Reclaimed By My Alpha (Natalia and Andrei) novel Chapter 575

Chapter 575

Natalia’s POV

Waking up the second time was so much worse than the first time.

The first time I’d woken in this cell, at least I had had the brief mercy of not knowing where I was, even if it was over quickly.

That feeling was gone now.

I opened my eyes to the same black ceiling and knew exactly where I was and exactly what had happened, and it all hit me like a

ton of bricks.

Everything hurt. My shoulders, my ribs, even my hands were raw with cuts and bruises. My wolf was trying to heal me, but the entire ordeal we had been through had weakened her. I had barely had a few sips of water and some stale, moldy bread since I had gotten to this godforsaken realm; it was hardly enough to sustain a fully grown female wolf, regardless of my injuries.

But that was not even the worst part about all of it.

Five years. For five years I had held the image of Andrei in my mind, refusing to let go of it like the way someone keeps a photograph and a lock of a loved one’s hair in a locket when they go off to war.

I had memorized the way he looked at me across a crowded room when he was trying to get my attention without being too obvious. And the way he always folded his arms when he was thinking hard. And the particular expression he would always get when Jane said something funny and he was clearly trying not to laugh.

I had spent five years with a broken heart, raising our children, running the pack, keeping everything together and pretending, most of the time, that I was fine.

And now I had found him..

But it wasn’t him. Not really.

He was alive. I should have felt relieved. Overjoyed.

And I did, underneath everything else. Of course I did. Andrei was alive. I was over the moon with happiness. But it wasn’t enough to blot out the sinking feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. Even when I’d first seen him standing outside my cell, I couldn’t even feel happy, not really. The joy I’d felt was quickly overshadowed by the instinctual terror in my lungs, as if my nerve endings knew that his very presence brought the plague with it.

The man I had just spent several hours with was not the man I remembered.

He had Andrei’s face and Andrei’s voice and even some of Andrei’s mannerisms, but that was about it. Whoever was inside that head was not my mate. It was like a separate entity had stolen his skin and was barely trying to act like him.

Worst of all, he hadn’t even recognized me. It was like I was nothing to him. Just a prisoner to torture for information. He thought I was lying when I told him over and over again what we had before he disappeared. He thought I was here on someone’s orders, not of my own volition.

It didn’t take a genius to know that something had happened to him, something that had methodically stripped away the person he had been before he came here, and replaced it with.. this. Whatever it was.

Just then, the temperature in the room shifted I felt a cool energy surrounding me, like jumping into a cold pond on a hot summer’s day. It wrapped around me, momentarily bolstering my energy.

I knew the feeling I’d felt it once before, in my dark kitchen a long time ago, on a night that had changed everything

I lifted my head from the floor.

The Moon Goddess didn’t appear the way she had in the vision years ago. I was still alone, as if her physical embodiment couldn’t form in this dark, hot place. But I knew it was her. I could feel her thurst, watching me

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Chapter 575

+25 Bonus

“You know what you have to do,” she whispered. 1

I turned away, facing the wall, as if she had been standing there and I didn’t want to look at her anymore.

“I know what you think I have to do,” I said out loud.

“Natalia. The man you loved is gone. What’s walking around in his body is not Andrei. His mind has been taken completely. There is nothing left to save.”

“You don’t know that.”

“The dark force that controls him has had five years to embed itself in his mind and body. It is not a shadow over him anymore, Natalia. It is him now. What remains of who he was is not going to be enough to break him from its spell.”

I looked at the wall. The stone was black and unyielding as ever. I would find no escape there, but at least the wall wasn’t trying to tell me the last thing in the world that I wanted to hear.

“You heard what the others said,” the Moon Goddess went on. “He’s building an army. And if you do not stop him, he will march that army through the overworld. It’s nearly ready, Natalia. And once it is, they will take every pack. Every territory. Everyone you have spent five years protecting. Even your children.”

I said nothing.

“This is not a punishment. I did not design this to hurt you. If I could make it happen any other way, I would.” A pause. “But I need you to understand that what you came here to do is no longer possible. You cannot bring him home. You can only end it.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

I still said nothing, refusing to turn away from the wall. Eventually, I felt the presence fade, along with the cooling energy. My wolf felt a little stronger now and had managed to heal some of my shallower wounds, but it wasn’t enough. The heat and the pain and the exhaustion set in quickly again.

The Moon Goddess wasn’t lying. She had told me five years ago that Andrei had to die, and I had dismissed her, and here I was in a cell in the underworld with shackles on my wrists and my husband’s handprints on my skin.

I knew that.

And I also knew what I’d seen in the interrogation chamber.

That pause whenever he was considering hurting me beyond repair. The fraction of a second before he would set down his tools and resort to simpler methods of torture; things that couldn’t destroy me.

Because, deep down, he was still in there. The man I loved. My husband, My mate. The father of my children.

I knew Andrei well enough to know that. He wouldn’t just disappear. Even if something had taken over his mind, he wouldn’t let go completely. He would hold on, even if just by a thread; if not for me, then for the children,

He wasn’t gone entirely. He was just trapped, and he was trying to get out.

I could get him out. I was sure of it. If only I could get him to remember me, even just a single memory of what we once had, then he would snap out of it. There was always hope, which was why we’d named our third as such, and as long as she lived, as long as the twins lived, we would always find a way back to each other. I knew it

All I needed to do was figure out which memory would be enough to wake him up again. 5