Chapter 41 The Weight of Warm Things

Chapter 41 The Weight of Warm Things
Calistra's POV

The kitchen was loud.

After the cold, heavy silence of the dining hall, the noise hit me like a wall the moment I pushed open the kitchen door.

Pots clanging, chairs scraping, voices talking over each other.

The long wooden table in the middle of the room was crowded with maids and kitchen staff eating their evening meal, and the fire in the big stone hearth was burning high and warm.

Nobody noticed me come in at first. They were all too busy talking.

I stood near the doorway for a moment and just let the warmth of the room sit on my skin.

Zara's body was tired. Her feet ached. Her chest still carried that tight, bruised feeling from the dining hall, from Rafael's voice telling her to kneel and clean another woman's boots like she was less than nothing.

Yes, she was an omega, and yes, she hates the fact that she's mated to the playboy prince, but that doesn't mean she should be treated that way.

I breathed in slowly.

The smell of bread and broth and woodsmoke settled something in me.

I walked quietly to the far end of the table, away from the loudest cluster of voices, and sat down.

Someone had left a bowl of stew and half a loaf of bread uncovered near the edge. I pulled it toward me and started eating without asking questions.

"—and I'm telling you, I heard it with my own ears," a maid named Dora was saying loudly from the middle of the table.

She was a round-faced girl with quick eyes who always seemed to know everything before anyone else did.

"Alpha Alessandro does not look happy. Not even a little bit."

"How do you know?" another girl asked.

That was Petra, young and wide-eyed, who had only been at the pack house for about three months.

"Did you go near the dining hall? We're not supposed to go near the dining hall when the Alphas are having private meals."

"I didn't go near it," Dora said, in a voice that very clearly meant she had gone extremely near it.

"I was just walking past. Slowly. And the door isn't that thick, Petra."

Several girls laughed.

"So what did you hear?" someone else asked.

Dora leaned forward like she was sharing a great secret, even though she was already speaking loud enough for the whole room to hear.

"Alpha Alessandro was talking to former Alpha John about Lord Rafael. About this whole marriage business with the Shadow Creek girl."

She lowered her voice by about half an inch.

"He was not gentle about it either. I heard him say something about Lord Leonardo."

The laughter around the table died down immediately.

Even though I went still.

Leonardo. That name always did something to a room. Like dropping a stone into still water. The ripples went everywhere.

"Lord Leonardo," Petra said quietly, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to say the name out loud.

"The one who left?"

"The one Alpha John drove away, more like," an older maid named Gretta said from the other end of the table. She had been at the pack house longer than almost anyone.

"That whole situation was a mess from beginning to end."

"What actually happened?" Petra asked, looking around the table.

"I only know bits and pieces. Nobody ever tells the full story."

Gretta sighed and set down her cup.

"Alpha John wanted Lord Leonardo to marry that witch from the Alpha Maverick pack.

Lina.

Alpha Maverick's daughter."

"The witch," Dora added helpfully.

"People say she was a witch," Gretta said carefully.

"What I know for certain is that she wanted that marriage badly and so did her father and so did Alpha John.

It was all about power and alliances and the usual nonsense old Alphas fight about. "She shook her head.

"The problem was that Lord Leonardo already had a mate: Aurora."

The room got very quiet.

Inside me, Zara stirred. She remembered this. She had been new to the pack house when it all happened, barely three months in, just a junior maid who kept her head down and stayed out of the way.

But she remembered the atmosphere. The way the whole packhouse had felt like a storm was sitting just above the roof, ready to break at any moment.

"But Luna Aurora is mated to Alpha Alessandro," Petra said, confused.

"She is now," Gretta said. "But she wasn't always. The bond shifted. It happens sometimes, though it's rare. But before it shifted, she was Lord Leonardo's mate.

And Lord Leonardo—" Gretta paused, choosing her words.

"He was not strong enough. Or maybe he loved his father too much. Either way, Alpha John kept pushing and pushing, telling him the pack needed this alliance, telling him a mate bond wasn't worth destroying everything for, telling him he was being selfish and weak for choosing one woman over the good of the whole pack."

She picked her cup back up.

"And so Lord Leonardo started pulling away from Aurora. Treating her badly. Rejecting her in little ways and then bigger ways, because it was the only thing that seemed to make his father proud of him."

"That's horrible," Petra whispered.

"Yes," Gretta said simply. "It was. And then Alpha Alessandro, who was so mean to her, started helping and that's when the bond shifted to him, and Aurora eventually accepted it, and Lord Leonardo—"

She stopped.

"He couldn't face her after everything he had done to her. Couldn't face Alessandro either. So he left. Packed one bag and walked out the front gates after their wedding in the middle of the night.

That was two years ago."

"Nobody has heard from him since?" Petra asked.

"Not a word," Gretta said, nodding. "Not a letter. Nothing."

The table was quiet for a moment.

"And now Alpha John is trying to do the exact same thing to Lord Rafael," Dora said, shaking her head.

"Trying to tie him to that Shadow Creek girl. That's what Alessandro was angry about.

History repeating itself, that's what I heard him say."

Several people murmured. Someone refilled their cup.

The fire crackled.

I stared at my bowl and thought about Rafael's face at the dinner table. That flat, closed-off expression.

The way he had looked at his plate instead of at me. The way he had said "do as she says" in a voice that sounded like it was coming from somewhere very far away.

I thought about Leonardo. About a man who had hurt someone he loved over and over because his father told him it was the right thing to do.

About how Luna Aurora would have felt when he kept hurting and hurting her just to show his father he is worthy to be the next Alpha.

Just then, the kitchen door swung open.