Dr Jasper POV

It's freezing. I don't know how much longer my body can survive in these conditions. It's wet and cold, and it's too exposed to the outside elements for humans to survive longer than a few days.

Maybe that's the plan. But why bring me here if not to punish me? I wish they would just make up their minds. I'm tired of fighting. I'm tired of running. I want to end it. I want him to end it for me because I'm too weak to do it myself.

Weak. That's what I am. Weak and pathetic. If I had just made a stand against my father perhaps none of this would have happened.

Maybe I would be at home with my family. My wife and three beautiful children. Instead, I followed my father's road for the sake of survival, and it led me here.

Marina is gone. Evelyn is dead. James hates me and Aida ... That's the worst part of all. What have I done to her? I don't even know where to begin. And now I'm here in this cell, just waiting to die slowly from hypothermia or awaiting a faster but more painful death. Punishment for not coming through with the promise I swore to uphold.

Father, this is all your fault.

I scratch around in the dark to find my backpack. It's all they let me keep. The thin clothes on my back and the backpack I managed to grab and stock with a few tiny morsels of food and my precious journal before I made a run for it from the institution.

I didn't get far before they grabbed me, and then I woke up here.

I pull out the journal. My memoir of sorts, I suppose, if anyone would ever read it. I had hoped that one day James and Aida would. It explains it all. The decisions I have been forced to make. The sacrifices. The horrors. The many mistakes over the years leading me to this uncertain end.

I flick back over the last few years of content in the tattered book. I know when it all went downhill. When my father turned on us all. The tear-stained pages are a map of my broken will to be part of all of this horror. But I did it to protect Aida.

I turn the pages to the early days. Happier times. And the beginning of my darkest of times. I find the photo stuck in the journal, bookmarking a page that I know by heart. The day my heart broke.

September 15, 2001

They came in the night. I know the day like the back of my hand because we had just had the local town carnival. We had a picture as a new family of 5 in front of the Ferris wheel. Marina and I and our three little ones.

We took the children home; the two bigger ones were exhausted. Evelyn is four but is such a tiny girl. She is about the same size as her two-year-old brother. They are a carbon copy of each other in looks. Dark hair and almond shaped eyes.

Marina's eyes.

I tuck the little ones into bed and go to my room, finding Marina and Aidalyn cuddled up in the armchair by the window. Little Aida is cooing softly in her mother's arms.

Marina looks tense. Her eyes search the darkened woods outside the window. She has been this way all day. Uptight and nervous.

An hour later I know why.

The scream in the hallway outside our room wakes me from my sleep. Marina is startled awake in the chair and looks at me, terrified. It's Evelyn. I rush out to see a tall, pale man in the hallway, holding the limp body of one of the elders' wives.

The thing holding her stares at Evelyn who is standing in her doorway,he licks his lips. In an instant, I am at her side. I grab her and go into her room whereJames is awake and terrified in his bed. I lock the door behind us.

She knows what to do. We've rehearsed this. she grabs her brother and jumps out the open window. I watch them as their tiny bodies run for the shelter. She holds his hand and drags him along. She doesn't look back.

I hear Marina scream, and I run back into the hallway, finding her in the arms of Lukah himself. He has Marina by the throat and the baby in his arms.

Suddenly, I am tackled from behind, and the next thing I see is a haze working its way over my eyes and Lukah walking away with Marina and Aida.

And then the lights go out.

A tear runs down my cheek. That was seventeen years ago and still I don't know what truly happened to my love. I assumed like everyone else that she was killed in the days after the attack. They killed many women and children that day.

I take my pen out and write the next section in.

September 28, 2018

This is the truth. My truth. The whole truth.

James and Aida, I love you. I'm sorry.

I thought Marina and Aida were both lost in the days following the attack in 2001 until my father called me a few days after they were taken and asked me to meet him at an address three hours away.

He said it was about Marina and Aida.

I drove too fast and completely recklessly to reach him as fast as I could. The address he gave me was an abandoned warehouse, but it was not empty.

Father was waiting for me at the gates. I had not seen him in almost a year. He looked withered and tired and very pale. He had a small child by his side, one somehow familiar to me. The features reminded me of a child that went missing a year back from a pack outing. Grace. The same age as Evelyn and a girl she used to attend kinder with. We suspected a random vampire attack at the time.

When she reached up and shook my hand, I knew who she was. She really is Grace. But she's different somehow. Her eyes are shallow, and her complexion once pink and rosy cheeked is now pale and almost grey.

Father took her by the hand, and I followed him into the open door. She smiled at me, and I froze. Fangs. She had fangs.

The sight inside the building was worse and still haunts me to this day.

All the children I thought were murdered were there, but barely alive. They were all in the warehouse in various states of testing. Some were in beds with blood being transfused, others in cells asleep. Some were in beds covered in bites, others in beds covered in sheets.

I stopped in my tracks and stared at my father. I said the words swimming in my head, "What have you done? Was it you that night? Did you let them in? Are you working with them?" And that's when it hit me. "Did you take Marina and Aida?"

Grace walked off into a cell and laid down on a small dirty looking camp bed. Father started towards a room at the end of the hall. I followed, trying not to look at the children on each side of me. I felt like I might throw up.

We reached the door at the end of the room that led into a separate section of the warehouse. Father opened the door. It was a bedroom of sorts, dirty and cramped. A small, simple bed was against one wall, and a desk covered in papers was against the other.

In the corner of the room was a baby bassinet. I ran over and looked down into it and saw a tiny sleeping baby. My baby. Aida.

But no Marina.

"What have you done?" I asked, in shock.

"What you should have done. I told you they only wanted Marina and Aida's blood and then the children would have been spared. But you wouldn't listen. You could have stopped all this. As it goes, the children have been very useful. My work has come a long way."

He said it like it was my fault. He was a monster. I touched the tiny girl softly and turned to face my father. I was going to rip his throat out.

" Where is Marina?"

"You're too late."

"Where is she?" I repeated.

"He took her. She was more powerful than we thought or had hoped for. She's amazing. Lukah had big plans for her, and she's his now. Aida will be next. They will be hybrids, and then we will be free from Lukah, our job done. We will rule the pack.

He can change our lives, Jasper, if you could only see. We can take over from the Lakes once and for all. It's a grand sacrifice, yes, but it will be for the common good.

I brought you here to see what I've been doing. To help me. I told him you would. I promised. I know you're brilliant with this work, with creation. I'm creating a new breed of werewolf. Stronger and faster and with skills we never thought possible. If you help me, Aida can stay with us until she's needed."

I launched forward and put my hands around his throat. I lifted his body from the floor and slammed him into the wall.

He slid down, out cold.

Oh goddess. What was I supposed to do? If I called for help, I wouldn't have had any shot at finding Marina, if she was even still alive. If I shut all this down or told the pack, Lukah would just come after Aida again.

A terrible plan entered my mind.

Oh goddess, help me. If Marina was gone then I needed to save Aida and my two precious children. I must keep this hidden from the pack.

I took the baby and placed her inside my coat, holding her to my body as we walked out of the office. I headed outside and found the gas connection to the warehouse, breaking it and pointing the open pipe into the bathroom window.

The children.

I tried not to think about it. If Lukah believed them all gone, then maybe he wouldn't search for her. I let the gas seep into the building, then I switched the power off and shut off the lights.

Please forgive me, Marina. Please forgive me, my children.

I went to the car, found my matches, and lit them, throwing them into the windows of the building. Then I blocked the doors to the exit of the building with my car.

And I walked away.

I took Aida and hid her. I used the medication I had planned for Marina and Aida and hid her from the wolf world altogether. I moved her around foster homes with different human families each year to keep her safe. I kept her at a distance from me.

In everyone's mind, she was dead along with the missing children and Marina.

Until they found her. Lukah found her and came calling for his promised hybrid. He threatened to take the entire pack down.

I resisted. I refused to cause any more pain to the pack.

And then he said something that changed it all.

"I will tell you where she is if you finish what was started."

So, you see, all of this? It was for her. For Marina, and for you all.

And I will never forgive myself for any of it.

I finish writing and seal the book. I'm shaking. It's all here for them to see. My whole damned existence. I mark it with my stamp. I need to get this to James and Aida so they know the truth. Somehow.

I stash the book in the backpack and hide it in a small hole underneath the boards by the window. I scratch my finger on the wood until it bleeds. I mark the spot with my blood. If they ever come looking for me, I hope they have a chance of finding it.

But that's a pipe dream. Why would they search for me? In a way, I hope they don't.

I hear the chains clang on the doors, and I immediately know what's coming.

Lukah enters the small space, and his icy presence chills the freezing room even more than before.

"Your time is up, Doctor."