Chapter 173 CLXXIII

Chapter 173 CLXXIII
Isabelll's POV

The sound that woke me was small; it was not an alarm, not a crash, not any of the sounds that had been waking me in the months of rogue attacks and threats and things going wrong at inconvenient hours.

It was a quiet, domestic sound that reached me through the apartment and pulled me up from sleep with the specific alertness of someone whose unconscious mind had decided it needed investigating.

Scraping the particular sound of a kitchen cabinet being opened by someone who was trying to be quiet and not entirely succeeding.

I lay still for a moment, listening to a small sound of frustration, barely audible, the sound of someone encountering a problem they had not anticipated.

I got up and the bedroom was dark, the clock on the nightstand showing four twenty-three in the morning. I pulled on the cardigan hanging over the chair and went to the door.

The kitchen light was on the low one, the one under the cabinet that Levi used when he came in late and didn't want the overhead to wake anyone. Aria had found it.

She was standing on the lowest rung of the kitchen stool, which she had pulled from the counter to the cabinet, reaching toward the shelf where the cereal was kept. 

The yellow box, which she had identified on her first day as the correct one, was on the second shelf. She was approximately four inches short of reaching it and was in the process of trying to solve this problem by extending herself in a way that was making the stool move.

"Aria," I said quietly.

She froze, then she looked over her shoulder at me with the expression of someone who has been found out and is assessing whether the finding-out is going to result in significant consequences.

"I was hungry," she said.

"I can see that," I said. 

"Come down from the stool before it tips."

She came down with the careful dignity of someone stepping back from an activity they were not technically supposed to be doing. She stood on the kitchen floor in her pajamas with George under one arm and looked at me.

"You should have woken me," I said.

"You were sleeping," she said. "You looked tired."

"I was sleeping at four in the morning because it is four in the morning," I said gently. "Which is also why you should be sleeping."

She looked at the cabinet. "I couldn't sleep."

I moved the stool back to the counter and reached up for the yellow cereal box and the bowl from the lower shelf and the milk from the refrigerator. 

I put it all together on the kitchen table and she climbed into the chair and I sat across from her with a glass of water while she poured and ate with the serious attention she brought to anything food-related.

The kitchen was warm and quiet. Outside the window the very early morning had that particular quality of complete stillness that existed for only a few hours before the world began moving again.

"Why couldn't you sleep?" I asked.

She ate two more spoonfuls before answering. "The dream," she said.

"The usual dream?"

"No," she said. "A different one."

I waited.

"It wasn't about you," she said.

"I mean, you were in it but it wasn't the nice kind. It was the kind where things are happening around you and something bad is coming but it hasn't got there yet and you can feel it coming."

She said this with the matter-of-fact description of someone who had been navigating the landscape of significant dreams long enough to have developed vocabulary for different types.

"What was happening in it?" I asked.

"There was a man," she said as she ate another spoonful, looking at the bowl.

"Old it was very tall like Levi but older. White hair. And he had men with him, four of them, big, wearing the same thing."

Something in my chest shifted slightly. "Where were they?" I asked, keeping my voice even.

"Outside," she said. 

"Outside a building coming toward it. Walking like they owned it." She looked up at me. "They were coming here to this building."

"To Levi's apartment?"

"I don't know which apartment," she said. "Just this building I could see the front of it. The door and they were walking toward it."

She ate more cereal.

"The old man looked like Levi," she said.

"Not exactly but the way he walked and his eyes the same as Levi's but colder." She considered this. "Like someone turned the warmth off."

I looked at her.

Aria's dreams were not the interpretable kind that existed between imagination and experience. They were not anxiety dreams or processing dreams or the ordinary symbolic dreams that children had. I had enough evidence of that now to stop questioning it.

If Aria had dreamed of a tall older man with white hair and four personal security team members walking toward this building, looking like a colder version of Levi, then the probability that she had dreamed of Levi's father was not something I could dismiss.

"Did he say anything?" I asked. "In the dream."

"No," she said. 

"He just walked like he had already decided everything and was just coming to make it happen." She looked at me over the cereal bowl. "I didn't like it, that's why I woke up."

"That's okay," I said.

My phone was on the kitchen counter. I had put it there before I went to bed, a habit from the months of emergency calls and security updates that might come at any hour. I looked at it now.

No notifications from Levi he had said he was going to the facility tonight. He and Marcus and twelve of the pack's combat team, a planned operation that I had been told about in brief terms and had responded to with the measured acceptance of someone who had learned that telling Levi not to go into dangerous situations produced no results and used up energy I needed for other things.