Chapter 95 The Truth Again

Chapter 95 The Truth Again


Jacob's Pov

The guard checked on us at seven and again at seven thirty, then settled into a pattern of every twenty minutes.

I had been counting.

Between checks, I had been working the rope at my wrists. Not frantically. Methodically. The same small movement was repeated until the knot began to loosen at one specific point.

Violet was on the bed. She had been breathing through contractions for the last hour. The spacing was down to four minutes. Helen had come and gone twice, examining her and leaving without looking at me or saying anything to Eric that I could hear through the door.

The guard did his seven-fifty check and left.

"Violet," I said.

She looked at me. Her hands were on Eli. Her face was tight with the tail end of a contraction.

I waited.

When it passed she said, "What?"

"I need to say something to you," I said. "While we have time between checks."

"You have been saying things to me every twenty minutes since they put you in that chair."

"This is different," I said. "This is the thing I need you actually to hear."

She looked at me steadily. "Then say it," she said.

"I told you about Caius," I said. "About your mother and what she did. About the bonding token and the letter in her handwriting. I told you all of it."

"Yes," she said. "You did."

"I need to know if you believe it," I said. "Not whether you have processed it or whether it fits with everything else you know. I need to know if you believe it."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Tell me the visions again," she said. "The way Caius described them."

"They arrive all at once," I said. "Not like a dream that builds. Like walking through a door that was not there before. The hands feel it first. A warmth at the fingertips that moves up through the palm before the vision itself arrives."

She did not say anything.

"After the vision clears, there is a moment of complete stillness. The specific emotional weight of what was seen stays even as the images themselves begin to fade."

She pressed her hands flat against Eli.

"A vision involving someone you are emotionally bonded to is clearer and more sustained than one involving a stranger."

"Yes," she said quietly.

"That is true," I said.

"How do you know that is accurate," I said.

"Because I have experienced it my entire life," she said. "It is not something you can observe from the outside and describe accurately. It is something you know from the inside."

"Caius described it from the inside," I said. "Every specific detail. Not the general shape of it. The texture of it. The way only someone who has lived with it their whole life would know to describe it."

She held my gaze. "I know," she said.

"You believe him," I said.

"I believe he has the gift," she said. "I believe it is hereditary because it did not come from the Alpha and it did not come from my mother. I have always known those two were afraid of something they did not recognise in me. If Caius is the origin of it, that explains what their fear was actually about."

"Then you believe you are not my sister," I said.

She looked at the window. The lamp was still off. The early morning was grey outside.

"Say it to me," I said. "Not to the window. To me."

She looked at me. "I believe we share no blood," she said. "Yes."

"Then everything I felt for three years," I said. "Every year I pushed you away. Every time I chose distance because it was the only honourable option. All of it was built on a lie."

"Yes," she said. "It was."

"I am sorry," I said. "I need to say that clearly. Not for the situation. Not for being here in this chair in this room. For the three years before any of this. For every time you looked at me and I looked away because I had decided the feeling was something I was not allowed to have."

"You made me feel like a mistake," she said. "For three years. You made me feel like wanting you was something wrong with me."

"I know," I said.

"You knew I loved you," she said. "You have always known."

"Yes," I said.

"You let me love you. You pushed me away. You chose Stephanie publicly and made me watch that," she said. "For three years."

"Yes," I said. "Every specific part of it is true."

"And you want me to do what with that," she said. "Right now. In this room."

"I do not want you to do anything with it right now," I said. "I want you to know that I understand what I did. I am not asking you to forgive it quickly or treat it as something smaller than it was. It was the most significant failure of my life and I understand that."

"Then why tell me again right now," she said.

"Because Eric is going to come back at some point and use everything I have done wrong to make me look like the less reliable option," I said. "I want you to have already heard it from me first. My own accounting. Not his."

She looked at me carefully. "You are preparing me," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"For what specifically," she said.

"For him reminding you that I was engaged to Stephanie publicly while privately asking you to keep our relationship secret," I said. "That I denied you in front of the pack. That I chose my position over you when it cost me something real. All of that is true. He is going to say it and it is going to be true."

"And your answer to it," she said.

"My answer is that it came from a lie I was given, not a lie I chose," I said. "The moment I understood the lie I came to find you. Every week at the border. Every letter through Gorran. Over the fence at five in the morning. In this chair right now."

"In this chair right now," she repeated.

"Yes," I said. "This chair is part of the accounting too. I am here. Inconveniently and unsuccessfully at this specific moment, but here."

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she almost smiled. Just at the corner of her mouth. Just enough to be something real.

"Inconveniently," she said.

"Yes," I said.

The guard came back. He looked in. He looked at me in the chair. He looked at Violet on the bed. He left.

When his footsteps had fully receded I said, "Nineteen minutes now."

"You have been counting," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"What are you going to do with nineteen minutes," she said.

"I have been working the rope since they tied it," I said. "The left knot is loose enough that another twenty minutes of consistent pressure will free my left hand."

"And then," she said.

"And then I have one hand," I said. "That is a different situation from no hands."

"There are two fighters in the corridor," she said. "I heard them when the guard checked."

"I know," I said.

"And Stephanie is somewhere in the house," she said.

"I know," I said.

"And Eric," she said.

"I know," I said.

"And Eli is four minutes away from his next attempt at arriving," she said.

"I know," I said. "I have been counting those too."

She pressed her hands against Eli. He moved under them. A long slow shift.

"I need you to know something."

"What," I said.

"I read all of your letters," she said. "The ones Eric kept. He put them in the locked drawer. I asked him to keep them instead of burning them. He let me have them after Eli was born the first time I went into false labour."

"You read them," I said.

"All of them," she said. "Every week. Every time he told me you had moved on I went to those letters and I read them and they did not sound like a man who had moved on."

"Because I had not moved on," I said.

"I know," she said. "I know that now.”