Unclaimed

Chapter Twenty

** ALPHA GRADY POV**

I shut the door to my office after sending Mark out to give me some privacy. I dropped into my chair with a sigh. Would Charli see it as a betrayal? Was I going to break her trust by calling Lily? She had asked me not to, and I said we would discuss it further, but neither of us brought it up.

After we went for a run and ate breakfast, she had gone upstairs to shower, while I went down to my office to start work. I spun my cell phone between my thumb and middle finger. I dialed Lily's number and decided I would just mention it, and then get down to the questions later.

"Hey, Alpha. Is everything okay?" Lily sounded concerned. Maybe I was calling her too often to help me clean up messes.

"Yeah, yeah. Everything's fine. I just wanted to talk to you about these nightmares Charli is having. Is there anything I should know about them?" I had no idea how to broach this subject as a concerned boyfriend instead of as the Alpha.

"They'll probably be gone soon," Lily said as if this should soothe me. "Once her mark is completely gone, the memories will stop coming to her in her dreams."

"And then what?" I thought I knew the answer already, but I wasn't sure. The water from the shower upstairs abruptly stopped, and I wondered if Charli was going to come down to my office.

"They'll be locked away in her mind somewhere we can't get to," Lily said slowly.

"Shouldn't we do something before then? More than half of her mark has faded. We should do something today." I felt myself crossing over into my Alpha role. Charli needed to get her memories back before they were gone. I was afraid they would eat at her forever. She was going to wonder for the rest of her life what had happened now that she knew there was a secret in her own mind.

"She asked me not to."

"What?" I snapped back. Charli had told me she didn't think Lily could bring the memories back, not that Lily had offered and she said no.

Upstairs, Charli mumbled a hello to her Aunt Lydia. She's calling someone to ask questions, I thought to myself. She said she didn't want to know but she's asking about the memories that were stripped from her.

"She asked me not to. She made her decision. She doesn't want to know." Lily was begging me to understand, but I still couldn't quite grasp it.

"How could she not want to know her own past?" I whispered.

"Alpha Grady, with all due respect, the memories that have been taken from her are highly emotional. She thought that boy was her future at some point, and it was taken from her. He's dead. She lost her boyfriend, all her friends, and her entire pack in one day. She lost her mate, Alpha. She doesn't need those memories back. I won't force it on her, either. I'm not going to risk throwing her into a depression that never ends."

"So what do we do then?" I almost shouted. I was getting frustrated that this situation was so different than I had thought. Finally, what Lily was saying started to make sense. Still, "What about when she can't forget that the reality she's in is the alternate ending, not the original?"

"Why don't you ask her that? Help her find happiness in her alternate ending. She told me no matter what, even if she begged, not to do the spell on her. She has made peace with losing those memories."

I shook my head in my hands, but something was off. Something was wrong in the house. I focused in on Charli, and heard her pacing upstairs. She stopped suddenly, and grunted in pain. By the time I saw her, she was standing at the top of the stairs with only the whites of her eyes showing as she started to fall. Fuck.