Chapter 13 013

Chapter 13 013


Zelyne's POV

Darius sent for me the next morning

Surprised me. We'd barely been in the same room twice since the wedding, never alone, never with any real reason to speak to each other directly. But Petra brought the message after breakfast and I went.

He was in bed. The sickness had been quiet about what it was taking — small amounts, day by day, easy to miss if you weren't standing right next to him. But up close you saw all of it at once. How much smaller he'd gotten. The way the sheets lay flat. The color gone out of his skin. The stillness of someone whose body had stopped being reliable.

His eyes though. Dark and sharp and completely, stubbornly there.

"Sit down."

I sat in the chair by the bed.

He looked at me without speaking for a moment. Room smelled like medicine and underneath it something else I didn't look at too hard. Outside the window the pack was going about its morning. In here it was quiet.

"Two weeks," he said.

"Yes."

"How is it."

"I'm managing."

His face moved. Not a smile but close to one — like he'd expected something careful and got something straight instead. He said the word back to himself. Managing. Quiet, like he was turning it over.

"Fair," he said.

He looked at the ceiling. When he spoke again it was slower, a man who'd started being deliberate about what he spent.

"My son isn't easy." No apology around it. Just fact. "Never has been. I'm not going to tell you otherwise." A pause. "But he's not what people say about him. And he's not what he thinks he is either. Both of those things are true at the same time." He looked at me. "You seeing any of that yet."

"Starting to."

He held on me with that look from the wedding. A beat too long. Reading something.

"Tell me something," he said. "Since you got here. What's been the hardest part."

Didn't expect that. I thought about it instead of just answering.

"Not knowing the rules," I said. "Not the ones anyone says out loud. The other kind. The ones you only find out about by getting them wrong."

He was quiet. "Have you. Got any wrong yet."

"Not yet."

"Good." He looked back at the ceiling. "Keep it that way. This pack remembers things and doesn't forgive fast and you're still very new." He paused. "They'll come around. Most of them. The ones worth having will."

I didn't ask which ones he meant. I'd find that out the same way I found out everything else here.

"Your mother wrote to you," he said.

I went still.

"Does she know you're alright."

The way he asked it — careful, like the answer meant something to him — moved something in my chest. "I told her I was managing," I said.

Almost smile again. "Same answer."

"It's the true one."

He nodded. Looked at his hands on the blanket. Old hands. Scarred across the knuckles.

"She's smart," he said. "Your mother. Smart enough to be scared of the right things." A pause. "She didn't want to send you here."

"No."

"She was right not to want to." Plain. Not cruel, just honest. "Not for the reasons she thinks. But she was right."

I kept my face where it was and waited.

He looked at me again. That reading look.

"My wife." He stopped. The pause went long enough that I thought he'd changed his mind. Then he started again, slower. "She finds things in people. Things she decides she can make use of. She's been doing it her whole life and she's good at it and most people don't see it until it's already done." His eyes on mine, not moving. "Whatever she's found in you — don't hand it over. Not a piece of it. Hold it and don't let her near it no matter what it costs you."

Nothing moved in the room.

A door shut somewhere outside. Only sound for a moment.

"I won't," I said.

He looked at me after that for a long moment. Then he nodded. Once. Slow. The way you put something down you've been carrying too far.

"Does Dominic know," I said. Quiet.

Something went through his face. Tired and old and complicated. "He's getting there," he said. "He's always been slow with things he doesn't want to see. Gets that from me." He shut his eyes. "Send him in when you go."

I stood. Put the chair back the way it was.

"Zelyne."

Turned around.

Eyes still closed. He looked smaller from the foot of the bed. "That garden on the south side," he said. "My mother had it put in when she came here as a young woman. She was from somewhere green and all the stone here got to her." A pause. "After she died nobody touched it. My wife always said it was untidy." The corner of his mouth moved. "My mother would've taken that as a compliment." He opened his eyes and looked up. "She'd be glad someone found it again. She'd have liked you I think."

I stood there and didn't say anything for a moment because nothing felt like enough.

"Thank you," I said.

He dipped his chin. Already going.

I left and found Dominic in the corridor and told him his father wanted him and watched him go through that door and then I walked back through the house on my own.

North wing corridor empty. That door shut. Everything looking exactly the same.

But I wasn't seeing it the same.

I went to the garden and sat on the bench and looked at the overgrown roses and the cracked path and the purple thing in the corner that had no business being that alive in all this grey. Thought about a woman I'd never met who planted all of this because she came from somewhere green and couldn't stand the stone. Who'd been gone fifteen years and left this behind her, still growing because nothing had told it to stop.

My wolf moved in my chest. Not a flicker. Something fuller — a slow steady weight settling in like someone sitting down and deciding to stay.

I pressed my hand to my sternum.

Whatever she's found in you — don't hand it over.

He was in that room dying and he knew exactly what she was. Had known for years. Carried it with nowhere to put it down until now.

He'd put it down with me.

I didn't know what to do with that yet. Didn't know what it meant that he'd picked me — seventeen years old, two weeks here, still learning which silences were dangerous.

But he had.

And my wolf was awake and steady and the garden was doing what it had always done — just growing, quietly, in spite of everything around it.

For the first time since I got here I didn't feel like someone waiting to find out what happened next.

I felt like someone paying attention.

Those aren't the same thing.

I was only just starting to understand the difference.