The War God Alpha's Arranged Bride (Evelyn and Alexander) novel Chapter 615

Daisy’s Truth

Judy’s POV

Daisy Baldwin stood at the front gates, as if she belonged there. She tucked her short blond curls behind her car and tried to keep her head held high, as she always did. However, I could see the tension in her shoulders and the way she kept looking around, as if she were afraid she would be found at any moment.

“Daisy is here?” Irene asked, her hands dusty with cheese. I noticed my friends were all staring at me, their eyes wide.

“She is,” Adam confirmed, nodding his head at the tablet that clearly showed Daisy waiting at the front.

entrance.

“We need to tell my father,” Irene said as she reached for her phone.

“Wait,” I blurted before she could pull up Gavin’s number. I turned to look at her, holding out my hand to stop her from calling him. I felt the sizzling crackle spark my fingertips, and I quickly pulled my hands back.

Magic surged through me, simmering and angry, and it made me feel uneasy.

“Let me just see what she wants,” I said, turning back to Adam. “I’ll walk out and see her.:

“That’s not a good idea,” Irene said, shaking her head. “My father would be furious if he found out.”

“Well, Gavin’s not here, or I’d have him go talk to her,” I said, raising my brows at her. “If she’s here to talk, then we will talk.”

“I’ll go with you,” Erik said as he stood from the table.

I nodded, and together we headed towards the front door.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Irene called after us.

“Yeah, maybe Irene’s right. Daisy is bad news,” Nan agreed.

“If I’m going to be the Silver Crescent Pack Luna, then I can’t cower away from a fight if one is presented to me,” I said from over my shoulder.

“You can’t fight!” Irene yelled. “You’re pregnant.”

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t fight,” Erik assured her as he followed me out of the front doors. The front courtyard was bright with late afternoon sun. Guards stood at their posts, hands near their weapons, eyes trained on the iron gate.

And there she was.

Daisy Baldwin.

The closer I got to her, the more I realized that she no longer looked like the confident puppet she’d been when she was playing everyone and stealing the stone from the Landry’s. She looked wrung out. Hollow around the cheeks. Her lips were pale. Her eyes had shadows like she hadn’t slept in days.

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When she saw me, she straightened like a wire being pulled tight. She wrapped her arms around herself like she was trying to hold herself together, and then I saw her lip… it was swollen and cut in the corner.

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My eyes narrowed at her as I stepped closer to the gate. Just before I reached the latch, Erik grabbed my arm gently.

“I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,” he said, his eyes never leaving Daisy. “The Alpha wouldn’t want you to go near her.”

Gavin was going to be upset once he found out that I was even entertaining Daisy at this point.

I folded my arms across my chest.

“Okay, I’m here,” I told her. “What do you want, Daisy?”

Daisy’s eyes flickered to Erik briefly before they fell on me again. She sucked her bottom lip in her mouth, and I wasn’t sure if I was mistaken or not… but she looked almost nervous.

“I need your help,” she finally said, her voice sounding strained.

“With what?” I asked, annoyance clear in my tone.

“I know you owe me nothing-”

“I’m glad you know that,” I said, cutting her off and raising my brows. “You shouldn’t be here, Daisy. After what you did…”

“I stole from a family who took something from another family,” she clipped, pressing her lips together and creating a firm line. “I did what I had to do.”

“Why did you have to do it?”

“Because of my mate,” she blurted. “He made me… he told he’d end this pain that he put me through if I did what he said. He knew my sister had once been married to Gavin Landry, and he wanted me to use that to my advantage.

My ears rang at her admission, and I stared at her with my mouth gaping open.

“I’m sorry… your what?”

If she had a mate this entire time, then why was she after Gavin?

Her cheeks flushed as if she could hear the question without me speaking.

“My mate,” she said, shifting her gaze to the ground. “He’s not my fated mate. But he did mark me years ago and had been keeping me around without much love.”

I blinked.

“You have a chosen mate?” I asked.

She nodded, her eyes briefly meeting mine.

“I do…” she said almost hesitantly. “It’s a long story… but it wasn’t really my choice.”

My heart stopped in my chest.

“You were forced to mate with someone?” I asked, my brows pinching together.

She nodded her head once.

“I was told that my only hope of breaking this bond is the host of magic,” she continued, meeting my eyes. “For a long time, I thought that was Lila, so she agreed to help me if I helped her figure out how to unlock her magic. By then, she already had the Moon Gem back…she couldn’t figure out how to get the magic from the Gem and put it inside of herself where she thought it belonged. I was the first and only one she’s told that she wasn’t able to get the magic out of the gem. For everyone else, she lied and told them she was too tired to practice magic, but she could feel it inside of her.”

“I had a feeling she wasn’t the true host,” Daisy said, letting out a breath. “After the second attempt… I kept thinking that it shouldn’t be this hard. That the magic should want to be returned to its host. Magic grows attached to the host, just as the host gets attached to magic. So, for her attempts not to work the first couple of times, it was strange to me. But then every time you were around, it would glow and seem stronger. I put all the pieces together myself. I’m surprised it took you as long.”

“Do you really want to talk like that to me right now?” I asked, raising my brows at her. “Let’s back up for a second… why would you want to break your mate bond? I thought once you were marked, you were connected as if you were true mates.”

“It’s not as strong as a true mate connection,” she admitted. “But that’s not the problem. The man I’m mated to is a complete monster.”

My mouth fell open.

“A monster?”

She let out a laugh, though it was humorless.

“Do you know what it’s like to be connected to someone who only thinks about themselves? We have a full bond, where I can feel and hear everything he feels and thinks. His thoughts are so loud that it’s hard to block them out, and his feelings are so dark that they’re all I can feel.”

Tears pooled in her dark blue eyes as she stared at me, and I was left dumbfounded. Had I been so wrong about Daisy Baldwin?

“He has this strange power or whatever where he can block my emotions so he doesn’t have to feel my ‘pointless’ feelings,” she said, shaking her head as the tears started to fall from her eyes. “He also has this rare bloodline where he can take multiple women as mates at the same time. Every time he’s intimate with another woman, it hurts like hell… but when he mates with another woman… I want to die. I sleep for days afterwards. The pain is so deep, I want to tear it out of me. I wouldn’t wish that kind of punishment on my worst enemy…”

My vision blurred, and I realized my eyes were filling with tears. My heart was broken for her, and I never thought I’d ever feel bad for Daisy Baldwin. She’s been nothing but a thorn in my side ever since I met her just before I worked for Gavin. She had been after Gavin for so long and had been deceitful the entire time… I had no idea if this was just another one of her games or if she was being serious.

But at this moment, as Diasy wrapped her arms around herself even tighter and let out a sob, I realized just

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how broken and scared she truly was. She had been a prisoner in her own relationship… her own mating. and she didn’t see any way out of the hell he put her in.

“He uses that type of pain and then some to get me to do what he wants,” she said. letting out a breath. “His mating with another woman means that I wronged him in some way. So, he’d mate someone else to make it right and punish me at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, there had been good moments… plenty of them to keep me from ending my life when things started to look bad. But the bad outweighed the good.”

“Daisy…” I whispered, shaking my head as a tear fell down my cheek.

She wiped at her tears almost angrily.

“And the stuff he always had me do… it was between drug trafficking, prostitution to please his business partners, and spy work… I did a lot of spying on Gavin’s territory because that was enemy lines. I was pretty enough and well-known, plus with my family connections, nobody would suspect me… I think that’s why he chose me. When he asked me to steal the Moon Gem, he told me that he would finally move me into the manor, introduce me as his mate, and marry me. I thought things could be better and I won’t have to live in fear and pain anymore… that he’ll finally love me. But I was a fool.”

“You did steal the gem, though,” I told her. “And what manor?”

She let out another breath, this one more exhausted than the last.

“I suppose you might as well know… the man who mated with me is Noah Blackwell. Or I guess you should know him as your brother.”

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