Chapter 23 023

Chapter 23 023
ISABELLA

He came back just after sunset

I heard the car on the drive and I heard the front door and I heard his footsteps come down the hall and stop outside the sitting room where I had been for the last four hours doing nothing except waiting and trying to look like I wasn't waiting.

He came in and looked at me and I looked at him and the air in the room did what it always did lately — went tight and careful and full of things neither of us was saying.

He looked different. Not better exactly but lighter somehow, like he had put something down somewhere. That was almost worse than if he had come back looking wrecked.

"How is she," I said.

He stopped in the middle of the room. "Isabella—"

"How is she," I said again. Same tone. Steady. I had practiced steady for hours.

He looked at me for a moment. "She's fine," he said. "She's well."

"Good," I said. "That's good."

I stood up from the chair and walked to the window and looked out at the grounds and told myself to breathe. The sky outside was grey and flat and the trees along the edge of the property were still and nothing was moving out there and I looked at all of it and felt nothing about any of it.

"You went to beg her to come back," I said.

"That's not what I did."

I turned around. "Then what did you do."

He held my gaze. "I apologized. I told her I handled everything badly and she deserved to hear it from me. That's it."

"That's it," I repeated.

"Yes."

I looked at him. "You drove to another man's territory, alone, unannounced, to apologize to your ex mate." I paused. "And that's it."

"Isabella—"

"Do you know how that looks," I said. "Do you know what that does — not just to me but to you, to this pack, to everything you said when you stood up there and made me your Luna. You went to her, Kaelan. You went to her."

"I needed to," he said. "I owed her that."

"You owed her." I laughed, and it came out wrong, too sharp. "You owed her. What about what you owe me. What you promised me when I came back. What you stood in front of the whole pack and said."

"I haven't broken anything I promised you," he said.

"You left," I said. "Without telling me. You drove to his house and sat across from her and said whatever you said and I was here. I was here all day not knowing if you were coming back."

"Of course I was coming back."

"I didn't know that," I said. My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it, hated the way it gave me away, hated that he could hear exactly how scared I was underneath all of it.

He looked at me and something in his face shifted. He crossed the room and stopped in front of me and looked at me properly for the first time in days, really looked, the way he used to before everything got complicated.

"I came back," he said. Quietly. "I'm here."

"But you went to her first," I said. "That's the thing. Whatever you say, however you explain it, you got in a car and you went to her first."

He was quiet.

"Did you ask her to come back," I said. "Just tell me the truth. I can handle the truth, Kaelan, I just can't handle you standing in front of me and not saying it."

He looked at me straight. "No," he said. "I didn't. I told her I wasn't there to take anything back. I told her the choices she's made are hers and I wasn't there to argue with them."

"But you wanted to," I said. "Part of you wanted to."

He didn't answer.

And that was an answer.

I turned back to the window. Pressed my fingers against the glass and looked at nothing.

"I knew," I said. "When I came back. I knew you were still with her and I came back anyway. I knew what I was doing." I paused. "I told myself it didn't matter because you had wanted me first, before her, before the bond, and that had to mean something. That had to count for more."

"Isabella—"

"Let me finish," I said.

He was quiet.

"I spent years watching you be with her," I said. "Watching you build something with her even when I could see it wasn't right, even when I could see you settling into it because it was easier than dealing with us. And I hated it and I hated her for it even though she hadn't done anything wrong." I stopped. "She hadn't done anything wrong. I knew that then and I know it now and I did it anyway."

The room was very quiet.

"She's pregnant," I said. "Your children are growing up in another man's house because of choices we made. Both of us." I turned around. "I'm not letting you carry all of that. I was part of it."

He looked at me like he didn't know what to do with what I was saying.

"I'm not doing this to be noble," I said. "I'm doing it because I'm tired of pretending. I'm tired of performing being fine when I'm not fine and I'm tired of watching you disappear into your guilt every night and I'm tired of the dead flowers on the table that neither of us changes."

He looked at the flowers. Then back at me.

"I don't know how to do this," I said. "I don't know how to be your Luna and carry what I did to get here and watch you go to her and still be standing here at the end of it. I don't know how to do all of that at the same time."

"You don't have to do all of that," he said.

"Then tell me what I do have to do," I said. "Because I have been in this house for weeks and I feel like I'm the only one trying to figure out what we actually are."

He crossed the room and stopped in front of me. Close. I looked up at him and he looked down at me and between us was four years of wanting and two months of having and everything that had happened to get from one to the other.

"I'm here," he said again. "I went and I said what I had to say and I came back. That's what I can tell you right now."

"That's not enough," I said.

"I know," he said. "I know it isn't."

I looked at him. "Did you love her."

He held my gaze. "Yes."

The word sat between us.

"Did you love me," I said.

"Yes," he said. No hesitation. "Different. Harder. Messier. But yes."

I looked at him for a long moment. My chest was doing something I couldn't control, that tight painful thing that had been happening for weeks, the feeling of holding something together that kept wanting to come apart.

"She told me she's not coming back," he said. "Not because of Vael, not because of where she is. Because she's done. She said it without anger, she just — said it. Like it was already true."

I watched his face when he said it. Watched for the thing that would tell me he was devastated by that, that it had broken something in him.

What I saw instead was something quieter. Something that looked almost like relief sitting underneath the grief. Like a man who had been waiting for a door to close properly and it finally had.

"Is that why you came back," I said. "Because she said she was done."

He looked at me. "I came back because this is where I live," he said. "Because you're here and this pack is here and my life is here." He paused. "I went to her because I owed her that. I came back because I want to be here. Those are both true at the same time."

I stood there and looked at him and tried to figure out if that was enough. If I could take that and build something real on top of it or if it was always going to be the thing underneath everything, her name, those children, the morning she walked into his office and he told her to go home.

I didn't know.

I didn't know if you could build something solid on a foundation that had cracks in it or if the cracks just spread over time until the whole thing came down.

"I'm not her," I said. "I know that. I've always known that."

"I know you're not her," he said.

"I'm not going to be easier than her," I said. "I'm not going to be quieter or more patient or better at absorbing things. That's not who I am."

"I know that too," he said.

"So if you're here," I said. "Be here. All the way. Not with one foot somewhere else."

He looked at me for a long moment. Something working behind his eyes, that slow careful way he thought things through before he committed to them.

Then he reached out and took my hand.

Just that. Just his hand around mine, warm and solid.

"I'm here," he said.

I looked at our hands. Thought about all the years I had wanted this, wanted him, had built whole futures in my head around this exact thing. His hand in mine, him choosing me, me being the one he came back to.

I had it now.

It felt different than I had imagined. Heavier. More fragile. Like something that could still break if either of us wasn't careful with it.

But it was real. Whatever it was, it was real and it was here and we were both standing in it.

I didn't pull my hand away.

"The flowers need changing," I said.

He looked at me.

"The ones on the table," I said. "They've been dead for four days. It's bothering me."

Something shifted in his face. That almost smile, the one I had fallen for years ago, the one that still did something to me no matter how much I wished it didn't.

"I'll change them," he said.

"Tonight," I said.

"Tonight," he said.

I nodded and looked back at the window ,