Chapter 180 CLXXX

Chapter 180 CLXXX
Xavier's POV

I thought about the Covenant about the advance force, about the enhanced rogues and the production facility that Levi's team had hit tonight.

I thought about the man on the other side of the river, the one I had spoken to the deal I had made. I had told that man that Vanessa would hand Isabel over.

And Vanessa had done exactly that I set down the tea and pressed my hands flat on the counter. I had thought, when I made that arrangement, that I was buying time. That I was creating a situation that gave Levi and Isabel the opportunity to act, that the Covenant's interest in Isabel would draw out the advance force's leadership and give us the opening we needed to identify and contain them.

I had thought I was being strategic I had not thought that Vanessa would move this quickly. I had not thought she would do it on a pavement with Aria watching.

I had miscalculated the thought of Isabel's face when I had told her that Aria was her daughter moved through my mind. The way she had pressed her hand flat against her chest above the scar. 

The way she had asked about Aria's childhood with the specific hunger of someone trying to fill a gap that was twenty-seven years wide.

I had known her for twenty-seven years before she was Isabel. I had known her in a life she couldn't access now. And in that life she had been the most extraordinary person I had ever been close to, not because of the bloodline or the power or the Covenant, but because of the specific and irreducible quality of who she was.

Seraphine had walked into a room and the room changed. Not because of authority or beauty or position because she paid attention. Because she noticed things that other people moved past. Because when she looked at you she was actually looking at you.

Isabel was the same; she had looked at Aria on a hospital café floor and seen a child who needed steadying. She had looked at a pack of injured wolves and done the work without being asked. 

She had looked at Levi with the full force of everything she was and he had not known what to do with it and had done it anyway.

I thought about the life we had built, Seraphine and I, in the years before the Covenant rose.

It had not been simple the knowledge of what was coming had been present for most of it, a weight that could be set down sometimes but never lost entirely. 

But there had been mornings in a kitchen with good light and the smell of something warm and Aria four months old in a cradle nearby and Seraphine's voice from the other room.

There had been that I had lived on the memory of it for six years.

And now she was Isabel and she was someone else's love and she was taken again and I was standing in a kitchen thinking about it.

I picked up my phone and called Levi he arrived forty minutes later. I heard his car on the gravel before I heard him at the door, the engine cutting with the abruptness of someone who had driven fast and stopped without the usual deceleration. He knocked once and I opened it.

He looked like a man running on the last reserves of himself. The controlled composure that was his baseline had eroded significantly, the careful management of the Lycan that he maintained as a constant discipline was showing visible strain. 

His eyes had the quality they got when the Lycan was very close to the surface, that sharpness and intensity that was more than human awareness.

He was in the last stages before the Lycan took the lead he was managing it but barely.

"Aria?" he said.

"Asleep," I said.

"Changed, warm, settled her hand is scraped, I've cleaned it she is alright."

He let out a breath that he had been holding since before he arrived.

"Come in," I said.

He came inside and I put tea in front of him which he looked at without drinking and I sat across from him and we were both quiet for a moment.

"Tell me what Aria told you," he said.

I told him all of it, in the order she had given it to me. The car stopping Vanessa. The tranquilizer gun. The second person in the car.

Levi listened without interrupting. His hands were flat on the table and I could see the tension in them, the effort of keeping them still.

When I finished he said nothing for a moment then he said, "The guard post at the pack border."

"What about it?"

"I called Marcus on the drive here," he said. 

"He checked the exit logs from tonight. Every vehicle that passed the border post, the time and direction."

"And?"

He looked at me directly. "Vanessa left the pack two hours ago," he said.

"Alone. According to the guard who logged her exit, she was driving alone one person in the vehicle."

I looked at him. "She had a second person in that car," he said. 

"Aria confirmed it was the man who put Isabel in the back seat. He was already in the car when Vanessa stopped." 

He paused. "Which means he was in that car before she crossed the border. Which means he was not a pack member she collected after leaving he was already with her."

"Someone she brought in before tonight," I said.

"Someone who was never registered at the border post," he said.

"Someone who entered the territory through a method that bypassed the checkpoints." He held my gaze. 

"She handed Isabel to someone who was already inside our perimeter without our knowledge."

The kitchen was very quiet. "Xavier," Levi said. "Who did she hand her to?"

I looked at this man sitting across from me, in the last steady margin before the Lycan took over, his hands flat on my table and his eyes doing what his eyes did when he was holding everything together by the specific discipline of someone who understood exactly what he was and what happened when he stopped maintaining the discipline.

He was asking me a direct question.

And I had an answer that was going to change everything about the next thirty seconds.