Chapter 115 Take Over as Alpha
ADRIANA
“It’s nothing alarming, Adriana.” Elijah must have mistaken my silence for worry. His voice was calm.
I nodded and tried to muster a smile.
“I just wanted to talk about us.”
My stomach did something complicated. “Us? What about us? Is something wrong with—”
“Relax.” He said it gently. “You’re my mate. My Luna. The woman I intend to build everything with. And I’ve been sitting with this for a while now. I don’t want to keep existing in this halfway space anymore. I want more than what we have been.”
I went very still. His words were playing on a loop in my brain.
“I’m not about to drop to one knee at the breakfast table, though I’m not ruling it out eventually.” The edge of his mouth lifted. “I just mean I don’t want to be just Elijah to you. I don’t want us to keep moving around each other like we’re still figuring out whether this is real. I want to mean something to you because you’re already everything to me.”
I reached across the table and put my hand over his. His fingers were warm and he turned his hand slightly, just enough, so that mine fit against his properly.
“Elijah.” I waited until he looked at me fully. “You already mean so much to me. You’re not just Elijah, you haven’t been just anything to me for a long time. You are what I didn’t know I was waiting for. You are what I didn’t think I was allowed to want.”
He held my gaze for a moment with an expression I couldn’t fully name. Careful. Open. Like he was letting himself believe it.
“I know I’m terrible at timing.” He cleared his throat, and the slight roughness in his voice did something entirely unreasonable to my composure. “But will you be with me? Officially.”
There is no wrong time when it is the right person.
“Yes.” I didn’t even have to think about it. “Obviously yes. I would have said yes months ago if you’d asked.”
He pushed back from the table, pulled me out of my chair, and settled me into his lap in one fluid motion like it was the most natural thing in the world. Then he kissed me, and I stopped thinking about timing or packs or any of the thousand things circling at the edges of my life. Just him. Just this. The extraordinary ordinary fact of being chosen by someone I would have chosen back a thousand times over.
“Oh, for the love of, there are children in this house.”
Hazel’s voice floated down from the staircase, and I pulled back laughing before I could stop myself. She had one hand over her eyes like she’d walked into something truly traumatizing.
“You are so dramatic,” I told her.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said pointedly, aimed at Elijah. “We need to go over something. Now, preferably, before I lose my mind.”
Elijah looked at me, apology already forming.
“Go.” I said it before he could. “We’ll talk tonight.”
“Okay,” he confirmed, standing and settling me back on my feet. “Just us. Somewhere that isn’t this house. Yes?”
“Yes.”
He pressed a brief kiss to my forehead and left with Hazel, who shot me an enormous grin over her shoulder the second his back was turned. I pointed at her. She laughed and disappeared around the corner.
I went upstairs still smiling, the warmth of the morning sitting high in my chest.
Yara immediately showed herself..
“You’re in a good mood.”
“I am. Elijah just asked me to be his girlfriend. So yes, I’m in a good mood, and I’d like to stay in it for at least a few hours if that’s alright with you.”
“I can feel his wolf’s energy around you. It’s strong today.”
That pulled something loose in my memory. I sat down on the edge of the bed and let it surface properly.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. When I was with the sisters, before we left, they said something that I haven’t been able to shake. They warned me that if the Cult can’t reach me through my enemies, they’ll come through my friends instead.” I paused. “I don’t have a huge circle here. But I need to understand what they meant. Is there anything you can tell me?”
Yara was quiet for long enough that I thought she’d stepped back. Then she spoke, and her voice was so careful. It made my skin prickle.
“The sisters don’t say things without reason. If they told you that, you need to take it seriously. These are not ordinary people with ordinary means. They will use whoever is closest to you, whoever you have let in, without hesitation and without mercy.” She paused. “Think about who killed your father, Adriana.”
The words knocked the air out of me. “His own people? They killed him?”
“I don’t know precisely what he did to earn it. But the person you need to fear above all others is the Grandmaster. He has been hunting you for a long time. He will not stop, and he will not tire. He cannot find you. You must make sure of that.”
I sat with that for a moment.
“But you said the reason they hadn’t been able to track me before was because they didn’t know about you. Now everyone in this pack can feel your presence. What’s protecting me from being found now?”
“Nothing,” she said simply. “Which is why the next step cannot wait.”
Something cold moved through me. “What next step?”
“You need to go back to your pack, Adriana. And you need to take the throne as Alpha.”