Chapter 186 Let's Bring Him Home
ADRIANA
I had been expecting the latter for days, but still, it left me feeling a little cold when it arrived that evening.
Martine brought it to me — the formal seal on the outside, the handwriting on the front that I did not recognize but somehow knew. I took it to my sitting room and read it alone first, which was a decision I made in the moment and did not second-guess.
It was everything I had anticipated and worse.
He spoke about love with the fluency of someone who had confused obsession with love for so long that the distinction had ceased to exist for him. He spoke about Elijah taking me as though I were something that could be taken, a possession that had changed hands rather than a person who had made a choice. He said Leo was a strong boy, that he would make a good heir, that all that was missing was me. Some other things I did not believe were worth my attention, all showing one truth, he was deluded in his own way of thinking and for that, has convinced himself we were meant to be.
He even signed it Your King.
I sat with the letter for a long moment and felt nothing that resembled the feeling he was apparently expecting me to feel. It was not even anger exactly, something colder than anger and more useful. The complete clarity of a person who has been told exactly what they are dealing with.
I took it to Elijah.
He read it standing up, which was how he read things he already knew were going to require a response. When he finished he set it on the desk with the careful precision of someone putting something down rather than throwing it.
“He doesn’t know what you are now,” Elijah said.
“No. He knows what I was when I was eighteen and living in my father’s pack with no wolf and no options. He’s been building his plan around that version of me.”
“That’s going to be the problem for him.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
The door opened without a knock, which in this palace meant either Leo or someone about to be spoken to about knocking, and I turned to find Hazel in the doorway.
I stared at her.
She looked back at me with the expression she wore when she was pleased with herself about something.
“Hello, Luna,” she said.
I crossed the room and pulled her into a hug before I had consciously decided to move, and I held on for a moment that was longer than dignified and entirely necessary. She was thinner than she had been, and she was carrying herself slightly differently in a way that told me the injury had left something behind even after the healing, but she was here and she was standing and she smelled like herself and I had missed her with a persistence that I had not acknowledged fully until this moment.
“I should have come sooner,” I said when I let go. “I should have come every week. I’m sorry.”
“You had three children and a pack and a power crisis,” she said. “And you did come. Twice that I remember.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“No,” she agreed, without heat. “But I’m here now so let’s not waste it.”
She looked past me at Elijah.
“The elders put Shawn in while I was recovering,” she said. It was not a question. It was the summary of a thing she had already worked out on the journey here.
“Yes,” Elijah said.
“I had two conversations with him before I left for the recovery house,” she said. “I told you about both of them.”
“You did.”
“And you said—”
“I said the elders had recommended him and I was going to give him a fair evaluation.” Elijah looked at her steadily. “I was wrong. I’m aware of that.”
She looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded once, in the particular way she nodded when she had made a decision to set something aside in the interests of something more pressing, and turned to me.
“I’m hearing something about a Golden Blade?” She raised her brows, in such a Hazel like way, my eyes misted.
Oh, how much I've missed her.
I told her everything, in the order it had happened. She listened attentively, not once cutting me off.
When I finished, she exhaled a heavy breath, as though she was letting the information sink in.
“Aiden has moved on to the southern territories,” she said. “He might be close to rounding up, I can get word to him.”
“Not yet,” Elijah said. “Not until we know the route isn’t compromised.”
Hazel nodded. “Shawn.”
“Shawn,” I confirmed.
“Where is he now?”
“Still in the palace. Elijah hasn’t formally dealt with him yet because we’ve been managing everything else.”
She looked at Elijah.
“He needs to be removed before any plan moves forward,” she said. “If he has a line to anyone inside Golden Blade and he gets wind of what we’re planning—”
“Tonight,” Elijah said. “Before dinner.”
Hazel straightened in the way she straightened when she had moved from information gathering into operational mode.
“We need to follow Leo’s instruction," she said.
“Yes.”
“So we need a way in that he can work with from the inside.” She looked at me. “He knows the layout?”
“He memorized the route on arrival. He’s been building a picture of the facility since.”
“He’s a good boy,” she said, and I could hear in her voice the same quality I had heard in Elijah’s — the recognition of something that was both pride and difficulty simultaneously.
“He’s Elijah’s son,” I said. “And Liam’s. He was always going to be this.”
Hazel was quiet for a moment.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s talk about how we bring him home.”