Chapter 174 CLXXIV

Chapter 174 CLXXIV
Levi's POV

I looked at the time four twenty-eight he should have been back by now or close to it.

I got up and picked up my phone. I was about to open my messages when it rang in my hand.

Levi.

I answered immediately. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine." His voice was controlled and moving fast, the version of his voice that appeared when he was managing something urgent and didn't have the luxury of pace. 

"Isabellla, listen to me carefully."

"I'm listening," I said. I moved away from the table slightly, turning so my back was to Aria, keeping my own voice level.

"My father is coming to the apartment," he said. 

"He knows you're there, he knows about Aria. Someone told him, "I don't know who yet, but he knows and he left the estate two hours ago and he's approximately thirty minutes out."

The kitchen felt different, the warmth was still there but something had gone through it like a current.

"Thirty minutes," I said.

"Less now. I'm driving back as fast as I can but I was eleven kilometers out when Adrian called me and there was no way I was going to get there before him." 

A pause, just long enough to tell me the next words were important. "Isabellla, I need you to take Aria and get out of the apartment.”

“Don't go to your own apartment. Don't go anywhere he would expect you to be. Call Xavier and tell him to find you somewhere that's not on any list connected to me or the pack."

"You want me to run," I said.

"I want you somewhere safe before he gets there," Levi said.

"Because if he arrives and finds you in my apartment, with Aria, looking like you live there, he will use that. He will use it against both of us and he will use it against her."

"A six-year-old girl," I said, and my voice came out harder than I intended.

"He is not a man who makes exceptions for age or innocence when he's decided something needs to be managed," 

Levi said. "Please, Isabellla take her and go. I will handle him when I get there."

"Levi-"

"Please," he said again, and the word came out with the full weight of someone who did not use it without meaning it completely. 

"I have never asked you to run from anything. I'm asking you now please go."

I looked at Aria over my shoulder. She was watching me with the focused attention she applied to situations where she had decided something was happening that required monitoring.

"Okay," I said. "We are going."

"Thank you," he said. "Call Xavier now, I will be there as soon as I can."

The call ended. I put the phone on the counter and looked at it for exactly two seconds then I went to the bedroom and started packing.

I moved fast, the way I had learned to move when efficiency was more important than thoroughness. My own things first, the essentials, the things that mattered. Medication, documents, phone charger, the small bag of items I kept ready from habit.

Then Aria's things.

I went to the living room where her bag was and opened it and repacked it from the version Xavier had packed to the version of what she actually needed and used, the things she reached for first thing in the morning and the things that made her feel secure in an unfamiliar space. George went in first then her red coat from the hook by the door.

"We're going somewhere?" Aria said from the kitchen doorway. She had brought her bowl with her, still eating, watching me with those dark assessing eyes.

"Yes," I said. "We are going somewhere else for a while. Can you finish that quickly and get dressed?"

"Why?" she asked if it was not resistant, just accurate.

"Because someone is coming here that we need to not be here for," I said.

Aria looked at me for a moment. "The man from the dream," she said.

I looked at her. "Yes," I said.

She put the bowl on the nearest flat surface with the decisive movement of someone reprioritizing immediately. "I will get dressed," she said.

She went to the bedroom where I had set up her things and I heard her moving, the quick efficient sounds of a child who had apparently done this before, because she was dressed and back in the living room with her shoes on in under four minutes, which was faster than most adults managed under pressure.

I called Xavier.

He answered on the second ring, which at four-thirty in the morning told me he had been awake.

"Levi's father is coming," I said. 

"I need somewhere to take Aria that's not connected to the pack or to Levi now."

A brief pause. "I have a place," he said. "I will send you the address."

"How far?"

"Twenty minutes from Levi's building."

"We will be there in thirty," I said.

He ended the call and the address appeared in my messages thirty seconds later. I shouldered my bag and picked up Aria's, and she immediately reached for it.

"I can carry it," she said.

"You have George," I said.

She accepted this logic.

I did a final check of the apartment. Kitchen light off. The cereal bowl was still on the side table, which I picked up and put in the sink because some things were automatic. Aria's pajamas folded on the chair in the bedroom.

I was at the door Aria beside me with bags on my shoulder. I was reaching for the door handle when the doorbell rang. The sound went through the apartment like something dropped into still water.

Aria and I both went completely still. I looked at the door and the doorbell rang again.

Not the tentative ring of someone uncertain. The ring of someone who had arrived at a door they considered they had every right to come through, pressing the bell with the confidence of a person who had not considered the possibility they would not be answered.

Aria looked up at me and her eyes were calm. She had been here before in the dream. I understood, standing near a door with this sound on the other side of it.

I looked at the door then I looked at the kitchen, at the window that faced the building's fire escape.

Then at Aria she was already looking at the window.