Chapter 189 Meet in the Middle
ADRIANA
Being Luna had thoroughly ruined me for the outdoors.
I understood this about myself with increasing clarity as I pushed through the undergrowth for what felt like the hundredth time in an hour, catching my sleeve on a branch that had absolutely no business being at that height, nearly going down on my knee over a root that I had somehow not seen despite it being the size of a small child.
I should have brought guards. Elijah had said to bring guards and I had said I would be fine and walked out of the palace before he could finish the sentence, because taking guards would have meant waiting for guards to be assembled and briefed and I was not in a mood for waiting. I was in the mood for moving.
What I had not adequately accounted for was that moving through a forest at night without guards was a different experience from moving through a forest at night with them.
“How are you getting on out there?”
Elijah’s voice in my head was warm. He already knows the answer and is asking out of love rather than genuine inquiry.
“Beautifully,” I said through heavy breaths. “Like I was born in these trees. You can call me Mother Nature.”
He laughed, which meant he knew I was completely full of it.
“I fired Shawn,” he said.
I stopped walking.
“Say that again.”
“Formally. He’s out of the palace.”
I stood in the middle of the forest with a branch in my hair and felt something that was approximately joy.
“I thought you couldn’t see anything wrong with him,” I said. “For eighteen months I have been telling you—”
“I know what you’ve been telling me.”
“And yet every single time I brought it up, you acted like I was inventing the problem out of thin air, like Shawn was this perfectly competent man that I had some irrational—”
“Adriana.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know what I did,” he said. “I knew what he was doing. I knew why you didn’t like him. I let it go on longer than it should have and I’m sorry for that.”
I pulled the branch out of my hair and kept walking.
“Then why didn’t you deal with him sooner? Why did you keep making me feel like I was the problem?”
“Because you handle things differently than I do. I wanted him to understand that being a woman didn’t make you weak, and the only way that lesson was going to land properly was if you were the one who delivered it.” He gave a slight pause. “You’re more measured than Hazel. If I’d told Hazel what I was doing, she would have broken his nose at the dinner table.”
He wasn’t wrong. She would have done it with complete composure and then asked someone to clear the mess.
“That is an extremely irritating way to handle a situation,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “You’re welcome.”
I almost smiled despite myself.
We talked like that through the rest of my walk, short exchanges through the mind link, his voice a constant low thread while I navigated the forest. He told me the soldiers were ready to move at sunrise. I told him I was approaching the border. He told me not to do anything dramatic. I did not respond to that.
The flag of Golden Blade was visible from the hill I had climbed to get my bearings. It was a pale shape against the darker sky, marking the gate. I crouched in the undergrowth and assessed what I could see. Two guards at the gate itself, visible and positioned like they had been standing there for long enough to become slightly inattentive. There would be others I couldn’t see.
The wall was high. The gate was the obvious entrance and obvious entrances were the wrong ones.
Then I felt the pull of the full moon that I had been so preoccupied I had completely failed to notice. It sat high and complete above the treeline, and I looked up at it and felt what I always felt under a full moon. Everything felt sharper, and the edges of the world became more defined.
I stepped out of the bushes and walked directly toward the guards.
They saw me and their postures changed, their hands immediately moved toward their weapons. Their weight shifting, the automatic response of men confronting an unexpected approach.
I met their eyes one at a time.
“Sleep,” I said.
They went down together, quietly, without drama, like men sitting down for a rest they had been waiting all night for.
I stepped over them and went through the gate.
I moved through it carefully, using the shadows of buildings, taking note of everything from the layout to the distances and the positions of the light sources and what they illuminated and what they didn’t. This information was going to matter later.
The palace was visible from most points in the village. It was larger than I had expected, better maintained, and that surprised me. Whatever Landon had built here over the years, he had built it properly. The question of how he had built it, how someone who had been a coward in someone else’s pack had become the Alpha of a territory this size, was one of the many things I intended to have answered before this was over.
I stood outside the palace and looked up at it. Leo was somewhere inside.
He was well trained, and from his message, he had things well under control. That made something settle in my chest that was not quite peace but was in that direction.
He was in there. I was out here. We were going to find each other in the middle.
I just had to make it to the middle first.