Face-Slapping15 min read
I Raised a Wolf, He Became My World (and Worst Nightmare)
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I remember the wind first—cold and hard, finding its way through a broken church window and straight into my bones.
"I can't lose you," I kept whispering into his hair, even as the sirens drew nearer like distant waves. "Please, stay."
"Healer, save her—please!" the boy yelled, and his voice cracked the air like a snapped rope. He was still a child in everything but the ruin in his eyes.
"Don't cry," I told him, smiling with what little strength I had. "This is my fate. You have to live. Take my piece of it and live well."
"No! Aurelie—" he called my name the way he always did, soft and raw. "You promised. You promised to be my elder sister, my keeper. You promised to stay. I won't let you die before the ambulance arrives!"
His grief tore the cathedral into a jagged thing. He was a wolf cub, all hunger and claws, and for eight years I had fed that hunger until it stopped snarling.
I felt my eyelids grow heavy. My hands, once warm, began to cool. Breath thinned. I watched him spill tears over my face and the cold marble, then watched those tears become a halo of frost.
"I can still help," I thought with the stubbornness of an addict—an addict of tasks. I had been a professional traverser, a loner who jumped worlds to fix things other people had broken. This was supposed to be my last mission: an SSR-level assignment, the one that had crushed ninety-nine before me.
"System," I murmured as the light from the mission interface shimmered at the edges of my vision. "Open the gate."
The System obeyed like a faithful if sarcastic servant. A doorway of gold opened. I hesitated only briefly, looking at the boy whose wild sobs filled the church.
"I am sorry, Chase," I said aloud to him, using the name my small patient had once used in another life.
I stepped through.
Behind me, something broke. The boy's voice drove up like a jagged blade.
"No—no god, no one—" he shouted, and then he smashed the altar statue into a cloud of marble dust. "Shatter your heavens if you must. Give her back!"
Then he knelt by me as if to pray and vowed to become a god himself.
"He'll heal," the System told me as I floated through corridors of light toward the Temporal Bureau. "Your mission metrics show blackening decreased to five percent. The world will not collapse."
That should have been the end, but the System was wrong about seams that hadn't been stitched.
I woke on a transport pod with a nose full of recycled air and the lingering phantom ache of a life I'd left. A sneeze, a mundane human sound, brought me fully back into the present world of bureaucracy.
"System?" I said aloud—habit more than need. "What happened after I left? How is Chase?"
"No data synchronized yet," the System replied with that annoying digital chirp. "You will be informed at the debrief."
I chose to nap. I took the pill the System suggested and slept like someone who had finally closed a long, heavy book.
Then I heard it: voices. Snatches at first, then whole phrases that tore across my sleep like a cold wind.
"—your daughter—she's gone. Take her away, cleanse this house."
"She was always a burden," a man's voice said, urgent and sharp. "That lunatic Chase—he is unfit. If he drags her into his rituals again, I will—"
Wait. My name. My body. My life. I should be dead in that church.
"Chase?" I whispered into my own sleeping head. The voice—sharp, older—cut through the fog.
"Come on," the System piped up in my head after a few nerve-wracking seconds of silence. "Your mission status needs verification."
The door to my capsule was not a door at all—I couldn't move. Suddenly I wasn't a traveler in charge of her own fate. I was stuck in my own memories, like a picture pinned to a board.
"Hand her over," Chase's voice said. It wasn't the boy's voice I had remembered. It was deeper, colder, as if he'd swallowed winter.
My heart—a strange, borrowed thing—stuttered.
---
I woke as myself in my own skin for the first time since the accident—except my body was not my own in timing. The world had kept spinning for five years.
"You're awake," a man said, tender and bewildered at the same instant. He looked like the sun had been shaped into a person and then rendered into blue eyes and a face I had once leaned against in dreams.
"Chase," I said reflexively. "You saved me?"
"Your heart stopped. The medics restarted it," he said. "You were a vegetable for five years."
He kissed my forehead. He called me names I had once accepted—"sister" and "my Aurelie"—until he rewired them into "wife" and "my whole."
The horror of learning I had been presented at an unholy marriage was as sharp as any bullet. I had come to guide him—raise a wolf cub into a man, a villain into a decent citizen—and now I had been tied into his life by a ceremony performed while I was out.
"That wedding—" I said shortly. "It was... legal?"
"It was enough," Chase replied simply. "I made sure."
His hands were gentle. His voice carried the low hum of a man used to being obeyed. The house smelled of rose petals and silk. The bed was soft as a cloud and treacherous as quicksand.
"Don't you think we're getting ahead?" I tried to joke.
"We're married," he said. "Now be my wife."
I pretended to be a vegetable. My body obeyed the program of that messy ritual: moved, dressed, kissed. I played the part because—truth be told—I had no choice. I was tethered to this world now. The System had lied to me; death would not return me to my own life. My family—if they even remained mine—stood in the gravity of this place, and if Chase turned, if his blackness rose to a hundred percent, the world might still tilt toward ruin.
Chase—Chase Bauer—had changed. The boy I'd spent eight years coaxing into warmth had hardened into a man who wore authority like a second skin. There was charm and devotion in him, but a pricklier hunger flashed beneath the surface.
"I won't be your prisoner," I said in the sterility of the bridal chamber, and I meant it.
"You won't be," he said. "You'll be my partner."
He meant something deeper.
---
Not long after, an intruder tried to cut my life short.
"Die, you bitch!" the woman screamed as she lunged at me with a fruit knife.
I was no fragile thing; the years of quick-transversal meant my reflexes were surgical. I caught her hand, twisted, disarmed, and before I knew what I had, a crude device blinked in my palm.
"What is this?" I hissed.
"A timed charge," she said with monstrous calm. "If you drop it, it will blow. If you move wrong, it will blow. Chase will go mad."
That's when Chase walked in. He looked...different. Five years had carved him into something precise and terrifying. He was all bone and shadow and soft, strangled light when he saw me.
"Don't move," he ordered, eyes fixed on the device. "If you make a wrong move, she's dead."
He had dismantled worst things for reasons I didn't yet fathom. I watched his hands—fast, sure. He stopped the countdown with a few cool motions that would have made an engineer cry with envy.
"You're safe," Chase said to me afterward, and this time I couldn't pretend to be indifferent. "I promised I would keep you."
"Then do it without cages," I said, for the hundredth time telling a monster how to bow.
"You don't trust me," he said, the old hurt I had once softened flaring like dry grass. "You never did."
"Because you threatened to make me your wife while I slept," I replied.
He laughed then, somewhere between a bark and a sob. "I'm learning," he said. "Teach me, Aurelie. Teach me how to love without killing."
And like that, the bedrock of our strange life shifted a degree.
---
Days passed in a rush of small skirmishes and reluctant tenderness. He fed me instant noodles the way I used to like; he fussed over my sleeping habits; he brooded when I spoke of visiting my family. I wanted to go back, to visit the home I had once left to finish a mission.
"Tomorrow," he said, then his face darkened. "No. Stay. I will bring them here."
He forbade. I bargained. He sulked into threats that I would have shrugged at once upon a time, but now—they hurt.
"Call them," I said finally, because I was tired. "Let me hear their voice."
He offered me his phone. He had used my birthday as its unlock code.
I dialed. A stranger answered—a woman with a too-sweet voice.
"You're who?" she chirped. "I'm Lorenzo's daughter. Hello, Aurelie."
The name snapped our life into two jagged halves: there had been changes at home while I had slept. My father—Lorenzo Davenport—had remarried in all the ways that men remarry their comforts, and someone named Bonnie Cantrell had quietly become a new "daughter" shadowing our household.
"Who is this?" I hissed to Chase.
"Your father took in a ward," he said. "He thought he'd given you a place to heal. It didn't go the way he expected."
On the other end, Bonnie's smile oozed false sweetness.
"Congratulations," she cooed. "As the new Miss Davenport, you're in a very auspicious position now. You married well—better than some of us, aren't you, niece?"
Chase's hand slammed the phone into the wall. The splash of plastic on plaster made my stomach turn.
"No. You don't like him," he said, and his eyes became a jumping animal—hungry, jealous, alive. "You don't love him."
"You can't tell me who I can love," I snapped, and then I did the awful thing and smacked him on the head. Old reflexes die hard.
"Ow! That counts as assault!" he said, feigning offense in a way that made me laugh and ache at the same time.
He apologized, and later, in a room soft with darkness, he promised to learn how to be better.
"I will not be the man who forces a heart," he said, penitence absolving like rain. "Teach me."
"Okay," I said foolishly. "Then start with this: don't break my wrist again."
So he promised.
---
Family returned like summer thunder. My brother Edison Cox—my brother, the surgeon—arrived in a white coat that caught him in the light like armor.
"My Aurelie," he breathed, and for the first time in days, I felt the old anchor of home.
"Doctor," I teased. "You look the same."
"Hopefully," he said. "Let me examine you."
He found something too: my growth hormones had been suppressed. Medicine had been used on me—subtle, dangerous suppression to keep me thin, pliable, small.
"Who did this?" Edison demanded, and I could see the old family's red wires starting to spark.
Chase bristled. "I only saved her."
"Then explain to me," Edison shot back. "Because whoever 'saved' her has been messing with her body chemistry. I won't have that."
It was a clash as old as houses and blood. Edison was my calm storm. Chase was a volcano. Between them I sat like a match nobody wanted to light.
"Leave it," Chase said finally. "She is mine."
"No," Edison replied. "She is my sister."
They both started to growl.
"Please," I begged. "Enough."
Edison offered me the protection of his surgical wing. Chase countered with the fortress of his estate. I felt like a pawn and the board at the same time.
---
Something happened at the family banquet that made me taste iron in my mouth.
Edison had been delayed. My brother Gunnar Bowen had been stuck somewhere and hadn't come to greet me on time. Still, the hall filled with relatives and mercantile eyes, bright as teeth.
Then the doors slammed open.
Old influence strode in with a young man at her shoulder. He looked like a photograph come to life—Rowan Finley—handsome, lined with cold politeness. He had been my betrothed once upon a time in the eyes of others. Rowan's family—the powerful Meyers—had not overlooked that opportunity back then.
"Your grandfather negotiated with mine," Rowan said with soft, clear voice. "We never cancelled the contract."
"You can't be serious," I said. "I married Chase."
"That marriage was hastily made," Rowan replied sharply. "Return to us."
Chase's reaction was a thing of myth. He could have smashed a man with a look; instead, he grabbed a glass and flung it toward Rowan.
"I can't believe you came here," he said between teeth. "Who sent you?"
Rowan's cool didn't crack. He said, "I am here on my family's behalf. The betrothal must be honored."
It devolved. Voices turned into shards of glass. Then, like fate having a terrible sense of timing, Rowan pulled a gun.
"Rowan!" The shout came that instant, a horrified chorus. "What are you—"
A shot rang.
I moved because I was the same fool from five years ago. I shoved Chase out of the way.
The bullet grazed my arm. The world fracture-flashed: my mother's scream, the wine spraying like dark rain, my father Lorenzo stumbling forward.
"Alone!" I hissed through the pain. "He's insane!"
Rowan's gun was taken by Chase's men in a blur. The room erupted into chaos, and then uniformed officers—summoned by family retinues and the smell of trouble—piled in.
Rowan was cuffed and screamed things at me I couldn't make out. He looked at Chase like the world had betrayed him.
"Take him," Chase told his men. "Hold him. He tried to kill her."
But Rowan's ladies and relatives were ferocious. Rowan's grandmother—Francoise Meyer—screeched about honor and betrayal. The room turned into a battlefield of words and accusations.
I was taken to the hospital. Edison examined me under brilliant lights and decided the wound was survivable: a graze, a bruise, a story that would cost Rowan his reputation.
Rowan was dragged off. People whispered. Cameras—always there—had caught every move. The net began to constrict around him.
---
Hospital quiets into an uneasy lull broken by the sound of my brother Gunnar's laughter, then the arrival of the unthinkable: news that Rowan had been in a "mysterious car accident" on his way from the station, rushed to the ICU. Stocks crumpled at his company. I thumbed a ring of anger and relief at the same time.
Chase's face was stone.
"I didn't do this," he said, fingers clenching. "But he won't hurt her again."
That very night, I sat against the cool window of Chase's estate and watched the moon. He sat by me.
"Do you hate me?" he asked simply.
"No," I said. "I don't love you—yet."
His hand found mine. "Teach me."
So I took his life apart and put it back the way I taught struggling monsters: with boundaries, with truth, with small, oft-repeated kindnesses that felt like homework.
"Don't yell so late," I told him on night three, when he stormed over a minor betrayal. "You scare me."
"That's not what I want to be," he said. "I only don't want to be alone."
"Then don't burn what keeps you."
We became an odd rhythm of closeness and wars. The estate bloomed with a thousand gifts—my new posh life—but it also made me dizzy with its gilded pallor. Chase prepared a mountain of presents for my return visit to my family. He insisted on "doing things right"—a parade of cars, a pile of jewels enough to sink a small country.
"Your gift," I asked one morning, idly tapping a tiara he'd brought like a childish magician, "where's the ring?"
"I am the ring," he announced with extraordinary sincerity. "I am all yours."
We drove to the family home with a motorcade that made actors and politicians grind their teeth.
"Don't call me 'small wolf' in public," I murmured.
"Then call me husband," he said.
"That's too hot a word," I replied.
"Then 'Chase Bauer' will do," he said, and squeezed my hand.
My family was there: my father Lorenzo with guilt already mapped on his face, my mother Katharina Coulter close at hand, Edison with righteous fury in his jaw when examining my arm, Gunnar—handsome Gunnar Bowen—with the grin that could break a heart and insisted on celebrating like it was the harvest.
"Welcome home," they said, and my heart thudded inside the cage of what I'd become.
The house brimmed with people—friends, relatives, market cronies—who watched Chase like a comet. The air was thick. And then Francoise Meyer arrived again with Rowan at her side.
"Step aside," she announced like a vulture taking flight. "Your family spared our boy in the past. Now he seeks what was promised."
"He's the one who tried to kill me," I said plainly.
"Being promised and being forced are different," Francoise said, as if wisdom about honor gave her license to steal. "We demand answers."
My grandfather—age and greed wrapped into a thin, trembling man—jumped at the chance to keep both trees in the garden. He wanted both the easy light and the heavy money. It was a common temptation. We never had enough people who could say no.
Rowan strode forward, eyes hard. "Aurelie, he took you. Return to us."
A thousand things tried to tear me then.
"No," I said.
He didn't accept it. He snapped the wedding contract as if legal strings were paper. The din crescendoed.
But then Chase did something unexpected: he rose, calm as a man summoning thunder, and called for silence. He had prepared for this day from the moment I woke and decided to stay.
"Bring them forward," he said into the room like a sentence that would seal the air.
All eyes turned.
He had, over the last week, collected evidence: phone logs, edited video files, and most importantly, voice records taken from the night in the bridal chamber, the woman with the bomb, and the solicitor who'd brokered deals behind my father's curtains.
"Play it," he told his assistant.
The overhead screen blinked. First came the woman's voice admitting how she had been hired to kill me—how she had been promised power in the aftermath—and then, much worse for the room, a recording of a meeting where Rowan promised Francoise that things would be placed in motion to "quiet" certain inconveniences.
"What is this?" Francoise sputtered, but the evidence mapped a pattern.
"Rowan Finley," Chase said slowly, "you shot my wife. You conspired to remove her."
Rowan's face shifted through steps I remember: smugness, then confusion, then a bright white panic.
"No—no—" he protested first, a brittle denial. "This—this is manipulated! I did not—"
"Where were you on the night of the shooting?" demanded Edison, stepping forward with his usual righteous blade. "Who paid you? Who paid for the hit?"
A security camera clip showed Rowan stepping from a vehicle that was later traced to a paid driver contracted through his family's shell company. Another clip showed Bonnie—Bonnie Cantrell—secretly asking favors of those same intermediaries.
"You set this up," Chase said. "You planted the woman, the bomb, the temptation. You wanted to frighten her into leaving, and when that didn't work, Rowan—" he paused, eyes like a lodestone—"—you pulled a gun."
Rowan's cheeks flushed as the room turned. The crowd shifted like birds in a sudden storm. Fingers were pointed. Phones came out, twitching with the hunger that is always ready for scandal.
"I am not—" Rowan tried again.
Then the first crack: someone in the room—a distant cousin—began to murmur about lost stock value in Rowan's company. The mention of business drew eyes like flies.
"Arrest him," Chase said. "For attempted murder. And for conspiracy."
"But—" Rowan's voice climbed into hysteria. He slammed his hand against the table. "This is—fabrication! You have no right!"
A thousand lenses rose. People took videos. Phones streamed. The room hummed with the electric glee of public ruin.
"Denied," Chase said with a hard smile. "From the footage to the bank transfers to the voice logs, we have it all."
Rowan's posture finally experienced collapse: first shock, then outrage, then a stumble into pleading.
"No! Please! You can't do this!" His voice ran up the stairs of hysteria. "I didn't—I'm a respectable family! You're trying to ruin me!"
"Beg," Chase said. "Beg for your life."
Rowan sank to his knees, sudden and disgusting like a marionette dropped from a table. He held out his hands in a way that showed he expected mercy and yet had no understanding of what he'd asked for.
"Aurelie," he cried, eyes wet in the worst of ways. "Aurelie, tell them it's a lie! I love you. I only wanted to—"
"Shut up!" Francoise screamed, but it was music now, a performance that had run out of tickets.
People in the room pointed, laughed, recorded. Some applauded—hissing at the first round of justice executed by the anxious, and some whispered about the stock fallout.
Rowan's face changed in stages. Smugness folded; disbelief rose. He grabbed at denials. He screamed about honor and heritage. Then the rope of evidence tightened like a noose and the blankness of reality hit, and he crumpled into the crying mess of someone who realized the world's cruelty too late.
"Don't you dare stand," Chase said to him as officers cuffed him. "You draw a gun in public, you hurt my wife—"
"Please!" Rowan wailed. "Please, I'm sorry!"
No one answered with comfort. Cameras lanterned their faces. Somebody shouted, "Record this! Record it!"
They filmed as Rowan crawled, as Francoise tried to pick up his phone and smash it, as the guests took pictures and streamed a live humiliation that would dominate the next three days of gossip.
The punishment was not merely physical. It was public, communal, and ritual. Rowan shouted, begged, denied, and finally confessed in a broken whisper. "I didn't mean to—" he said over and over until the words had no weight left.
Police led them away. People clapped, half-mocking, half-satisfied. Cameras didn't blink. The event was irreversible.
Chase came back to me, his expression a mixture of triumph and exhaustion.
"Justice doesn't fix everything," he said softly. "But it makes a beginning."
"You went too far," Edison said later, but even he had to admit that the evidence had been damning.
Rowan's collapse had been complete. He had moved through the cycle a villain must: pride, planning, attack, exposure, denial, unraveling, begging. The public had witnessed his fall, recorded it, and shared it. He had been paid in humiliation.
Bonnie's role was also exposed: payments traced back to her accounts for "consulting fees," threatening voice memos delivered in her voice. She had been a white petal on a poison stem.
She was escorted out of the house in humiliation, pleading with my father, with anyone who would listen. "Please, I only did what I had to do to ensure my place in the family!" she cried. "I had debts! I—"
"You will face the law," Chase said. "And the court will decide."
The spectacle took hours. Cameras died eventually, but the impression burned like acid.
Later, when the dust settled, some people came up to me and said, "You did it well."
I had not. Chase had. Or perhaps the world simply loved a fall from grace.
---
After that, life smoothed for a moment into a new kind of daily. Chase learned to yield some control. He tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to banish his possessiveness into less harmful forms: buying greenhouses where we walked together, asking me how I wanted my mornings arranged, learning how to be quiet when I needed space.
"Teach me to be good," he would say, and I would dictate the petty rules of human tenderness.
One night, after a storm of fireworks had passed over the estate and the moon was a thin silver coin, Chase bent his head. "Aurelie," he said, "teach me the rest. Teach me how to love and let go."
"Love doesn't need ownership," I told him. "You ask for what I can give, not what I will be forced to live."
He smiled, the way a man tries on hope.
"I will be your ring," he said that night. "Until you decide otherwise."
We made small promises that were not universal. We kept them. We failed sometimes. We tried again.
Months later, at an award dinner for Gunnar Bowen—my third brother—people cheered for the actor and the family alit with simple pride. I sat beside Chase, our hands discreet under the table.
My phone buzzed; it was Edison: "Come home soon."
"I will," I wrote back.
Chase read the message, lifted it to me like a priest presenting a chalice. "We are doing okay," he said. "You and I, we will be okay."
"Maybe," I said, thinking of the gold doors the System had once opened. "Maybe I'm learning to like being alive here. Maybe there is a piece of me that belongs in both places."
Aurelie Zhu: professional traveler, reluctant bride, healer of a wolf. I never expected to become anyone's salvation. Yet here I was—rooted, stubborn, and dangerously fond.
I tightened my fingers around Chase's hand. His warmth seeped into me like a promise.
"We'll make sure the blackness never fills you again," I whispered.
He looked at me like a man given a map, then humbled by the distance.
"Then teach me," he said.
And when I shut my eyes that night, it wasn't because I had to. It was because, for the first time, I wanted to sleep beside this wolf who had been turned into a man—and to try, with meticulous care, to turn him into someone kind.
The End
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