Chapter 280 Just A Baby
ADRIANA
The sun had shifted by the time we got back, later than I’d realized, closer to noon than morning, the kind of time that told me exactly how long we’d been gone and how little we had to show for it.
I stepped out of the car and the first thing I did was deal with the prisoners.
“Put them in separate cells,” I said to the nearest guard. “On different floors. No one opens those doors without my direct authorization. Not the King’s, not the Beta’s, mine specifically. If either of them says a single word, I want to know about it immediately.”
The guards moved and I went inside.
Hazel was in the entrance hall. She looked at my face and didn’t ask questions, which was one of the things I valued most about her.
“Do you want to see the cameras now or do you need an hour?”
“Give me twenty minutes,” I said.
I went upstairs. Elijah’s clothes from last night were still on him. He’d gone straight to the dungeon when we got back from the party and then straight to the cars, no time to change and I stopped him in the corridor.
“Go and change,” I said. “You look like you’ve been wearing that for sixteen hours because you have.”
He looked at me. “So have you.”
“I’m changing now.”
He didn’t put up a fight. I went to my room and got out of the party clothes and into something I could actually move in, and I ran water over my face and looked at myself in the mirror. My skin looked pale and my eyes were hollow. You’d think I haven't slept a wink in weeks. Splashing water on my face one last time, I went to check on the kids.
I heard them before I reached the room. The twins were in the shared bedroom, I could tell from the sounds. I pushed the door open and found exactly what I expected.
Elijah junior was in midair, fully committed to a landing on his brother, and Lorain was directly in the trajectory, sitting at the end of the bed with a book open in her lap, and I crossed the room fast and pulled Lorain sideways and out of the path and Elijah junior landed on the mattress where she had been sitting a half second before.
“Mum!” He sat up immediately. “I was about to win!”
“You were about to land on your sister.”
“I would have moved,” Lorain said, looking up from her book with complete composure.
“You were not moving.”
“I was about to.” She argued.
The twins thought this was the funniest thing they’d heard all day. Lorain returned to her book with the dignity of someone who had made her point and was done with the matter.
“Mum, we play like this all the time,” Liam said, like that somehow solved the problem. “No one gets hurt.”
“Someone gets hurt every single time and you two just have a high pain threshold.” I sat on the edge of the bed because my legs had been carrying me since yesterday and were putting in a formal request for a surface. The twins settled. Lorain closed her book and moved to sit beside me without being asked, which she always did when something was wrong and she’d decided that being near me was the most useful thing she could offer.
She was five years old and she read a room better than most adults I knew.
“Mum.” Elijah junior looked at me with the direct look he used when he’d been thinking about something and had decided asking was better than not knowing. “Where’s Lana? We went to her room and she wasn’t there, and the maid said to ask you.”
I looked at my twins. These boys who had come into the world two at a time and turned everything louder and more chaotic and more full, and I thought about what they needed to hear right now and what they didn’t need to carry.
“She’s in the hospital,” I said. “She caught something and the doctors want to keep an eye on her for a bit. She’s being taken good care of.”
“Can we go see her?”
“Not yet. She’s contagious and you two would catch it in five minutes flat. She’ll be home soon.”
They accepted this in the way children accepted things that came from parents who sounded certain, not happily, but without resistance.
“We’ll make her something,” Liam said. “For when she gets back.”
“Cards,” Elijah junior agreed immediately. “We can make cards. So she knows we missed her.”
Something in my chest compressed so completely I had to breathe through it slowly. I blinked back the tears that gathered in my eyes.
“She’ll love that,” I said.
I got them redirected toward something that involved sitting rather than bodies being launched, and I stood up and walked to the door and pulled it almost closed and heard Elijah junior say to Lorain. “Why don’t we get sick too so we can go see her? She’s probably scared in there.”
Lorain responded in a slightly exasperated tone. “You can’t get sick on purpose. And she’s not scared. Mum said she’s being looked after.”
I closed the door the rest of the way.
The tears that had been waiting since the cabin came without any further negotiation and I didn’t try to stop them because there was nothing left to stop them with. I made it to my room and sat on the bed and let it happen and after a while I heard the door open and felt Elijah sit beside me and his arm came around me.
“They want to make her cards,” I sobbed.
He didn’t say anything. He just held on.
“This is the second time,” I said, when I had enough of my voice back. “Second time she’s been taken and she’s barely had the chance to know this family. Why her? Why is it always her?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I’m going to find out.”
“And what if they’ve hurt her? She’s just a baby. She doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
“Don’t go there yet,” he said. “Stay here. Stay with what we know.”
He held me until the worst of it passed and then he pressed his lips to my forehead and said: “you need to eat something. You haven’t eaten since yesterday.”