Chapter 176 CLXXVI

Chapter 176 CLXXVI
Isabelll's POV

"From this pack, from Levi's life, from all of it. I have tried every other method and none of them have worked. You are the most stubborn woman I have ever encountered and I have been in rooms with people who would make most supernatural beings reconsider their life choices."

"Removing you gives the situation room to resolve itself in the direction it needs to go. Without you there to anchor him here, Levi will eventually return to what he's supposed to be."

"You don't believe that," I said.

Something moved in her face fast, and then disappeared.

"It doesn't matter what I believe," she said. "It matters what is necessary."

I heard Aria shift very slightly behind me, and I moved fractionally to keep her covered.

"Vanessa," I said.

"Think about what you are doing, you are not a violent person. You are calculating and you are controlled and you do things for reasons, but this is not who you are."

"You don't know who I am," she said.

"I know enough," I said. 

"I know you stood in a coffee shop and used your ability on me rather than something physical because on some level you couldn't bring yourself to do the direct thing.”

“I know you told Levi that what you did to me was a mercy because you needed to believe that. I know that everything you have done has been in the space between what you want and what you've decided is necessary."

"This is necessary," she said.

"No, it isn't," I said. 

"This is desperation and you're too intelligent to not know the difference."

She looked at me for a long moment then she reached into her coat everything in my body registered the movement at once. 

She was reaching into the interior pocket with the specific motion of someone accessing something kept close, something important, something she had put there before she left wherever she had come from tonight.

I stepped back and my heel made contact with Aria and I felt Aria's hand grab the back of my coat.

Vanessa brought out a gun.

It was smaller than the weapons I had seen during the rogue attacks, not the tactical weapons the pack security team used. A medical-grade delivery device in the form of a pistol, the kind used for anaesthetic delivery at range, which I recognized because I was a doctor and I had seen the clinical equivalent in controlled settings.

A tranquilizer gun she was not going to kill me on a street in front of a six-year-old but she was going to take me.

"Please," I said. The word came out without strategy behind it, from the place underneath everything that was simply true.

"She is six years old, Vanessa. She has been looking for me for her entire life. Please don't do this in front of her."

Vanessa looked at Aria around me for a second, something happened in her face. A crack in the closed quality, something underneath that was not cold at all.

Then it closed again.

"She will be fine," Vanessa said. "She is the daughter of a Lycan; she will be found quickly."

"She will be terrified," I said.

"Isabellla." Vanessa raised the gun. "I'm sorry."

I turned and pushed Aria hard behind me, putting my full body as a barrier the shot was quiet. A compressed air sound, nothing like the weapons from the attacks. 

I felt the impact in my upper arm, a small precise thing, the delivery mechanism doing exactly what it was designed to do. The anaesthetic was fast. I knew from clinical experience that it would be fast. I had six seconds, possibly eight if I was resistant, and I used every one of them.

I turned to Aria before my legs stopped working and I grabbed her by the arms and I looked directly at her face.

"Call Xavier," I said. "His number is in my phone, it's unlocked, call Xavier. Tell him where you are. Stay on the pavement in the light where people can see you."

"Mama-" Her voice cracked on the word and her hands grabbed my arms.

"You are safe," I said. "You are going to be fine, call Xavier, stay in the light."

My legs went.

I went down with Aria's hands still on me, her face the last thing I could focus on, her eyes wide and not crying, which was somehow worse than crying would have been, the specific look of a child who has been through enough to know that tears would not help this situation.

The pavement came up.

I heard Vanessa's footsteps and I heard a car door. I heard Aria say Xavier's name clearly and without trembling into a phone and then the anaesthetic took everything, and there was nothing left but dark.

Behind me, on a pavement in the early morning, a six-year-old girl stood alone with a phone in her hand and a rabbit under her arm and the presence of mind to do exactly what she had been told to do.

Because she was her mother's daughter and her mother had raised her to be brave.