when she was embarrassed, her brilliant smile that would leave you dazed and buzzed in its wake, her hair that fell around her face and shoulders so perfectly as if she had spent a few thousand hours a day trying to perfect it instead of just giving it one touch-up.
• I remembered when we were children, we used to play tag in our wide backyard, and I would chase her around, and she would run from me, laughing and teasing me. She had always been the faster runner between the two of us, always two, three, or even four steps ahead of me. I had never been able to catch up with her, and in the rare times that I manage to do so, she would always eventually slip from my hold, and I would have to go and chase after her once more.
• Even tonight she is a lifetime ahead of me. Even tonight, she was the first, between the two of us, to cross the line between life and death.
• Lily used to be so full of joy and energy, and now, here she was, lying in front of me, motionless, dead. She looked so fragile in this light, so broken. And yet I did not pity her, because an angel like Lily did not deserve to be simply pitied in death. She deserved to be revered, to be remembered as the glorious shower of gold that she was.
• As the seconds ticked by, she grew heavier in my grasp, but still, I did not let her go, because I did not want to. I wanted to hold her, if it would help to make her feel less lonely as she departed from this world in the wake of this injustice. And I knew that she could not feel anything anymore, nor would she know this last act of kindness that I was going to bestow upon her, but I did it anyway, if only to console the grieving, writhing creature thrashing and growing in the depths of me.
• My wolf cried and clawed at my skull, begging to be let out. It longer to have one last contact with its playmate as well. But my wolf was a feral being that I did not trust at the moment. It wasn’t a creature of emotion, but of instinct…and if instinct told it, it might as well rip Lily to pieces in a fit of rage and grief.
• With a heavy heart and a shaking hand, I curled my fingers around the dark hilt of the sharp dagger, and with a single, determined tug, I pulled it out of her body. The puncture wound left behind made me wince, and as it clearly had not yet been hours since her death, some blood squirted out of the wound, in the same way that an injured creature would cough out blood.
• I let myself cry and feel the pain that was pulsating throughout me at the moment, running from my heart and to the rest of my body in waves that ebbed and flowed. It was not a physical type of pain, but I felt it so strongly that it might as well have been. I had always prided myself in being able to handle pain way better than the average wolf, but it seemed that this was not the case now, not tonight.
• I shivered, grimacing, tucking the stray strands of Lily's golden hair behind her ear, just so I could see her face clearly. She was pale and still like a doll, so different from the unstoppable force of nature that she once was, that I once knew her to be.
• In another fit of desperation, I looked around and tried to sense and smell other scents in the apartment, but all I could find were traces of Lily and my brother, Ezra.
• Who did this?! I wanted to scream, but no voice would come out, so the sound was trapped in my head, in the four walls of my mind and skull. Why her?! What did Lily ever do to anyone? She was a sweet angel who would never so much as harm a fly; what could she have possibly done to anger someone enough that they would do this atrocity, this devastation, to her?
• If only I was a god. I'm starting to think that the title of Alpha was no good nor use for me after all. What was the sense in being the Alpha of the pack if I could not even protect or save the person I loved the most? Even if she wasn't my mate, I should have still been able to protect her. I should have saved her.
• In my despair, I failed to notice the arrival of Ezra and the fellow members of our pack. I only realized they were here when one of them let out a gasp, and chaos ensued. The others began shouting and pointing and accusing and talking over each other, and it all got so loud, and I got so sick of it that I yelled, “Stop!” with my arm raised to silence them.
• That was my fatal mistake.
• Because in my grief, I had forgotten that I was still holding the knife that I had just extracted from Lily’s body…the weapon that had taken her life.