Chapter 164 My Secrets
ELIJAH
I stopped walking.
She turned to look at me and there was something in her expression that I had not seen there since she arrived. She looked more like a sister than anything else right now.
“When I placed my hand on the second twin,” she said, “I felt something I wasn’t expecting.”
“What did you feel?”
“A presence.” She held my gaze. “Something that should not be in a child that age. It was like a power that has been displaced from its original source.”
My brows furrowed and I went very still.
“You’re saying something is in my son.”
“With your son.” She corrected. “It is inside him. I looked at Adriana and I could see that she felt it too in the same moment. She didn’t say anything in front of you.”
“She didn’t tell me.”
“She may not have understood fully what she felt. Or she may have wanted to understand it before bringing it to you.” She put her hand briefly on my arm. “I’m not telling you this to alarm you. I’m telling you because you need to know, and because Adriana is going to need you to know before she has to find the words for it herself.”
I felt the weight of it settle into me alongside everything else I was carrying.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the source?”
“I don’t know precisely. The sisters would be better placed to identify it. But—” She waited until I looked at her directly. “Whatever it is, it carried over from something that was supposed to be finished.”
The Grandmaster.
I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t need to. The look on her face when I arrived at the word internally confirmed it without either of us having to speak it into the open air.
I breathed out.
“Don’t tell her you told me,” I said.
My mother frowned slightly. “Why not?”
“Because she needs to come to me with this herself. If she knows you already told me, she’ll spend energy managing that instead of just telling me. And I need to hear it from her.” I paused. “I’ll be patient.”
My mother looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t fully name.
“Your father was not good at patience,” she said. “He was good at many things. Not that.”
“I know.”
When we went inside, I left her to go and find Adriana.
She was coming out of the training grounds as I turned the corner, one of the sisters still at her side, her hair pulled back and her face carrying exhaustion. She saw me and something in her face shifted.
I crossed the distance between us and put my arms around her without saying anything.
She pressed her face into my shoulder and stayed there.
“How was the council?” she asked, her voice muffled.
“Managed,” I said. “Don’t worry about Carver.”
She pulled back slightly and looked at me.
“He’s going to be a problem.”
“He’s already a problem. I’ll deal with it.”
She studied my face before nodding. She was letting it go now but it wasn’t over.
“And the training?” I asked. “How did it go?”
“Hard,” she said. “But I stayed upright. Which is more than I could have said this morning.”
I kissed her forehead.
“That’s enough for today,” I said.
She nodded against me and I kept my arm around her as we walked back into the house together, and I kept what I was carrying with me.
I told myself she would come to me when she was ready. I told myself I could wait.
ADRIANA
The sisters’ requirement was for the training to start at dawn and it was non-negotiable, which I had learned in the first conversation we had about structure.
Dawn was when the power was most malleable, most responsive to direction, before the day’s accumulated stress and emotion had a chance to layer over it and make everything harder to reach. It was also when the twins had typically been awake for two hours already, which meant I arrived at every session already running a deficit.
The schedule looked, on paper, like something manageable. Two hours of training in the morning. Pack duties through the middle of the day, modified to remove anything that might produce significant emotional stress, which turned out to be a category so broad it was nearly meaningless, because being Luna was almost entirely composed of things that produced emotional stress.
What the schedule did not account for was the fact that my body had not read the schedule.
I was three weeks postpartum with twins. I was breastfeeding, which meant that every two hours regardless of what else was happening my body made its own demands in ways that could not be postponed.
I was sleeping in fragments. The kind of sleep that accumulates without ever producing the feeling of having actually rested. And underneath all of that, running constantly like a current through damaged wiring, was the awareness of what had happened in the nursery and what it meant and what it could have meant if the boys had been in slightly different positions or if the glass had traveled differently.
I had almost hurt my children.
That thought did not leave me. I had tried reasoning with it, filing it into the correct category of things that had not happened rather than things that had, and it refused to be filed. It sat in the foreground of everything and colored everything I looked at, including my sons when I held them, which produced its own difficulty because holding them was when the power moved most unpredictably and most strongly.
The first three days of training were, by any honest assessment, terrible.
The sisters were patient. They did not express disappointment when I failed to hold the power back during an exercise, or when it surged unexpectedly and sent the training ground equipment scattering.
Yara was still distant.
That was the part I had not told anyone, not even Elijah. In the weeks since the birth, Yara had been present and active. I could feel her there, the warmth of her, her attention, but I could not reach her properly and she could not reach me.
The surge in the nursery had frightened her, I thought. Or perhaps it had been the other way around. Perhaps the surge had come partly from the gap between us, from the power having nowhere to anchor itself.
I didn’t know what that meant for us.