Chapter 5 Five

Chapter 5 Five
ELARA'S POV

The stone steps felt cold underneath me, but I wouldn’t budge.

I’d been sitting long enough for the noise inside to fade into something far away, like rain against a window. In my hand was a half-empty champagne bottle. I didn’t recall consuming that much alcohol. Maybe I had. Maybe it didn't matter.

The night air might smell like pine and something sweet, flowers from the garden Thorne had planted three years prior, when I’d first arrived at Silvercrest as his Luna. I used to love that garden. Now it only reminded me of everything I’d tried to grow that didn’t take root.

I heard him before I saw him.

Not footsteps exactly. More like a change in the air, how the dark appeared to thicken and then finally settle again. I looked over and he was just standing there, leaning against the stone pillar at the edge of the steps like a statue who had been waiting there for hours. Green eyes. Calm. Staring at me without the pity I’d come to expect on people’s faces tonight.

"You're still here," I said.

"So are you," he said.

His voice was low. Not a whisper, but close. The sort of voice that didn’t need to shout to usher you close.

I turned around to face the garden. I thought he might say something else, ask why I’d been sitting outside alone while I was being humiliated, or give me some empty comfort like people do when they don’t have anything else to offer. He didn't. He simply sat down next to me on the step, there being enough distance not to feel invading one’s personal space and stared into the same black as I was.

“It’s a nice night for being outside,” he said after some time.

I almost laughed. "Is it?"

“Better than whatever’s going on in there.

I didn't argue with that.

We sat quietly for a minute. It wasn't the uncomfortable kind. The kind that had room in it, space for things to rest before binding them up with words.

“I thought I could be enough when I married him,” I said.

I hadn't planned to say it. The words come out like they do when you’ve held them too long and your arms finally give.

He didn't respond right away. He refrained from immediately ameliorating the silence with reassurance or questions.

“I thought if I was good enough, quiet enough, devoted enough,” I went on, “that it would matter. That would matter." I looked down at the mouth of the bottle in my hand. "Three years. And at some point through those three years, I just stopped being a person. I was just a role. Luna. Devoted wife. But perfect and obedient and utterly invisible.”

They ask you questions like “What did you look like before?” he asked. "Before the role."

The question caught me. No one had ever asked me that before.

“I don’t remember,” I said, and the truth of it felt heavy in my mouth. "I used to paint. I would argue with my father about old war strategies simply because I enjoyed the argument. I wanted to run at night — and guess what? I was allowed to do that.” I shook my head. “Then I came here and I just … didn’t. All of it."

"Why?"

“Because of the fact that Thorne hates messes,” I said. “He liked things neat and tidy and presentable. And I wanted him to love me. So I got clean and neat and presentable.” I exhaled slowly. “And he still didn’t love me enough.”

This green-eyed man next to me was suddenly quiet. Then quietly, “He didn’t lose you because you were too little. He was too blind to see that he lost you.”

I looked at him then. Really looked at him. The scar along his jaw. The steadiness in his expression. The way he didn’t say it like a compliment, like he was trying to make me feel better. He said it like how you say something that is just true.

"Who are you?" I asked.

His mouth curved slightly. Not quite a smile.

Before he could respond, voices erupted from within. Spooky, piercing, several people talking over each other Then a door slammed.
I looked toward the sound, and when I turned back, he had disappeared.

Not walking away. Not slipping around a corner. Just gone, as if the dark had folded in on him and shut.

I blinked in his direction where he had sat.

There was the sound of heavy footsteps crossing the threshold behind me. I knew them. I had memorized them as I had memorized everything there was to memorize about Thorne in the early years, how he breathed when he was angry, how his jaw set when he had already made up his mind and was only pretending to weigh another option.

"There you are."

His voice was flat. Controlled. The type of control that meant he was raging.

I didn't stand up. I sat there with my champagne bottle and I looked up at him like you look at something that used to scare you, but now only wears you out.

“I’ve been searching for you,” he said.

"I was here the whole time."

Something moved across his face. He stared at the empty space next to me, at the two faint indentations in the dust on the step where someone had sat, and his eyes narrowed. Then his run closed about my arm and he dragged me to my feet.

"Inside," he said. "Now."

I let him pull me. Not because I was afraid. Because I was saving something. I didn’t know what, but I could feel it in my chest, small and quiet and new, and I didn’t want him to see.

The walk back through the hall was a show. Heads turned. Eyes dropped quickly. Selene across the room made eye contact, and her look was one like an entire conversation. I gave her nothing back. I smoothed my face and squared off my shoulders and I allowed Thorne to take me up the stairs as if I was just tired and needed to go to bed.

The door in our bedroom closed behind us. The lock turned.

Then he took a position in the middle of the room and looked at me as he always did when making weapons out of words.

“You made a fool of me tonight,” he said. Quiet. Deliberate. Each word is placed with care. “Alone, half drunk outside while my guests watched. While my pack watched." He paused. "There will be consequences, Elara. For all of it."

I said nothing.

I took a seat on the edge of the bed and let him finish and then I reclined back, staring at the ceiling, waiting for him to move to the opposite side like he had been doing for the last couple months: sleeping next me as if I were furniture that could be safely ignored.

When his breath finally settled into a sleep, I was still awake.

I was thinking of the steps. About the voice that had asked what I looked like earlier. In a way that darkness had devoured a man whole and no one heard him.

I wondered whether it had been a figment of my imagination. Grief did strange things. Champagne did stranger ones. I might have been sitting there alone and talking to the garden and creating a listener because I needed one so badly.

Then I flipped my wrist in the dark.

The stench hit me even before I lifted it to my face.

Dark amber. Smoke and resin and something older below that, like forest floor after rain. Rich and deep and utterly foreign to anything in Silvercrest.

It was on my skin. Oh, just where his hand had briefly steadied my wrist moments before when I nearly knocked over the bottle. Only one caress, barely a moment.

He had left his scent on me.

Not by accident. Lycans didn’t scent mark randomly. Every wolf knew that. It was intentional and purposeful and it signified something, although I didn't know what.

My heart pumped once, hard, into my ribs.

He was real. And he had made certain I would know it.