Chapter 206 Healing
ELIJAH
The doctor had already come and gone by the time I got Adriana settled.
She hadn’t woken up once during the examination, which the doctor said was fine — her body was shutting everything unnecessary down so it could work on the leg. What he couldn’t tell me was why she wasn’t healing the way she should. Normally a wound like that would be closing itself within hours. Instead the tissue was doing nothing, just sitting there raw and damaged like she was human.
He wrapped it properly, left instructions, and I walked him out and stood in the corridor for a moment before going to check on Leo.
He wasn’t in bed. I pushed the door open and found him at the window, standing with his arms crossed and his back to the room, looking out at the dark grounds below. He didn’t turn around when I came in and I didn’t announce myself. I just came and stood behind him and we stayed like that for a while.
“I didn’t want to kill him.” His voice was low and flat, the voice of someone who has been sitting with words long enough that they’ve lost most of their temperature. “I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve trained for it. I’ve thought about it in the abstract. But actually doing it—” He stopped. “There was blood everywhere, dad. I swung it and his head—” He stopped again. “I couldn’t look at it. I still can’t stop seeing it.”
I put my arm around him from behind and pulled him back against me and held on.
I remembered my first time. The way the adrenaline cleared out and left absolutely nothing in its place except this ringing silence and the smell of blood and the realization that something had left the world because of what my hands did and it was never coming back. I had been alone with it.
My father had looked at my bloodstained clothes and put one hand briefly on my shoulder and walked away, and I had understood from that gesture that what I was feeling was not something I was allowed to show.
I had promised myself I would never do that to Leo.
“It doesn’t go away cleanly,” I said. “I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it does. But it changes. It becomes something you carry differently. And tonight you don’t have to carry it at all — just let it out.”
He was quiet for another moment and then he turned around and put his face into my shoulder and cried, and I held him and said nothing else because nothing else was needed. I stayed until the crying slowed and then stopped and then his breathing evened out and I felt the weight of him getting heavier against me as sleep came for him.
I got him into bed and stood there for a moment looking at his face in the dark.
He was fifteen years old and he had just killed someone to save his mother. I was so proud of him it broke my heart.
I went back out into the corridor and pulled the door almost closed and a voice came from the end of the hall.
“Is he out?”
I turned around.
“Aiden.” I crossed the distance between us in about four steps and he met me halfway and we hugged the way men hug when something significant has happened and words are temporarily inadequate. “When did you get here?”
“An hour ago. I heard what happened and I got in the car.” He pulled back and looked at me. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. Things have been—”
“Don’t.” I shook my head. “Come on.”
We went to my study and I sat across from him and looked at him properly for the first time. He had aged in the way that people age when something has been grinding at them for a while — not dramatically, just in the lines around his eyes and the set of his mouth.
“How are things with you?” I asked. “The pack?”
“Pack is fine. Being Alpha is genuinely not what I thought it would be.” He laughed, short and tired. “And the kids are—” He paused. “Raising them alone is something else.”
I frowned. “Alone? Where’s—”
“She passed.” He said it simply, the way people say things they have said many times and have worn smooth through repetition. “A few months ago. We were in the house. She just—” He exhaled. “She just fell. No warning, no explanation. She was there and then she wasn’t. I didn’t put her through an autopsy. I just buried her.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment because there was nothing adequate and he didn’t need me to search for something inadequate.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
He nodded.
“How’s Adriana?”
“Sleeping. The leg is a mess but she’s going to be fine.” I sat back. “Leo killed Landon. You know it’s his first time. He’s barely holding it together.”
“God.” Aiden shook his head. “I remember mine. I saw the man in my dreams for weeks. Every time I closed my eyes.”
“You used to come to sleep in my room.”
“Every night for a month. You were so annoyed.”
We both laughed at that, the kind of laughter that comes out of exhaustion and relief and a shared history long enough to hold both.
“He’ll be fine,” Aiden said. “He’s your son. He’ll be fine.”
I nodded.
We sat in silence for a moment and then I watched him glance toward the door and I already knew what was coming.
“Hazel?” he said.
“Still in Golden Blade. Bringing the soldiers back.”
He looked down at his hands. “We haven’t spoken in a while. I don’t know what I did. Or if I did anything. I just—” He ran a hand over his face. “I got married and she went cold and I don’t know what happened.”
I knew what happened. Hazel had told me about the child and had told me it wasn’t my information to give, and I was going to honor that. What they worked out between them was their own.
“Talk to her when she gets back,” I said. “Sit down and actually talk to her. Hear her out before you try to explain yourself.”
“You think she’ll listen?”
“I think if you lead with listening instead of defending, she might.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Do you still love her?” I asked, because I wanted to hear him say it.
He looked up. “Yeah. I do. I thought time and distance would take care of it but it didn’t.” He smiled, sad and small. “I love her.”
I didn’t tell him what that meant or what to do with it. That was his to figure out.
We sat there a while longer and talked about smaller things, and outside the window the pack settled into its nighttime quiet, and down the hall Leo slept, and in the bedroom Adriana’s leg was slowly, finally beginning to heal.