Chapter 9 Nine

Chapter 9 Nine
Selene’s POV

I heard him before I saw him.

The noise of a door slamming into a wall hard enough to crack the frame echoed down the east corridor, followed by boots on stone moving with speed and the lower murmur of guards scrambling to catch up with something they hadn’t been prepped for. I rounded the corner and froze.

Thorne Vale, Alpha of Silvercrest, the most disciplined man I’d had the dubious honor to meet was ripping his pack house apart.

He’d been traversing the guest ~hallway~, hand wrapped up in cloth that had already gotten soaked with his blood, questioning every Omega he passed with an intensity that was barely restrained enough to make them shove themselves against the wall as he strode past. His jaw was tight. He had that gray-eyed quality that I’d only seen a handful of times in him, stripped of the careful, strategic veneer he typically maintained over everything; some raw and unprotected thing underneath.

I stood and watched him.

I felt nothing like sympathy.

I knew where she was. I knew this since midmorning, and had put the puzzle together from the lack of her presence in the places she’d usually go inside Silvercrest when it was time for a disappearing act. Luna's garden. The upper reading room. The small window seat at the back of the east corridor looking out over the top of the pine treeline. She hadn’t been in any of them, which suggested she had gone somewhere smaller and older and farther away from the parts of this house that had swallowed her whole.

I said nothing.

I tracked Thorne as he passed down the corridor, turning finally at the far end where he did not look back, his guards trailing him like nervous shadows. I straightened my dress and reversed my path.

Vespera was on the stairs.

She was descending from upstairs with the leisurely air of a woman who had already determined that the day belonged to her, one hand running along the banister, hair of gold carefully arranged, cream-colored gown absolutely unwrinkled. Saw me down at the bottom and her mouth curved into that smile she had sharp as a tool.

The stairs put us alone. No guards nearby. No Omegas in earshot.

I didn't bother with pleasantries.

“Your father,” I said, “is Gamma Rickon.”

Something in her eyes adjusted. Just slightly. The smile stayed in place.

"Selene," she said. Her voice was warm and mildly condescending the way it always was when she was dishing out patience. "You look exhausted. This must not be easy for you, watching”

"Pressure was applied," I said. "Before the soiree. Before the formal proposal. Somebody nudged things into place very carefully, and it was not just the Elders and it was not merely Thorne.” I held her gaze. “This is none of this as natural as you’re pretending it is.”

She got to the bottom step and turned her head and shot me that razor smile full charge. It was a beautiful and ugly thing, up close.

“You’re a bitter little Beta,” she said, pleasantly, “who can’t stand to see your best friend lose. It's almost touching. Loyal to the end." She looked over my shoulder down the hallway. “But the end has come, hasn’t it.”

I smiled back at her.

It was not a warm smile. I hadn’t had Vespera’s range with a smile, that honeyed performance, but I had something else. I had to be patient; I had a memory, and I had long learned that the most useful thing you could ever collect about a person was what they did when they thought no one was paying attention.

“I collect things,” I said. "Small things. The kind that by themselves don’t mean much.” I let that sit for a moment. “With whom you connected in the week prior to the soiree. Letters you sent and whom they were sent to. Who is in and out of your rooms during the two days before the formal proposal was announced.” I paused. “Gamma Rickon is extremely good at sneaking around. But he uses the same Omega courier and she has an extraordinarily good memory.”

Vespera's smile remained.

But the fringes of it accomplished something I had long awaited. A fracture, just beneath the surface, the way ice looks right before it breaks apart, a thinness, an alteration in the nature of her stillness.

“You had better be careful,” she said. Her voice remained smooth, but something underneath it had changed pitch. “It is a dangerous habit for a Beta to make claims with no standing from which to reinforce those claims.”

“I didn’t assert anything,” I said. “I just told you what I collected.” I stepped back one step to give her the corridor space nuevamente. “Enjoy the title while it still fits.”

I turned and walked away before she could answer.

I didn't look back. I had learned long ago that looking back made you seem to be waiting for something from people, and I wasn’t waiting on Vespera Reece Vale. What I had said had landed. I had sensed it in the thin, particular flavor of her silence as I left, the difference between a person who was done with you and one who was doing math again.
Let her recalculate.

I walked through the lower corridor toward the library, made sure I was not being followed and ducked behind the reading shelf to a narrow door set in the wall behind it.

It opened, quietly, on ancient hinges I had oiled myself, once a day I had come trailing after Elara because the set of her shoulders told me she needed somewhere to fall apart without an audience.

The light of the lantern had come to me before my eyes had fully drawn in. Low and warm, emanating from deep in the stacks.

I found her on the floor, with papers fanned in a wide arc around her, cross-legged, her dark hair loose, her gown creased from hours sitting on cold stone. She had dust on one of her sleeves and ink on two of her fingers, and she was holding a document in her hand, staring at it with the particular focused look that meant she was keeping something turning over and over until it revealed its other side.

She sounded more awake than she had in weeks.

I stepped over a pile of scrolls and sat on the floor next to her, uninvited. The stone was cold beneath my dress. I didn't care.

We didn't speak for a moment. The archive around us kept its silence, patient and undisturbed, as old rooms do.

I looked at the papers. Lycan exile records. Border maps. A file that had been obviously purged of its most solid parts, the human being within it.

I looked at Elara.

She was still reading.

I thought of Thorne upstairs, bleeding from his hand, shrieking through corridors after I’d finally broken the lock on his control. I thought of Vespera on the steps with her splitting smile. I thought back to three years of watching my best friend shrink, and shrink more and get quieter still, make herself less visible until there were times I was standing in the same room with her when it felt like I was looking at a painting of someone instead of a human being.

For so long I had said to myself that it wasn’t my place. That she had made her decisions and it was not my place to question them, it was my job to attend to her in them. That love also sometimes meant witnessing someone walking a road you wouldn’t have picked for them, and being close enough to catch them if they stumbled.

But there was a difference between choosing to fall and being pushed.

And Elara had been pushed.

I took a slow breath.

“Just tell me what you need,” I told her.

She lifted her eyes from the document.

I caught her gaze and said the thing I’d kept tucked back behind my teeth for three years, the thing I’d promised myself, sworn, that I would never say because saying it also meant acknowledging how bad things had gotten and I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that until just this second, in a cold archive floor with exile records spread out between us and the Alpha of this pack tearing apart the house overhead looking for a woman who no longer wished to be found.

“Tell me what you need,” I repeated. And I can help you disappear.”

For a long moment, Elara stared at me.

Then something in her face changed, not breaking, not relief precisely, more like the expression of a person who had been holding a door shut alone for a very long time and had just felt another pair of hands apply pressure against it next to their own.

She set down the document.

And she began to talk.