CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THIRD PERSON POV.

Adam excused himself from the meeting that was already extending beyond the time he had projected for.

He was at the pack palace.

The room he sat in was built for exactly this kind of standoff, high ceilings meant to swallow raised voices before they could echo. Papers had multiplied across the dark polished table over the last hour; alongside spreadsheets nobody agreed on.

Being a substantial stakeholder and a vital presence to Adal Pack's economy meant he needed to attend some crucial decision-making processes.

Even if it meant him being in the palace.

Today was one of those days. A merger between two banks was going on, and it looked like quite a number of wolves were going to count losses due to poor planning from one of the institutions.

The conversation had to be settled at a round table with the pack elders, the alpha, and every other major stakeholder of the pack present; because the loss was something that affected each and every one of them as well.

But the argument was tilting towards the part where Adam felt he saw no need to speak anymore. And as such, for the past thirty minutes he had been silent.

His attention had drifted somewhere beyond the table entirely, past the blame being traded by people he expected to have more decorum. It settled instead, on the slow crawl of the wall clock and the ache building steadily behind his eyes.

He had initially asked to be excused and go home, that he had other engagements for the hour. But the alpha requested that he waited till the meeting ended simply because it was a necessity.

And he couldn't disobey the alpha.

At least not here, because one of the leaders of the second defending bank was from the neighboring pack where his brother worked. BlueRise.

Signs of defiance to the alpha in front of an outsider would look like an obvious flaw in their ruling system. It would make Blake appear weak and unable to control his people, and that was a vulnerability he did not want.

Right now, the meeting got boring. No one had any relevant thing to say. It was just a back and forth and a clash of non-submissive egos.

Voices rose and dulled around him in a rhythm he'd stopped following. Elders repeating themselves with slightly different words, hoping repetition might pass for a new argument. He had seen better deliberations in cartoons.

Adam let his gaze fall to his own hands instead which was restless against the table, and counting down the minutes until he could reasonably slip away.

He checked the clock once more and saw that it was already thirty minutes past eleven. He didn't want to keep Athena up till midnight. So he excused himself to step out and make a call.

The hallway outside offered a different kind of quiet and cooler air. He could still hear the buzz of the meeting fading behind the closed door until it was almost nothing at all. He exhaled, rolled the tension out of his shoulders, and pulled out his cell phone.

Dialing her number immediately.

She picked up after the third ring. “Hey…” she said. The greeting sounding incomplete.

“Hey, how was your day? How are you doing?” he noticed his voice had a subconscious intonation to go soft when it came to her.

“It was fine, I'm doing okay.” A temporary pause, “Are you still stopping by?”

“It's a bit late for me, isn't it?” hearing the disappointment in her voice.

“You could always come in. I mean, I'll wait for you. I'm not really doing a-anything much aside, just preparing for b-bed.” she was stuttering. He found it kind of cute.

“I don't think I'm able to make it in tonight anymore. There's this meeting that's going on, and I cannot be excused from it currently. They need my presence there.”

“It's fine, I understand. Duty calls.”

“But I could stop by tomorrow. Are you going to school tomorrow?” he was a bit worried that he'd let her down.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Did you go today though? I never asked.”

“Nah. But I feel like I could go tomorrow. I feel a bit better and in a better frame of mind, and Grey says he wants to go as well, so I have company. I think it will be a better day.”

He wanted to ask why she felt better, for good measure… but it occurred to him that it may sound pessimistic and be interpreted the wrong way. “That's cool. What are you doing after school? aside coming home.”

She laughed at the way he phrased the question. “Aside coming home?” she repeated.

“Yes, I cannot aside that.”

“Nothing.”

“Here's what. I'll come get you after school, and we'll go somewhere. Are you okay with that?”

“Yeah, sure I am.” That was all Adam needed to hear to break into a smile.

“All right. Take good care of yourself, okay? I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see you. Bye.” The phone call ends.

Adam lingered in the hallway a beat longer than necessary with the phone still loose in his hand; before he released a groan when he realized he'd have to walk through the door again.

“I cannot deal with this.” He muttered to himself as he pressed on the door handle.

Meanwhile…..

Athena found it weird that the conversation ended that way. She began to wonder if she needed to use endearments for him at the end of conversations, or if at the point they were, using endearments on him would be overstepping.

But she had something to look forward to the next day anyway, which was Adam's …

Date?

She wondered if she could call it that.