Chapter 159 Order
ELIJAH
18 YEARS AGO
I was twelve years old the first time I understood that something was genuinely wrong with my family, and not the ordinary kind of wrong that all families carried quietly and learned to work around.
My parents had been arguing for months by then. Long enough that the sound of raised voices from their room had stopped producing any particular reaction in me beyond a low, tired resignation. I had developed the ability to hear it and move through it simultaneously, the way you learn to sleep through rain.
I would eat breakfast with the noise coming through the ceiling and go about my morning as though it wasn’t happening, because that was what my father did and I had learned it from him without either of us meaning for that to happen.
That morning was different. The air felt still. Something heavy sat in my chest but I couldn't put a name to it.
The crash was loud enough that I felt it before I understood what it was, a physical concussion of sound that moved through the floor under my feet and stopped me midstep on the stairs. Then silence, which was in some ways worse.
I went to their door and knocked. Then knocked harder.
“Dad? Mum? What happened? Are you both alright?”
I heard nothing from inside. There were no voices, no movement that I could detect through the wood.
I pressed my ear against the door and listened until the handle moved from the other side and the door opened a few inches and my father appeared in the gap, filling it with his body the way he did when he was managing a situation and didn’t want me to see past him.
“Everything is handled,” he said. “Go to school, Elijah.”
He closed the door before I could respond.
I remained in the hallway for a few seconds after, and then I shrugged and went downstairs and picked up my bag. I caught my reflection in the mirror by the front door and stopped.
My palm. I had caught myself against the doorframe when the door opened and pushed me off balance, and the hand I had pressed against the wood had transferred something onto my palm when I’d wiped it on my trousers. A reddish stain that wasn’t dirt.
I turned around and ran back up the stairs.
I knocked on the door again, louder this time, and kept knocking, and that was the day my mother opened it and looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before and sent me to my room.
“You should have gone when your father told you,” she said. Her voice was completely even. “You should have listened.”
She locked my room from the outside. I banged, pleaded and begged her to open it but she didn’t. No matter how loud I screamed and how much I begged. The door remained shut.
I stayed there for two days. My father slid food and water under the door and said nothing about why this was happening, and I said nothing either, because I was twelve and I had no framework for any of it and asking felt like it would make something worse, though I couldn’t have said what.
On the third morning she unlocked the door and sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair back from my face with a hand that was shaking very slightly, and she cried without making much noise. I lay there and let her and didn’t know what to do with my hands.
We never spoke about it.
Then the following week she left.
My father’s angry voice was what woke me up from my deep slumber, calling her name through the house. It was different from how he usually called her, he didn’t sound angry and he wasn't yelling. He sounded scared. Absolutely petrified.
When I got outside my father was on his knees on the front path and my mother was standing at the gate with a bag, and the things she said to him as she went were things I have spent eighteen years working to unhear.
She called me the boy you call a son.
She said she felt frustrated. That she was tired of this life. That none of it was what she had wanted for herself. I was holding her back.
Then she walked through the gate and that was that.
My father went into a darkness afterward that I had no tools to reach into. He stopped sleeping and started drinking and stopped being my father in any meaningful functional sense, and the elders came to me, a teenager and told me that if the Alpha’s behavior continued, the pack’s stability was in question and measures would be taken. I had stood in front of those men and nodded and gone home and poured every bottle of alcohol I could find down the sink.
That was when my father hit me the first time. Then for asking about her. Then for the drinking getting worse because I couldn’t pour fast enough and couldn’t be everywhere at once.
I absorbed all of it and kept the pack standing and told myself she was never coming back.
And now here she was.
Standing in front of my house, in front of my mate, with eighteen years of silence between us and whatever she had decided she deserved to say.
“Guards.” My voice came flat. I didn’t need to try hard to lock my emotions around her. She was nothing to me. “Remove her from the pack. She is not welcome here. Anyone who permits her entry after today answers for it directly.”
“Elijah.” Adriana’s voice beside me, low and careful.
I didn’t bother looking at her. I knew whatever she was going to say would be in favor of letting that woman stay and I didn't want that. So, I fixed my gaze on the nervous looking warrior that stood close to us.
“That is my order.”