Chapter 134 Make Me Yours
ELIJAH
When I heard Adriana’s voice through the link, I thought I had fully lost my mind and was now hallucinating.
I’d been standing in the middle of the room that Jane had stayed in, looking at the small collection of things she had left behind, and I was not in a particularly good place.
I had not expected to hear from Adriana. After the way she had left and the things I hadn’t said as she walked out the door, I had been telling myself to give her space and wait. That she would reach out when she was ready and trying to push it would only make things worse. I had been rehearsing patience I didn’t entirely feel.
Then her voice arrived and all of the rehearsal turned out to have been unnecessary.
I was glad she reached out. It meant she still cared. I was so glad, it was almost embarrassingly uncomplicated.
This house had been difficult since Jane died.
The pack had known her peripherally and the general mood had gone subdued. I had organized the burial efficiently and placed her next to Liam because she had asked for that in one of the last coherent conversations we’d managed, and I had honored it because whatever else was true about her, she had loved him completely and that deserved to mean something.
Leo had surprised me.
I had expected the death to undo him further. I had braced myself for another locked door, another stretch of days where he would barely eat and wouldn’t come out. Instead, something had shifted in him in the days after Jane died, and it took me a while to understand what it was.
He had seen her. He had sat across from her and cried and been angry and let himself be held and said the things he needed to say in the only language available to him. And now she was gone, but he had gotten to have that. The thing he had been denied for years — the chance to be in the same room as her and not be abandoned again — he had gotten it, and it had closed something that had been open in him for a very long time.
He was eating again. Not much but it was better than nothing. And he’d asked about Adriana twice.
I had told him she was somewhere she needed to be and that she was coming back, and he had accepted that with the grave seriousness he brought to most things and gone back to his train.
Standing at the border of Adriana’s pack in the dark, watching the treeline for movement, I had not expected her to appear the way she did. I hadn’t told her exactly when I was coming. But she was there, and the moment she saw me she crossed the distance between us without hesitation and wrapped her arms around me and held on.
“I missed you,” she said into my shoulder. “I shouldn’t have been so angry. I know I’m difficult sometimes.”
“You shouldn’t apologize for that.”
She pulled back to look at me. “Yes I should. You were trying to protect me.”
“And I did it badly. You had a right to know and I made the choice for you. That wasn’t mine to make.”
She studied my face for a moment and then seemed to decide the accounting was settled.
“You brought Leo?”
“I couldn’t leave him. Aiden has the pack but Leo doesn’t do well when I’m gone for more than a day and this isn’t going to be a day.”
She smiled at that, and it was so genuinely warm that it hit me somewhere in the center of my chest.
“Good. He’s been asking about you,” I said. “He’ll be glad to see you.”
She took my hand and led me through the border and I let her, following her through the quiet of a pack that was still finding its shape under new leadership. I could feel the difference in the air. She was making her presence felt here.
Her room was at the back of the main building. Leo was already settled in a room down the hall, the door cracked with his toy train visible through the gap. I checked on him and he was almost asleep, which was all I needed to see.
I went back to Adriana’s room and closed the door.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed still wearing her jacket, looking at her hands. She looked up when I came in.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this without you and it’s been making everything harder,” she said. “Yara told me not to bring you and I listened and I think I was wrong. I was managing. Just because it’s better with you here.”
I crossed the room and tipped her chin up.
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She held my gaze for a moment, searching it for something, and apparently found it because she exhaled slowly and some of the tension left her shoulders.
“There’s so much to tell you.”
“We’ll talk about everything,” I said. “But tonight you need to rest.”
She shook her head slightly.
“I’m not tired.”
“Adriana.”
“I’m serious. I’m not.” She looked at me steadily, and there was something different in her expression now. “We’ve been apart and I’ve spent the whole time wishing you were here and now you are. I don’t want to sleep.”
I should have been sensible about it. I had been on the road for hours and there was a significant amount of work beginning in the morning and I was an adult who understood the value of rest before a difficult period.
None of that mattered particularly.
“Make me yours,” she said quietly. “No more waiting.”
I didn’t need to be told twice.