Chapter 126 I'm Going Back
ADRIANA
Something was happening and no one was going to tell me what it was.
I had been in this situation before. The last time, it had been Elijah going missing and every person around me suddenly developing an identical inability to answer direct questions.
The hushed conversations that stopped the moment I came into a room. The careful neutral expressions that people put on like a uniform the second they noticed me nearby. The way Hazel and Aiden would be deep in something and then simultaneously find reasons to be somewhere else the instant I appeared.
I recognized all of it.
I was standing at the top of the stairs when I spotted them below. Hazel and Aiden had their heads close together over a table covered in papers, speaking quietly and quickly, like they wanted to get something settled before they’re interrupted. Neither of them had noticed me yet.
I watched them for a moment. Whatever this was, it had been going on for at least a few days. I’d been catching the edges of it. A conversation that ended too quickly, a look exchanged over my head, a document folded away faster than necessary. I’d been telling myself I was imagining things because I already had enough to carry with Jane being in the house and Leo still not having found his way down the hall to her door.
I wasn’t imagining it.
I came down the stairs.
They heard me on the third step and by the time I reached the bottom the papers had been gathered into a rough stack and the expressions were already in place — warm, easy, slightly too relaxed.
“Hey,” Hazel said. That high, bright note in her voice that only appeared when she was working to sound like nothing was wrong. “Did you sleep alright?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing! Everything’s completely fine. Aiden, can you go check on the perimeter rotation? I’ll finish sorting these.”
Aiden looked at her for just a fraction of a second longer than was natural, a look that had a whole conversation compressed inside it, and then he nodded and walked away.
Hazel crouched down to gather the last of the papers from the table and one slipped from the stack and drifted to the floor near my feet. I picked it up before she could reach it.
It was a map. A section of the forest to the east, drawn in careful detail, with multiple locations circled in red ink. Each circle had a notation beside it. Footprints. The word appeared across the page in several places, each one marking a different spot.
“Whose footprints?” I said.
She stood up and held out her hand for the paper. “It’s nothing related to you. It’s a routine tracking exercise. Can I have it back?”
“Hazel.”
“Adriana, please—”
My eyes moved past her to the table.
There was a photograph there. Just a small one, partially obscured by the remaining stack of papers, but I could see enough of it. A dark fabric. A particular pattern along the collar.
I knew that sweater. I had worn it for months. Lisa had torn it off me during one of the beatings because she said it was protecting me somehow and she wanted it gone. I had not seen it since.
“Why is a photograph of my sweater on your table?”
Hazel stood very still.
“Why was it found in the forest? Why are there footprints being tracked? What is actually going on and why is everyone in this house treating me like I can’t handle information about my own life?”
My voice came out sharper than I intended but I didn’t pull it back.
She opened her mouth, and I could see her weighing options, and then she looked toward the stairs.
Elijah was standing there.
He came down slowly, looking at the papers in Hazel’s hands and then at my face, and he did not look surprised to find me here asking these questions. He looked like a man who had known this moment was coming and had not quite finished deciding what to do when it arrived.
He took the papers from Hazel and looked at her briefly.
“I’ve got this,” he said quietly.
She left without argument.
He held the papers out to me.
“Hannah and Lisa escaped from the cells. A week and a half ago. We have been searching for them since then and we have not found them.”
The words arrived in a strange order, like my brain was rearranging them as they came in to make sure they meant what I thought they meant.
I didn’t take the papers. My hand wouldn’t move.
Hannah and Lisa. Out of the cells for days. While I had been sleeping in this house and eating at this table and sitting with Leo in the evenings, they had been somewhere out there and nobody had said a word to me.
Out of the two of them I genuinely didn’t know which one frightened me more. Hannah had spent weeks making my life in this pack small and painful and she had tried to kill me more than once with a smile on her face. But Lisa, she had been after me for longer than anyone here had known me. Lisa was personal in a way that went all the way down.
“You kept this from me.” I wasn’t looking at him now. I was looking at the floor. “For ten days.”
“I was trying to give you space to deal with Jane and Leo. You had enough—”
“No.” I looked up then, shaking my head. “Don’t tell me I had enough to deal with. That is not your decision to make for me. This is my life. These are people who have tried to kill me. And you looked at me every day for ten days and said nothing.”
He didn’t flinch from it, which I respected even though I was furious.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I turned away from him and walked to the stairs. I heard Hazel call my name from somewhere behind me and I kept walking because I didn’t have anything to say to her yet and I didn’t trust what might come out if I stopped.
I reached my room and closed the door and stood against it.
Lisa was out there. And my father was dead, which meant she had no reason to stay away from home. The pack I had grown up in, the place Yara had been telling me to go back to for weeks now. Lisa would go there. It was the only anchor she had ever had.
Maybe that was why Yara had been so insistent. Not just because of the throne. Because if I didn’t go back and establish something solid there, Lisa would simply walk in and take whatever was left unguarded. And then she would have a base, and resources, and people, and she would come for me from a position of strength rather than desperation.
I had been avoiding going home because I was afraid of what it would cost me.
But staying away was costing me more.
I pulled in a slow breath and made the decision. I was going back.
Not because I had been told to, not because I was being pushed. Because it was the only move that made sense, and I had run out of reasons to keep pretending otherwise.