Chapter 3 - The Sperm Donor/ Abortion

Lyra's POV

"Impossible" she howled.

Ria's rage was a burning fire that threatened to burn away every last shred of my dignity.

Her anguished howls echoed deep within my soul, fueled by the ultimate betrayal we had just witnessed.

'That BASTARD ... That Traitor!' she snarled viciously, hatred dripping from her words like acid.

"How dare Damien deceive us in such a vile, evil manner! To violate the sacred vows to be bound together, our love, our trust, our very souls - this is unforgivable!"

Anger crashed over me as the roiling tsunami of Ria's emotions was so overwhelming that I felt myself slipping beneath the surface.

My control was swiftly eroding, erased by the rage of her through our shared soul.

In the blink of an eye, Ria seized complete command over our body, her primal need for escape taking over.

A shudder rippled through me as the shift began, bones cracking and reforming in agonizing slow-motion.

Petrified, I could only watch helplessly as my hands and feet distorted, fingernails elongating into razored claws while coarse silver fur sprouted from my skin.

My spine arched sickeningly, realigning into a lupine structure and my face elongated into a deadly snout filled with dagger-like fangs.

When the metamorphosis was completed, I found myself hurtling through the underbrush on all fours, paws churning up great swaths of loam as Ria fled headlong into the forest's secretive embrace.

"Ria, stop! Please!" I pleaded desperately through our mindlink, my voice raw with anguish. "We can't just run away from this! I...I need to talk to Damien, to try to understand why he-"

But Ria was beyond the reach of reason, consumed by the storm of fury, betrayal, and bone-deep heartbreak that blotted out all rationality. Her mind was a raging cyclone of anguished accusations and snarling denials, lashing out at everything in its path.

With a grief-stricken keen, she ducked beneath a low-hanging pine bough, tearing across the uneven terrain with loping strides that carried us ever deeper into the old growth forests surrounding our pack's territory.

Brittle branches whipped my face, drawing rivulets of blood from a thousand tiny lacerations, but I barely registered the stinging pain.

Mey gaze remained fixated straight ahead, eyes seeing nothing but the shattered fragments of the life I had believed was mine endlessly replaying in torturous clarity.

"We trusted him completely!" Ria howled, her voice reverberating through my skull in a thunderous cacophony.

"After all we have endured, after suffering years of derision and humiliation, he was the one constant in our lives. The one person who never judged us, who swore to honor and cherish us until the Moon herself burned out!"

Agonizing memories erupted like napalm in my mind, each one more excruciating than the last. I saw the mocking sneers from packmates who had deemed me worthless, an embarrassment never fit to breed or serve any purpose.

Heard the vicious slurs whispered behind cupped palms - barren bitch, omega failure, useless sow. And beneath it all, the constant, gnawing devastation of failure every time my cycle arrived and I realized my womb was cruelly empty once again.

Through it all, Damien had been my only solace. My knight in tarnished armor who had promised with every fiber of his being to love and protect me. To stand between me and those cruel voices who sought to bury me beneath their hateful insults.

Until now. Now the betrayal was his, and it cut far deeper than any biting word or malicious glare ever could.

Because he had made me believe, against all logic, he accepted me.

Was it all lies?

My dream could still be realized at his side.

That no matter how many try at the insemination, he would accept me.

The lies upon which that promise had been built were a festering poison, tearing through my system in an unstoppable conflagration of disbelief and anguish.

I could still see it with horrifying clarity - Damien's naked body writhing atop Seraphina's naked one, their limbs entangled and glistening with sweat, skin flushed from the heat of the basest passion imaginable.

The act itself was damning enough, a pure violation of what we had.

But it was the expression blazing in Damien's silver eyes as he pulled away that incinerated the last remnants of my existence. The way he had looked at me with such cool detachment, not a shred of remorse or shame to be found, before uttering the most heinous falsehood of all - This isn't what it looks like.

As if betraying me in the most intimate way conceivable could somehow be reframed as an innocuous misunderstanding.

Memories exploded rapid-fire, one after another - Seraphina's mocking laughter as she laid her claim, purring that she was Damien's true mate, his Luna, the one who would bear his children and rule at his side.

Damien's impassive features as he redressed and tried to rationalize his unfathomable actions.

The crushing realization that his oft-recited vows of everlasting fidelity and adoration had been nothing but hollow lies, uttered for the sole purpose of keeping me complacent while he reveled in the arms of my most sadistic tormentor.

A mournful howl ripped its way free from my jaws, giving a primal voice. Ria, my other half, had her own emotions in bay.

But the rage, fury, hatred, shattering heartbreak....and something else darker still lingering beneath, an impulse so vile it stole the breath from my lungs.

"I agreed to this insemination because of him," she spat with caustic venom. "So that, that bastard can be Alpha someday."

"We don't need this," I cried, " we don't need the child, I'd better abort it. We don't need any reason to be together with him." I whined, feeling my heart ache.

"Yes, it's better to abort it before he even knows about it." Ria agreed.... And with that I turn my paws to the city.

I'm going to abort it.

....

"We're here." I muttered as I switched back on two toes. The fur, the claws are all gone as I step in human territory.

My bare feet slapped against the grimy pavement, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in my wake as I stumbled through the dimly lit streets of downtown LA.

Sweat poured down my face in rivulets, my clothes soaked through and clinging to my trembling form.

Every step was sheer torture, the fire of Ria's fury roaring through my veins. It took every ounce of willpower to maintain my human shape against the scorching riptide of her anguish crashing over us in relentless waves.

"Stay calm, stay in control!" I chanted the desperate mantra like a prayer, gritting my teeth until my jaw ached. "Just a little further, then it will all be over."

The primal urge to retreat into the sheltering embrace of the woods tugged at me insistently, beckoning me to flee back into anonymity. To run until my bones turned to liquid fire and my treacherous heart finally gave out, silencing the torturous loop of Damien and Seraphina's tangled bodies seared into my psyche.

But I pushed onward, fueled by a single-minded need to obliterate the warped new life blossoming within me. I would not allow that abomination, that ultimate personification of his unfathomable betrayal, to manifest and corrupt the fragile dreams it had been conceived to represent.

At last, the familiar red neon sign for the reproductive health clinic blazed into view like a harbinger, that sterile doorway representing the escape I so desperately craved.

I didn't even break stride, simply throwing my weight against the glass doors until they surrendered with a protesting screech of complaint.

"Where's.... Dr.... William?" I heaved.

"Ms. Silverwood?" The night nurse rushed out from behind the check-in counter, eyes wide with alarm. Her hands landed on my shoulders in a useless effort to steady me as I swayed drunkenly, clutching the desk for an anchor. "Good lord, what's happened? You're bleeding!"

I shook off her supportive grasp with perhaps more venom than intended, fixing the terrified woman with a look of grim determination that brooked no argument.

"I need Dr. Williams," I rasped, the words scraping my raw throat with the passing of every syllable. "Right now!"

The quavering nurse opened her mouth, perhaps to protest or offer meaningless platitudes of succor, but an authoritative voice cut through the tense silence.

"Everything is under control, Janice. You can return to your duties."

Dr. Williams emerged from the shadows beyond the nurse's station, eternally composed as always despite the slight furrow that creased her regal brow at the sight of my disheveled, haunted appearance.

"Lyra? Oh god, what's happened? Where's Damien?"

The utterance of that name detonated a fresh maelstrom of torment, shattering the dam Is constructed to contain it all.

A strangled whimper broke free as images exploded with lurid clarity - Damien's naked, sweat-soaked form moving in a lewd moves in top of Seraphina, their limbs entwined as tightly as the snakes with which they had surely made an unholy pact to achieve such unforgivable desecration.

"He's gone," I choked out, curling my arms protectively around my abdomen in a pitiful attempt to shield myself further. "With her! That bitch, Seraphina!"  

Dr Williams inhaled sharply at the coarse profanity lacing my tone but made no move to reprimand or censor. I plowed ahead with the admission, forcing the rancid truth from between bloodied lips.

"They were...he betrayed me, Maria. In the worst way imaginable."

In the stark silence that followed, each ragged inhalation felt like shards of glass scoring my chest from within. Finally, Dr Williams seemed to collect herself, guiding me through a door marked Employees Only with brisk efficiency.  

"Shh, just breathe, Lyra," she soothed in that same detached cadence she always adopted when the situation turned critical. " is not good for the baby." She soothed.

"I don't need the baby!.... That's why I'm here, I don't need his baby!" I shouted.

"It's okay, I get it....now tell me everything that happened from the start. Don't leave anything out."

And so I did, without preamble or filter, unleashing the torrent of anguish and violation with machine-gun rapidity.

How I had discovered my beloved and that sadistic she-demon rutting like beasts in his bed.

The shattered illusion of his love and fidelity as hollow lies, his pleas of innocence ringing more obscenely false than the most transparent of deceptions.

Finally...finally Ria's voice, ripped with the blackest snarl of maternal fury and hatred as she screamed for me to purge myself of his poisoned spawn before it could take root.

By the time I reached that bitter conclusion, heaving like a spent force of nature, Dr Maria Williams looked as though she had been hollowed out and the carapace refilled with ashes.

When at last she spoke, her voice sounded decades older, withered by the force of the storm that had raged through her clinic.

"You wish to End the pregnancy," she stated, her words laced with neither inflection nor judgment, simply clinical acceptance. "You're certain of this?"

I flinched as if struck by the blunt finality of her pronunciation. But the venom of Ria's contempt swiftly hardened my resolve into an impenetrable bulwark against doubt or second-guessing.

"Yes," I rasped, hating how my voice shook but lacking the energy to conceal the cracks in my facade. "All of it, Dr Maria. Every last lingering tie to the lies he used to control and manipulate me. I want it eradicated, excised with the same brutality as the act that spawned it."

She held my gaze for a long moment, then nodded once in solemn understanding. "Wait here then. I'll go prepare everything necessary and summon an orderly to assist." Williams turned on her heel and strode away, leaving me alone to ponder the gravitas of the irrevocable choice that lay ahead.

Gradually, my soul turned into an almost inaudible cadence pulsing with metronomic precision from somewhere within the bowels of the clinic.

A faint fluttering like the strained beating of fragile wings valiantly fighting against the confines of a glass dome.

The delicate rhythm wound itself through my consciousness, insinuating itself into the fabric of my being despite my attempts to resist its sheer siren allure.

In that endless suspended moment, a shocking certainty blossomed with such abrupt clarity that my next breath stalled in my burning lungs.

I knew that sound.

Underneath the howling anarchy and brutalized torment churning through me, I knew it in the marrow of my very bones.

The unmistakable susurrus of a fragile new life, woven from the primal essence of my own flesh and energy.

My child's heartbeat.

A plaintive, desperate keen building in my throat imploded back into my ribs, crushed beneath the cataclysmic gravity of this revelation.

I was vividly aware of Maria's returning footsteps, her efficient strides carrying her closer to me but I couldn't tear my senses away from that hypnotic, delicate pulse.

Thrumming with the same eternal synchronicity as the cradle song of the very cosmos itself.

The doors of the clinic burst apart in a shrieking concussive blast, their rending accompanied by a deafening bellow of purest rage and territorial dominance that shook the foundations beneath my feet.

"ENOUGH!"

I whirled toward the source, half-blind with the stinging torrent of tears I could no longer contain.

Through the searing kaleidoscope of heartbreak and agony, I glimpsed a behemoth of a man silhouetted in the frame of the obliterated entrances, his presence seeming to bend the very atmosphere around his formidable frame like a black hole devouring all light and substance.

"NO, You won't Abort My Pups!" He muttered.

"No further harm will come to my pup tonight!" The stranger yelled, making me shiver.

The words bludgeoned me with the force of a physical blow, reverberating through my soul with authority. I barely registered Dr Williams's choked cry of alarm as her attention focused on this intrusive stranger.

All of my senses were riveted on the stranger, drawn by a compulsion as primal and immutable as the lunar cycles themselves.

Time seemed to crawl as he surged toward me, emerald eyes blazing with searing intensity from beneath a severe brow and shock of tousled ebon hair.

His features were chiseled from granite perfection yet familiar in a way that strained the borders of comprehension.

"My HEIR.....My Pups...

HIS HEIR... HIS PUPS...

Just who is this stranger? Is he The Sperm Donor? The real father of my Child?