Chapter 36 Chapter 36
Chapter 36
DEREK
She held my gaze steadily. She was a better liar than I'd given her credit for. Her voice was even, her expression carrying exactly the right amount of embarrassment and regret, and if I hadn't seen the crash site footage, hadn't watched my wife's car flip three times on a highway camera, I would have believed every word of it.
"I'll replace it," she said. "I have some personal items I've been meaning to sell, and I can cover the cost. You shouldn't be without a car because of my carelessness."
Personal items she'd been trying to sell for weeks, as it turned out. At six different shops whose owners were all too afraid of my name to take them.
"Don't worry about the car," I said.
"I'd like to," she said firmly. "It was my fault. I should have been paying more attention to where I parked."
I looked at her. Really looked at her, the way I should have been looking at her for two years, the way I'd been too busy looking at someone else to do. She was standing very straight, which I now knew was because slightly bending her spine increased the pressure on her ribs. Her left hand was held in a position that minimized strain on the broken arm without drawing attention to the injury.
The makeup covering her bruises was flawless, the hair arrangement concealing the laceration precise, and she had done all of this on a day when she'd been kidnapped and crashed and held in a basement and released from a clinic, and she'd done it so that she could come home and apologize to me about a parking lot.
I didn't know what to do.
That was the simple, honest truth of it. I was an Alpha who had run a pack for a decade, who had managed territorial disputes and political negotiations and the full machinery of both a corporate empire and a werewolf hierarchy, and I was standing in my own living room without the faintest idea what to do next.
I couldn't tell her I knew. Not tonight, not like this. There was too much she didn't know, too much that would need explaining before I could acknowledge what I knew, and she was running on whatever combination of pain management and sheer stubbornness was getting her through the evening. Having the full weight of reality land on her tonight would not help her heal.
But I couldn't keep pretending either. Couldn't send her to bed with her cracked ribs and her broken arm and her careful makeup and go back to being the distant, distracted husband she'd built her escape plan around.
"Are you hungry?" I asked.
She blinked. "I—sorry?"
"Dinner. Are you hungry?" I moved toward the kitchen, and after a moment I heard her follow. "Mrs. Chen left something in the oven. She usually does on Sundays."
"You don't have to—" Selene started.
"I know I don't have to." I opened the oven and checked what was inside—some kind of casserole, warm and covered. I found serving dishes in the cabinet where they'd always been and started doing the straightforward, uncomplicated work of putting food on plates. "Sit down."
A pause behind me. Then the quiet sound of her pulling out a chair at the kitchen table.
I brought the plates over and sat across from her, and for a moment we were just two people having dinner on a Sunday evening, which was something we had almost never been in two years of marriage. We usually ate at opposite ends of the formal dining table when we ate together at all, which wasn't often.
She ate carefully. I watched her calibrate each movement, watched the brief tightening around her eyes when she reached across the table for the salt and forgot for a half-second to protect her left arm. She caught it, adjusted, smoothed her expression back into neutrality so quickly that it was nearly seamless.
"How was the office?" she asked.
"Fine." I refilled her water glass without being asked because it was closer to my side and reaching across would have required more movement from her.
"Quarterly reports. Nothing exciting."
She nodded and continued eating, and the conversation settled into something almost companionable in its mundaneness, which felt strange and slightly surreal given what I was carrying inside my head. The crash footage. The basement. Her voice through the phone, faint and frightened, asking for help. Her voice through a hospital room door, trying to be discharged so she could get home before I noticed.
She didn't ask me how I knew she'd taken the car. Didn't seem to find it strange that I hadn't looked up the accident report, hadn't asked for the insurance information, hadn't pressed her on any of the details of the story she'd given me. She seemed to be waiting for interrogation that wasn't coming, and the absence of it was making her slightly more tense rather than less, because it didn't fit the pattern she'd established for how I responded to things.
"Rosalie mentioned she enjoyed the gala," I said, which was entirely fabricated but served the purpose of keeping the conversation going, because the silence was becoming too awkward for me.
"She was wonderful," Selene said, and the warmth in her voice when she talked about my grandmother was unguarded in a way that her voice almost never was with me. "She always is. She has a gift for making everyone feel like the most important person in the room."
"She does," I agreed.
We finished dinner. Selene offered to help with the dishes and I told her to leave them, and she didn't argue , which told me that the evening had cost her more than she was showing and the pain was hurting on more than she let on
She stood from the table and the slight catch in her movement when she straightened—ribs settling under the shift in posture—was invisible to anyone who wasn't looking, and I was looking, and I felt the guilt of it settle into my bones like cold water.
"I'm going to head up," she said. "It's been a long day."
"Selene."