Chapter 144 One More Day
ELIJAH
I was close to shaking with rage. I couldn’t believe these people really expected me to stand here and do nothing when my mate was gone. No, not gone. Taken, by crazed cult members who wanted her dead,
“She is out there somewhere with those men and we have no idea what they’re doing to her.” I kept my voice as level as I could manage, which was not very level at all. “How am I supposed to just wait?”
Hazel looked at me with the expression she used when she thought I was being unreasonable but was trying to find a kind way to say so.
“The sisters gave their word that she would come back. That isn’t nothing. That’s actually quite a lot, coming from them.”
“The sisters aren’t there with her right now.” I was exasperated. Why couldn’t any of them see where I was coming from? “They’re not watching what’s happening in real time. They gave their word based on what they could see and what they could see might have changed.”
“Or it might not have. Elijah.” She waited until I looked at her directly. “If I were the one taken, and you had the sisters’ assurance that I was coming back, would you still want to go charging into a situation you have no map for, with no way to locate me, against opponents we’ve already established can’t be fought conventionally?”
I didn’t answer immediately, which was answer enough.
“Even if we went after her right now,” she continued, “we have no idea where they took her. The trail into the forest ran cold within half a mile. They moved through it in a way that left nothing trackable. We could search for weeks and find nothing but more forest. That’s not helping her. That’s making us feel better while achieving nothing.”
She was right. Knowing it was its own specific torment because rightness didn’t do anything about the absence of Adriana, which I could feel with a physical specificity that had no equivalent in anything I had experienced before. Not even losing Emily had felt like this. That had been a slow erasure. This was an open wound.
It has been four days. I was so close to losing my damn mind.
The mind link between us had gone silent sometime during the night of the battle. I had felt it cut off suddenly and completely, leaving a silence that was louder than the noise had been.
I had been reaching into that silence every hour since and finding nothing, not even the faint presence that usually existed at the edges of the connection even when she wasn’t actively speaking. It was as though the channel itself had been closed from the other end.
I could not feel Yara at all.
That was what frightened me most. Yara had been present at the edges of my awareness, a peripheral warmth that I had become quietly accustomed to, and now she was simply absent. I didn’t know if that meant Adriana was unconscious, or restrained by something that was suppressing the connection, or something worse that I was working very hard not to let myself think directly.
We had casualties. Significant ones. Nearly half of the soldiers who had stood in that field had not walked off it, and the ones who were still here were not in good shape at all.
I had spent two of the four days managing the immediate aftermath of the battle. The wounded, the logistics, the communications with families. It had given me something to do with my hands, which was the only mercy of it.
“Aiden is sending word from home,” Hazel said, looking at her phone. “He thinks the Cult may be moving on our pack.”
I straightened.
“Get him on the line. Tell him to prepare our full defensive measures, nothing reactive, he holds position until they make a move and then he responds with everything we have. He does not wait to hear from me before acting. He has full authority.”
Hazel was already moving.
“Are you going back?” she asked over her shoulder.
“When I have Adriana.” The words came out without hesitation. “Not before. You go back if you need to. I won’t hold you here.”
She stopped walking and turned around.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She looked at me for a moment longer. “I’m not going anywhere, you absolute idiot.”
She left to make the call.
I walked outside into the grey morning and stood in the quiet of what had been a battlefield four days ago and was now just an ordinary stretch of ground again.
I thought about the proposal. About the look on Adriana’s face in that hallway and the way her eyes had done something complicated that I had not fully understood in the moment but that I was beginning to understand now.
She had known. Or suspected. She had been carrying the possibility of exactly this and she had not told me because she didn’t want it to change how I fought, or how I let her fight.
She had been trying to protect me.
I was furious about it and undone by it in equal measure, which was an exhausting combination.
I exhaled a sigh and silently muttered to myself, hoping for a sign from her. Something to tell me she was fine.
I had said one more day to the guard I had assigned to continue the forest search, and I meant it. If the sisters had not communicated anything by tomorrow, I was going to find my own way into that forest and I was not coming back without her.
Hazel returned and stood beside me without speaking.
We watched the treeline together in the thin morning light, and I held on to the only certainty I had, which was that Adriana was alive because the alternative was not something I was going to accept.
She was alive and she was coming back.
That was the only version of this I was willing to recognize.