Red String {EDITING}

Chapter One | The Way Back Home

Snow was beautiful.

Lyra had always loved the snow. She loved the innocent beauty, but she also loved the fact it could kill the unprepared and the unknowing. Beautiful, and yet so very deadly. Silently, she wished she could be a little more like the snow, though she was fairly certain she could easily apply the latter half to herself. She had killed before – many a times – and that fact stained her very soul, or so she thought.

There was an art to strangling a person to death with ones thighs whilst slicing another's throat with a butter knife, and it was those arts which had been taught to her ever since she'd turned the tender age of eight. Now, at the not so tender age of eighteen, she wished she'd never learnt them. Nothing was fun about assassination and war, especially not when one had been kidnapped and moulded into such a soldier against their will.

Irritated, Lyra pressed her hand up against the cold glass and wished she could open the window to feel the soft icy flakes drifting from the fluffy white clouds above. The bars across the window made that feat rather hard to accomplish – as did the fact there was no latch nor hinges. It was just a moderately thick piece of glass made to taunt her with a view of the very thing she could never have.

Freedom.

Or so they thought. Lyra smirked, glancing down at the key in her hand as she promised herself. "Soon."

Soon she would be free.

Her fingers curled around the piece of ornately carved metal that would lead to her freedom. It was the last item she had needed to carry out her plan, and it had been by far the hardest to obtain. A master key like the one she held was only given to select members of the organisation, and it had been sheer luck, and perhaps just a hint of skill, which had landed it in her lap. Members of the upper echelon who were given master keys were annoyingly strong. They had full control over their goddess-given ability, which was far more than she could say about herself.

She had watched, waited, and struck as quickly as she could like the opportunist she apparently was. Remembering how her fingers had closed around the wolf head on the bow of the key made her shudder. She had pulled it from the pocket of the cooling corpse at lightspeed under the red-eyed gaze of the alpha who'd just dealt with the man trying to kill his subordinates. He'd killed him, not that it bothered Lyra. She had seen enough death to last a lifetime, and the Children of the Night always lived a long time, bound to the earth and the moon eternally.

Those red eyes haunted her dreams, burning at the back of her mind as she tried to figure out why they unnerved her so. They brought her vague memories of head pats and happiness, but she couldn't for the life of her figure out why. She had only met those cold blood red eyes for a single instant, barely able to swallow as the alpha stared back at her so flatly with those eyes from underneath a messy fringe of ash blonde hair. It had only been sheer determination which kept her legs moving when she'd ran back to the relative safety of Omega Taurus' base.

Alphas were terrifying beings, and even more so for her since she was technically on the opposing side to them. She had barely escaped from the last one she'd had the misfortune of bumping into, and she had doubts she could do it again. The red-eyed alpha had hesitated for a split second upon spying her there, and that split second was all she needed thanks to her own ability.

Lyra glanced down at her hand, pulling on the hum she could always hear in the back of her head. It was like the buzzing of bees, and it was always there no matter what she did. She pulled it to the surface now, sighing as the faint sensation like pins pricking her skin came. Red sparks erupted over her pale skin, the air crackling for a few moments before she pushed the sparks back. They were always present, simmering under her skin, ready to be unleashed in a few moments notice.