Chapter 170 The Unexpected
ADRIANA
I was with the sisters in the training ground after dinner, the sky going dark above us, the air carrying the cooler quality it had taken on recently that meant the seasons were shifting. I had been doing these sessions twice daily and the evening sessions were becoming something I valued differently from the mornings. The morning sessions were about control. The evening sessions had begun to feel more like conversation.
The power and I were learning the shape of each other, which was different from me trying to force it into a particular form.
The sisters listened to what I told them about Carver’s plan without visible surprise. They had a quality of having already known most things, which I had decided was not omniscience but rather the accumulated pattern recognition of entities who had been watching human conflict for longer than any of us had been alive.
“He’s going to use someone I trust,” I said. “Someone I won’t expect. And whatever they say is going to be designed to make me think my children are in immediate danger.”
“Yes,” said the elder of the two sisters. “It’s a unique kind of trigger. Activating the threat response through maternal instinct is the most reliable way to produce an involuntary surge in a special wolf at your stage of development. He’s done his research.”
“Can you be there? At the gathering?”
“We’ll be present,” she said. “But we won’t intervene unless something goes wrong that you genuinely cannot manage. If we catch it for you, it proves nothing. You need to catch it yourself.”
“I know that.”
“Then why ask us to be there?”
I thought about it honestly. “Because knowing you’re there changes what I believe I can do.”
She looked at me with something that was close to approval.
“Then we’ll be there,” she said.
I went about everything normally, although underneath all of it I was running a constant low-level process that was something between preparation and prayer. Building the capacity to hold. Rehearsing the space between feeling and responding, making that space larger and more reliable with every repetition.
Yara came back on Sunday night.
She didn’t announce herself. She was simply present like she hadn’t been since before the nursery incident, and the difference was so immediate and so complete that I sat up in bed at two in the morning with tears running down my face that I hadn’t felt coming.
“I’m here,” she said. Simply. No explanation, no apology for the absence, which was not her style and which I did not need.
“I know,” I said.
“You’ve been busy while I was gone.”
“You could say that.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You’re ready,” she said. “For Tuesday.”
“Are you sure?”
“You held it in Carver’s office. You held it twice more after that. You’ve been building toward this without knowing you were building toward this.” A pause. “I’ve been watching. Even when you couldn’t reach me.”
That made me feel relieved for some reason. And a little proud of myself too.
I lay back down.
Elijah was asleep beside me, one arm over his eyes, and I looked at the side of his face and felt the accumulated warmth of everything he was to me. The man who had pulled me off a forest floor and untied ropes and stood between me and every bad thing that had come since.
“I need to do this myself,” I said quietly, to Yara and to myself simultaneously.
“Yes,” she said. “You do.”
The gathering assembled on the central grounds, the pack coalescing from its various corners into a collective presence that I had come to love just like I loved most things about this life. The children. The noise. Being with a group of people who knew each other and were choosing, every day, to organize their lives around that knowing.
I moved through it with Hazel at my left and one of the sisters at a distance I hoped looked casual. Elijah was visible across the grounds, doing what he always did at these gatherings, being present and accessible.
I did not know who Carver’s person was. I did not know when it was coming.
I stayed alert and kept moving and talked to people and held a baby who belonged to a woman I’d been meaning to visit and laughed at something Leo said and kept the space between feeling and responding wide and available.
Petra appeared beside me with an expression I had never seen on her face before — genuine terror and grabbed my arm and said, “Luna, you need to come right now. It’s the twins. Something happened in the nursery. One of them, they said one of them isn’t breathing—”
With all my preparation, I wasn't ready for the first sudden charge I felt inside of me.
It came from somewhere below everything, from the maternal bedrock that the sisters had told me was the deepest source available, and it rose through me with the force of something that had been waiting for exactly this fear. I felt it in my bones. I felt it in the air around me, in my very being, it was there.
I stood in the gap.
The training had made the gap wider. I felt the edges of it, felt how much force I was holding against, felt the very real possibility of the thing simply going through me rather than waiting for me to contain it. I breathed. I reached for Yara, who was there, fully there, pressed against the inside of my awareness with her strength added to mine.
I held it.
The ground did not shake. The lights did not flicker. The power moved through me and I held it and it subsided and I was standing in the middle of the gathering in the afternoon sunlight with my hand on Petra’s arm and my heart hammering against my ribs and nothing visible had happened.
Petra’s face had changed. The terror was gone. In its place was something else, confusion, and underneath it, shame.
She had known. He had told her what to say and she had said it and she had watched it not work and now she was understanding something about what she had participated in.
“The twins are fine,” she said. Her voice was very small. “I’m sorry, Luna. I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” I said. I kept my voice gentle. “Go find Hazel. Tell her what happened. All of it.”
I stood after she left and breathed out a sigh of relief. No one was looking at us. The scene had passed without getting anyone’s attention. I did.
The giddy feeling made me rise on my tippy toes a little in excitement.
Somehow, I found Carver’s eyes. He was standing near the perimeter and he had been watching, and the expression was as dark as a thundercloud in the middle of the pacific.
I held his gaze for a moment, then I smiled before turning back and going about my day.