Chapter 217 It Should Have Happened Sooner
ADRIANA
Mark’s elbow came back hard into my jaw and the floor came up to meet me and I was reaching for Elijah before I’d even stopped falling and my hands came away wet and warm and he was already on the ground beside me and I grabbed his face and he was looking at me and trying to say something and I couldn’t hear it over the sound of Hazel’s voice completely breaking as she screamed his name.
I woke up to a white ceiling and light that was too bright and my body was already trying to sit up before my eyes had fully opened.
“Luna, please—” A nurse appeared immediately. “You need to stay lying down—”
“Where is my husband?” It didn’t come out as a question.
The nurse’s eyes moved to the door and Hazel was already coming through it, crossing the room fast, and she pulled me into her before I could read anything from her face.
“I’ve been sitting here for three hours waiting for you to open your eyes.” Her voice was rough and uneven. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”
“Hazel.” I pulled back and made her look at me. “Tell me right now.”
She was smiling. Exhausted and hollow-eyed and clearly held together with very little, but she was smiling.
“He’s in the ICU. The knife was bad, I’m not going to lie to you, it was really bad. But he’s stable. The doctors say he’s going to be okay.” She squeezed both my hands hard. “You saved his life, Adriana. If you hadn’t come downstairs when you did—”
“Where are my kids?”
“Home with Aiden. All of them. Lana too, she’s been seen by the doctor and she’s going to be completely fine. She just needs feeding up.” She wiped her face quickly with the back of her hand. “Can I tell you one more thing?”
I waited.
“Mark is dead. Aiden handled it.” She said it quietly and with absolute finality. “It’s over. We won.”
I sat with that. Turned it over slowly and let it settle into all the places that had been braced against it for so long they’d almost forgotten what it felt like to relax.
“I want to see him.”
“One hour. I promised the doctor.” She pushed me gently back against the pillow. “One hour and then I take you myself. I swear it.”
I closed my eyes and felt my body finally, completely, let go.
Six months since I’d watched my husband’s blood spread across the floor like it had somewhere to be, pooling dark and fast while I knelt beside him screaming for doctors who weren’t there yet. Six months since I’d held his hand and felt it go slack in mine. Six months since I’d sat in that hallway with his blood soaking through my dress, staring at nothing, waiting for Hazel to come back because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
I still heard it sometimes. The sound of him hitting the ground. My brain had filed it somewhere it couldn’t be deleted.
“Elijah, stay with me. You can’t leave me, not now. Please. The doctor is coming, just hold on.”
I’d known even as I said it that I was lying. There was too much blood for that to be true and I’d seen enough injuries in my life to know the difference between bad and unsurvivable. But my mouth kept moving because stopping meant accepting it, and I wasn’t ready to do that. I don’t think I’ll ever be fully ready for that.
He’d grabbed my wrist when I started to stand. When the fury in me was building into something that was about to become very violent and very permanent. His grip was barely there but it stopped me cold.
“Don’t.” Just that one word, barely above a breath. “Take care of the kids.” He paused, struggling, and I pressed my hand harder over his wound like pressure alone could undo what had already been done. “Tell them I’m sorry for not coming back. Tell Lana—” Another pause. Shorter this time. “Tell my daughter I love her. That I always will.”
Then his hand fell from my wrist.
His eyes, which had been locked on my face with everything he had left, went somewhere I couldn’t follow.
The tears stopped. Just stopped, like someone had turned off a tap. The grief was so enormous it swallowed every other feeling clean and left me sitting in that terrible quiet with his head in my lap, staring at the wall across from me, not thinking, not breathing properly, just existing in the space between one second and the next.
It had been my fault. I’d miscalculated. I hadn’t anticipated how fast he would move and Elijah had been the one who paid for that mistake with his body while I stood there and watched it happen.
My husband was supposed to be dead.
Well, technically he wasn’t.
Six months later, he still hadn’t opened his eyes. The machines breathed alongside him and the monitors beeped their steady rhythm and the doctors used careful, measured language that boiled down to we don’t know and we can’t promise you anything.
He was in a coma. They couldn’t tell me when it would end. They couldn’t even guarantee it would.
All the children knew was that their father was sick. I’d made that decision early and held to it because every time I opened my mouth to say something more honest, I saw their faces and the words dissolved.
Leo was fifteen. He understood more than I gave him credit for, and I think he’d quietly stopped asking because he’d learned to read my expression. The twins were still young enough that sick covered enough ground. Lorain took everything I said as fact with a seriousness that broke my heart every single time, but sometimes she would ask for daddy. Lana was too young to ask anything at all, which was its own kind of grief. He’d missed all of her firsts. And I hated myself for it.
The elders knew the truth. Within weeks they were already raising the question of succession.
I’d looked at every single one of them before I spoke.
“My son is fifteen years old.” I spoke with a calmness I wasn't truly feeling. Each word I chose was deliberate. “I will not place him on that seat. I will not let that chair and those people turn him into something he isn’t ready to be. Elijah’s throne does not sit empty and it does not go to a stranger. I’ll hold it until my husband comes back.”
Several of them opened their mouths.
I let the silence sit until they closed them again.
There was no coronation. I didn’t want one and I didn’t hold one. There was nothing to celebrate. Elijah was lying unconscious in a room upstairs and I was sitting in his chair trying to think the way he thought and that was not something I was going to put a party dress on for.
The past six months had been a wall I ran into every single morning. Meetings that stretched past midnight. Pack disputes that required my presence and my signature and measured, diplomatic responses when what I actually felt was nothing close to diplomatic. Men who looked across the table at me and made their decision in the first five seconds. Men who spoke over me and then looked surprised when I didn’t let it pass. Men who had bent easily for Elijah and now seemed to believe that his absence had changed the terms.
It hadn’t. I made sure of that, repeatedly and without apology.
And the people who had put Elijah in that room?
I hadn’t waited. I hadn’t deliberated or strategized or assembled a committee. I found them and I dealt with it personally and directly, with my own hands, the first moment I had access to them.
I had no feelings about that whatsoever except that it should have happened sooner.