Chapter 150 I’m Sorry…

Chapter 150 I’m Sorry…
Grace had no intention of going anywhere with Sarah Ainsley.

She stood in the corridor with the woman's hand still wrapped around her arm, watching the officers disappear around the corner toward Enzo's room, her mind was already several steps ahead, running through outcomes she didn't like the shape of. She needed to get back to him. She needed to be in that room before they were.

She thought about the drip.

The thought arrived uninvited and would not leave once it had formed. Enzo was lying unconscious, still recovering from venom that had nearly killed him in the tunnel, and a clear bag of fluid hung on a metal stand beside his bed, dripping steadily into the back of his hand while a machine beeped out the rhythm of his pulse for anyone who cared to watch it. If the people walking that corridor knew enough to identify what he was, if they had been trained the way the rest of the country seemed to be getting trained overnight, what exactly was stopping them from killing him quietly while a nurse's back was turned?

She doubted they would shoot him. Not here. A hospital had cameras in every corridor and nurses who noticed things.

But poison was quiet.

A syringe emptied into the wrong line. A dosage adjusted by someone wearing the right uniform and carrying the right clipboard. By the time anyone thought to ask questions, Enzo would already be gone, his death ruled as an accident. A clinical mistake.

Her heart rate climbed. She pulled her arm free of Sarah's grip.

"Grace."

The voice stopped her before she had taken a full step, It was quiet and careful. She sounded like she had practiced this line so many times, in front of a mirror.

"It's about your mother."

Grace's feet simply refused to move.

Her hand drifted to her stomach, the gesture so automatic now that she barely registered doing it, a quiet anchor that reminded her she wasn't only making decisions for herself anymore. Whatever happened next had consequences beyond her own. She caught Sarah's eyes flicking down to the movement, watched something flash across the older woman's face, surprise, before it disappeared behind the same careful composure she'd been wearing since she first grabbed Grace's arm.

Sarah didn't ask. She didn't even acknowledge it out loud.

She just held Grace's gaze and said it again, with more weight this time. "Your real mother. Julia."

Julia. The woman she had never met. Grace glanced down the corridor toward where the officers had vanished, toward the room where Enzo lay defenceless, and every instinct in her told her to go that way instead, to push past Sarah and run.

But Sarah had never looked at her like this before. Not once, in all the years Grace had known her as a mother, had she carried this particular expression. There was urgency in it, and it looked almost frantic.

Grace swallowed.

"Fine," she said.

Sarah nodded once, the relief on her face brief and immediately suppressed. "Come with me."

They walked through the hospital's sliding doors without another word between them. The cool night air met them the moment the glass parted, and the parking lot stretched out beyond it, quiet and amber-lit, rows of streetlights casting long shadows across the pavement. A handful of cars moved near the entrance where the ambulance bay sat lit up and busy. Further out, where Sarah was walking, everything went still.

She led Grace to a dark sedan parked at the edge of the lot, away from the cameras mounted near the entrance, and stopped beside it without unlocking the doors. She turned to face Grace fully.

For several seconds neither of them said anything.

Sarah looked older than Grace remembered her looking. Not in the obvious ways, not more wrinkles or greyer hair, but in the way exhaustion settled into a person's eyes after months of carrying something they couldn't put down. It was the face of a woman who hadn't slept properly in longer than she would admit.

She drew in a slow, unsteady breath.

"I've wanted to tell you the truth for years," she began. "Every birthday. Every Christmas morning. Every single time you looked at me and called me Mom, some part of me wanted to sit you down and just say it." Her fingers tightened around the car keys in her hand, knuckles going pale. "I kept telling myself there would be a better time to do it. A calmer moment. A moment that wouldn't break everything we'd built."

Her voice cracked slightly on the last few words.

"There was never a better time, no amount of apology fixes what we did," Sarah continued, shivering against the night air, pushing her free hand into her jacket pocket. "I know that. I'm not standing here asking you to forgive us." She paused, gathering herself. "But I need you to know something important. Your mother allowed us to take you. That choice was never stolen from her. She came to us herself, and she gave you to us because she genuinely believed it was the safest path for you, and she trusted us completely to raise you the right way."

Grace said nothing. She kept her face still and let the words land without responding to any of them.

"We were never part of your world," Sarah said. "The supernatural side of things. We're ordinary people, Grace. Completely human, completely unremarkable in every way that matters there. But for a very long time, you were our entire world instead." Her voice softened, thickened. "Your father and I tried for years to have children of our own. Every option that existed, every treatment, every desperate attempt. None of it worked. And then your mother showed up at our door with you wrapped in her arms and asked if we would raise you as ours."

She looked down at the pavement for a moment, blinking hard.

"I said yes before she had even finished the question. I have never in my life been more grateful for anything than I was for you walking into our lives that day. Whatever else turns out to be true about how all of this started, that part was real. Every birthday I planned. Every scraped knee I bandaged. Every single night I sat up worrying about you when you were out too late. All of it was real, Grace. I need you to know that."

Something shifted in Grace's chest, something she did not want to acknowledge at all.

"Last time," Grace said, keeping her voice flat and controlled, "you told me you were bound by some kind of oath. That you weren't allowed to tell me the details. So what changed?"

Sarah's expression hardened slightly, the softness retreating behind something more urgent.

"The oath broke," she rushed out, the words coming quickly now, almost tumbling over each other. "It broke because of circumstances none of us could have controlled. The news that's been playing on every channel, the wolves, the entire world finding out what's actually been hiding in plain sight. That changes everything for everyone connected to this world, Grace. Witches will be next. The same hunt that's already starting for wolves is going to find its way to anyone carrying magic in their blood, and your mother understands that threat better than almost anyone alive." She held Grace's eyes steady. "She wants you back. She has been trying to reach you. I came tonight because she is the only person who can actually keep you safe from what's coming."

The old anger rose up fast, sharp enough to surprise her with how close to the surface it still sat.

"My mother didn't want me before," Grace pressed her lips in a thin line, pulling herself fully out of Sarah's reach. "She handed me to you and vanished. Never came back. Not a letter, not a phone call, not a single sign she remembered I existed. So tell me what makes now so different."

Sarah glanced around the parking lot before answering, a quick sweep that read more like habit than genuine caution, the reflex of someone who had spent years looking over her own shoulder.

"Your mother has always been running," she said quietly. "Since before you were even born, possibly. She never wanted that kind of life for you, constantly moving, never staying anywhere long enough to put down roots, always checking behind her. You were given to us specifically so you wouldn't have to live like that."

"Running from what?"

Sarah's mouth closed.

Grace watched her face carefully and watched the decision happen behind it in real time, “I don't know the details," Sarah said, shaking her head, and Grace did not believe a single word.

"You're lying to me."

"I'm not in a position to explain everything tonight." Sarah glanced around the lot again, another shiver running through her, though the night wasn't as cold. "There isn't time for the whole story right now."

Grace looked back toward the hospital entrance, and felt herself being pulled in two directions at once. Her mother on one side. Enzo on the other.

She made her choice.

"I have someone precious to look after first," her expression giving nothing away, she turned back toward the sliding doors.

Sarah's hand shot out and closed around her arm again, tighter this time.

"This is important, Grace."

Grace spun back to glare at her, the full weight of every unanswered question from this woman's entire relationship with her, every withheld truth and convenient silence, turning into a single sharp look, she opened her mouth to say something that was not going to be gentle.

A fine powder hit her face.

It suddenly came from nowhere, she had barely half a second to register the smell of it, faintly sweet and chemical, before her legs stopped obeying instruction and the parking lot tilted sideways beneath her.

She went forward.

Sarah caught her before she hit the ground, arms closing around her like she knew this was going to happen and had prepared for it. Grace's vision darkened at the edges, her thoughts slowing, she felt herself being moved, lowered, a car door swinging open beside her.

"Are you really... doing right by me..." The words came out slurred, half-formed, reaching back for what Sarah had said only minutes ago.

"I'm sorry." Sarah's whole body was shaking now. "I am so, so sorry, Grace. Please forgive me." Her voice cracked completely, grief and urgency tangled together in it. "But I need to save my husband."

The last thing Grace registered was the smell of car upholstery and the soft click of a door closing.

Then nothing at all.