Chapter 31 31
Lucien’s POV
It took me forever to swim up from the bottom of that dark ocean of consciousness. I smelled it first—something familiar, comforting, something tied to memories I’d buried hundreds of years ago. Selena.
“You’re awake,” she murmured and reached out to press the coolness of her palm against my forehead. “The fever just broke an hour ago.”
"How long was I unconscious?" I inquired, my voice raspy from lack of use.
"Two days." She picked up a glass of water from the nightstand and held it to my lips with the skill of experience. "You nearly died, you know. If I had not come when I did..."
The suggestion lay there in the air between us. I owed her my life, again. How many times since then had this scene been played over, century after century? How many times had the fact that she even knew how to do it, that she could be my only hope — when otherwise I was dying?
“Lena," I returned, lifting up as best I could through the stiffness of my limbs. "Where is she? Is she safe?"
“She’s alright,” Selena told me, and she put her hand on my chest to help me lie down. "Resting in the guest room. The pregnancy is going well, although the strain hasn’t been ideal for her.”
Something about the how she said that made me look at her more carefully. There was a studied neutrality there, a kind of diplomatic restraint that she’d always employed when talking about things that annoyed her.
"What aren't you telling me?" I asked.
“Nothing that can’t wait until you’re feeling stronger,” she answered, deflecting with the panache of someone who’d mastered the art over centuries. “Your job right now is to recover.”
She rose to her feet and walked over to the window, pulling aside the curtains with the easy unthinkingness of one who had performed this.. sort of thing day after countless previous day. They were all efficient, it was the kind of economy that produced an environment for perfect recovery.
“Your pack is lucky,” she went on, not looking at me. “The assault could have been a lot more serious. Well, as it is now, you just lost four.”
Only four. Her casual response to those deaths bothered me, until I remembered that Selena had experienced wars in which thousands of people were killed. Her view of loss had always been from a long lens through immortality.
“Marcus was one of them,” I said, to see how she reacted.
"Yes. He died protecting what you care about most.” Then she turned and looked at me, her face expressionless. "It was an honorable death."
There was something cold that settled in my chest as I clinically evaluated the murder of a loyal companion. This was the Selena I recalled—sheer, competent, take-no-prisoners zeal for my well-being and occasionally short on tender feelings which rendered pain worthwhile.
“You don’t appear particularly fazed by it,” I remarked.
"What's troubling is that it was avoidable," she corrected. “If your mate had followed your own rules and taken care with security, then Marcus would be alive today.”
I felt my jaw clench at the veiled slam of Lena's words. “And she’s not responsible for what occurred.”
"Isn't she?" Selena’s voice was as even, but there was something pointed underneath. “She didn’t listen to your orders, she didn’t care about your fears and she put herself in a place where she could have been taken. The ripple effects of those choices went well beyond what would have been her own safety.”
In the hours ahead I realized how effortlessly Selena whirled into these rhythms that had choreographed our centuries together. Without being asked, she had brought me food—not just any old food, but the things that I particularly liked to eat when I was having a sick day. Broth that was warm and infused with herbs to aid my body in processing the leftover poison, bread that had been toasted just so, water filtered and cooled to exactly the temperature at which it made me feel most refreshed.
Nonsense, she fluffed my pillow without offering it to me because she knew exactly how I liked a bed to cradle and position my body when I was forced into one. She raised and lowered the curtains during the day, adjusting light levels to stave off headaches that always followed serious injury.
It was like slipping on an old coat, falling back into grooves carved as deeply in both our souls as they had been by sheer repetition. And, for a hot second, I indulged in the ease that comes with being fully known, when someone else can see what you need before you get it.
It was then that Lena stepped through the door.
She appeared wan, worn out with golden hair hanging limply around a face that was pale, with unmistakeable stress and sleep-ridden eyes. I looked at her with both eyes as she darted between Selena and me with a look that I could not correctly interpret.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, edging herself in as though she weren’t sure if she was welcome in her own bedroom.
“Good,” I answered, reaching for her hand. "Come here."
But while she rose to tap out my offered starter, I couldn’t help but observe the contrast. Shell Selena had moved about with the assurance of someone who had always been, Lena seemed to be hesitating, did not know where she belonged.
“Selena’s been looking after you,” Lena said, her tone carefully neutral.
I nodded, lightly squeezing her fingers. “We owe her a debt that cannot be repaid.”
Lena flinched at those words, something flickering in her eyes—pain, perhaps, or resignation. As if that was nothing to be surprised about.
“I’ll leave you be,” she said, already starting to pull away. "I understand that you have to be weak again."
"Now wait," I protested, tightening my clasp on her hand. "Please. I want you here."
But as she climbed into the chair on the other side of the bed from where Selena had been sitting, I sensed that something had gone wrong. Three people trying to make sense of a situation none of us had wanted, but that circumstances had thrust upon us.
“The pack elders have been wanting to know when they can pay their respects,” Selena said, breaking the strained silence. “May I tell them you are well enough to receive visitors?”
She was addressing the question to me, but something in her manner of asking it — with all the authority of someone who’s been making executive decisions about my calendar — left no doubt that she’d already received and handled similar requests. In effect, a formal ambassador to the wolf hierarchy.
"Not yet," I replied. "Let me recover my strength for another day."
"Of course." She jotted a note on paper I had not realised she was holding. "I'll handle the arrangements."
I'll handle the arrangements. As if it was the most natural thing for her to be running my affairs, deciding who could see me and when.
Lena went very still next to me.
As the day progressed and my energy slowly came back to life, I felt suspended between two dimensions that didn’t quite align. There was too much easy comfort in being around Selena at odds with how much I really loved Lena, and it left me feeling like a swing set once again, swung back and forth painfully between them.
"Where have you been?" I asked Selena, on the occasion in which Lena ventured outside for fresh air.
"Everywhere and nowhere," was the characteristic evasive answer. "Traveling. Learning. Staying out of trouble, mostly."
"For three hundred years?"
“Time is different when you are alone.” Her voice had that touch of ancient sadness in it which made my own heart shrink within me,—guiltily. “The main thing is I’m here now, and you need me.”
But as she said the words I could see her eyes working around the room, looking at what I’d done since she left. The softer furnishings Lena had picked out, those feminine touches that meant this was our place as much as mine.
“Things are not the same any more,” I said cautiously.
"Are they?" She went to straighten a vase of flowers that had been artfully displayed, her actions saying more about what she thought of the changes than words could. “Some things just stay amazingly consistent to me.”
"I have a mate now. A child on the way."
“You’ve had mates before,” she shot back without blinking. "What makes this one different?"
The question hovered between us, freighted with implications I amused myself by not yet being ready to explore. What did make Lena different? That was pure love, or just novelty of someone who had not seen me at my worst?
When Lena came back from her walk, I observed how the more senior members of the pack greeted her. Polite, reverent, but tinged with a distance I could sense was new since Selena’s arrival. It was as if she had made herself without meaning in her presence whatever the Alpha wanted to do, as though first Luna could be brought down to just the Alpha's woman of the moment.
"The cooks would like to know your preference for dinner," Lena said, finally coming near the bed.
But before I could say anything, Selena started talking. “He’s not going to be that much hungry yet,” she said matter-of-factly. "Something light would be best. Maybe some of the broth, the soup Maria makes—you know that one with healing herbs.”
The casual manner in which she issued instructions regarding my care, the presumption that her understanding of my proclivities outweighed Lena’s entitlement to ask, made for a second tense moment.
“I meant as a question to Lucien," said Lena softly, but there was still iron in the velvet.
"Of course," Selena replied smoothly. "I was giving a bit of advice from experience.”
Experience. The word clung to the space like a weapon, reminding her and resonating, that Selena had everything under control; centuries of knowing me, what I was going to want and when.
Looking between the two women, I understood that having Selena back wasn’t a blessing the way I’d wanted it to be when I was so lonely. Instead, it was making me face questions I had been avoiding about what I really wanted and whether it was possible to honor my past without obliterating my future.
The cozy familiarity of my relationship with Selena, which had once provided solace, now seemed like a prison. A golden cage that would keep me from settling fully into the new life I was working to create with Lena.
But it wasn’t as easy as just making a decision. “We’re breaking centuries-old habits, after all,” he said. It was going to take making a conscious decision, second by second, which self I would inhabit.
And I was no longer sure that I knew the answer to that question.