Chapter 39 39

Chapter 39 39
Lena's POV

The healer wanted to look at Demi's wrists.

Demi let her, but she was watching me the entire time the woman unwrapped the marks the binding had left and I pretended not to notice because if I looked back right now we were going to have the conversation in the middle of the corridor with Percy three feet away and that was not where I wanted to have it.

"Sera."

"In a moment."

"Sera, that mark on your neck is a—"

"I know what it is."

Silence.

Then, quieter: "Do you."

I turned.

Demi was sitting on the edge of the bed in the room Percy had taken us to, holding her wrists out for the healer and looking at me with those eyes that had always been able to take me apart from the inside. Three years. Three years and a significant amount of whatever Rael had put her through and her eyes were exactly the same. It was almost unfair.

"Yes," I said. "I know what it is."

She looked at the mark.

Looked at my face.

"Are you alright," she said.

It was such a Demi question. She had just come off a horse after three years of captivity and she was asking me if I was alright.

"I am not the one who needs a healer," I said.

"I did not ask who needed a healer," she said.

The healer finished with her wrists and said something quiet about coming back with something for the bruising and left, which I appreciated because it was either that or I was going to ask her to leave and that would have been less polite.

The door closed.

Demi looked at me.

"Sit down," she said.

"I am fine standing."

"Sera. Sit down."

I sat down.

She studied my face for a long moment the way she used to study a room before deciding whether it was safe to be in it. The specific attention of someone who had learned not to trust surfaces.

"He claimed you," she said.

"Yes."

"The Lycan King claimed you."

"That is what happened."

"And you are—" She stopped. "You are not running."

"No."

She looked at me for another long moment.

"Tell me from the beginning," she said.

So I did.

Not everything. Not the parts that were not mine to say and not the parts I did not have words for yet. But from the beginning. From the night Corvin handed me a job that was supposed to be clean and simple and was neither of those things, from the first night inside the fortress walls, from everything that had moved and shifted and changed between then and the gate an hour ago.

Demi listened the way she always listened. Without interrupting. Without her face giving anything away until she had the whole picture.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"Corvin is in a cell," she said.

"Yes."

"In this fortress."

"Yes."

She processed that.

"And Damon," she said. "He knows what you are. He knows where you came from. He knows Corvin sent you here to take something from him." She looked at the mark on my neck. "And he did that anyway."

"Yes."

She was quiet again.

Then: "Sera, I have something to tell you."

The way she said it stopped me.

Not the words. The weight under them. The specific weight of something that had been carried a long time and had not gotten lighter.

"Demi."

"I need you to listen," she said. "And I need you to not do the thing where you start making a plan before I finish talking."

"I do not do that."

She looked at me.

"I need you to not do the thing where you start making a plan before I finish talking," she said again.

I pressed my mouth together.

"Fine," I said. "I am listening."

She looked at her hands.

At the marks the binding had left.

At her hands again.

"Rael did not take me because of you," she said. "Not at first. Not the way you think." She looked up. "He took me because of what I found out. Three years ago. The thing I found out three years ago that I had been trying to get to you when he stopped me." She held my gaze. "I never got to tell you because Cain told you I was dead and you were inside the fortress by the time I got free the first time and then Rael found me again and—" She stopped. "I should have found a way to reach you. I tried three times. I am sorry."

"Do not apologize to me," I said.

"I am telling you because you need to understand that what I am about to say is not new information," she said. "It is three years old. Which means it has been sitting in the world this entire time. Which means things have already moved because of it whether we know it or not."

My hands were still in my lap.

"Tell me," I said.

She looked at me.

"Cain is not working for himself," she said. "He has not been for years. Someone has been running him. Someone above him, outside the pack structure, outside anything you would have had access to from where you were." She paused. "I found out who."

The room was very quiet.

"Demi."

"It is someone inside this fortress," she said. "It is someone who has been inside this fortress for a long time. Before Damon. Before the old Lycan King." She held my gaze and her voice did not shake, not once, which meant she had been living with this for three years and had made her peace with how large it was. "Sera, whoever has been running Cain has been building toward something specific. And the deed, the vault, the inside job, all of it." She paused. "That was not Rael's plan."

I looked at her.

"That was theirs," she said.

The door opened.

Damon stood in the frame.

He looked at my face.

And I watched him read it the way he had been reading me since the beginning, that fast and accurate attention that missed nothing, and I watched him go still in the doorway with the particular stillness of a man who had just understood that the conversation he had walked in on was not the conversation he had been expecting.

"What is it," he said.

I looked at Demi.

She looked at me.

"Close the door," I said.