Chapter 193 CXCIII

Chapter 193 CXCIII
Levi's POV

The apartment was quiet. Aria was in the other room with Xavier, the arrangement that had been established in the past several days. The twins and Zoe were in the room beyond that.

It was past four in the morning, the door opened quietly and Xavier came in. He had not been to the apartment when we arrived, had been with Aria, and when Marcus had told him through the door that Fenwick was still working he had stayed away, which had been the right call and had clearly cost him.

He came in now and went directly to the bed and looked at Isabell. He looked at her for a long time.

The blood on her institutional clothing had been partially cleaned by Fenwick during the examination but not completely, and the evidence of the past four days was visible on her in ways that went beyond the physical, in the thinness of her face and the specific quality of her stillness.

Xavier stood at the bedside and looked at her with the expression of a man who had known this woman for much longer than her current life and was reading those four days against a history that ran deeper than I had access to.

He turned and looked at me at the bloodstained shirt. I sat in the chair for three hours. At whatever my face was doing.

"She is stable," I said.

"I can see that," he said.

He stood there for a moment longer, looking at her breathing, and then he looked at the window and then at me.

"I need to go outside," he said. "I need to go outside right now."

"Xavier-"

"Now," he said, and his voice had changed to the specific register of someone who has reached the outer limit of what they can contain in a human context.

He was going to shift, I understood. The Lycan response to sustained crises and the specific sight of someone you loved damaged and lying in a hospital bed was sometimes more than the human form could hold, and the shift was the body's way of processing what the mind could not.

"Go," I said. "The grounds at the back of the building. It's clear."

He was already at the door and out of it before I finished the sentence. I heard his footsteps moving fast through the apartment and then the sound of the building's rear door and then nothing.

Somewhere out in the early morning grounds behind the building, Xavier was shifting into his Lycan form and running, which was what Lycan bodies did with grief and fear when they had too much of it.

I looked at Isabell then I picked up my phone. Marcus answered immediately, which told me he had been awake, which told me he had been waiting for this call.

"She's stable," I said. "Fenwick has her. She's going to recover."

"Good," Marcus said, and the single word carried the full weight of four days of coordinated searching and border management and holding the pack together while I was operating outside its official structures.

"I need to brief you on what I learned from Vanessa," I said. "And I need to give you new instructions."

"I'm listening," he said.

I talked for twenty minutes. I covered everything Vanessa had told me about the Assembly, their operational structure, the number of people who had been at the facility and were now either neutralized by my extraction team or dispersed. 

The Assembly was not finished by tonight's action, the operation had been one facility and one set of people, but the advance force structure had been significantly disrupted.

"Security upgrade," I said. "Immediate. Every border post goes to double staffing starting tonight.”

“I want the perimeter monitoring system running on its own dedicated power supply with no connection to the main grid so it cannot be cut the way the grid was cut. Every vehicle entering pack territory, pack affiliated or not, goes through full documentation from this point."

"That is going to slow movement significantly," Marcus said.

"I know," I said. "Do it anyway."

"Understood."

"I'm going to be training the combat team personally," I said. 

"Starting this week whatever I do for Isabell's recovery in the days ahead, I'm also doing that. The Assembly is going to come back and when they do I want this pack ready in a way it hasn't been before."

"Levi," Marcus said, and his voice had the quality it got when he was about to say something he had been holding back. "Are you alright?"

"I'm functional," I said.

"That's not what I asked."

"I know," I said. "I will sleep when she wakes up."

Marcus made the sound he made when he disagreed but accepted the situation. "I will start the security upgrades tonight," he said. "And Levi, good work."

I ended the call.

I made three more calls in the next thirty minutes. Each one barking instructions to pack security leads about specific changes I wanted implemented. Each one receiving the response of people who understood the situation had escalated and were ready to move.

By the time I finished, the sky outside the window had begun the very first movement from black toward the dark grey that preceded dawn.

I put the phone down and the room was quiet. Isabell breathed. I sat in the chair and watched her breathe and did not sleep and did not move.

My phone buzzed. It was a call this time, not a message. I looked at the screen. Adrian I answered, because Adrian did not call at this hour without reason.

"She is back?" he said. His voice was even, but Adrian's even voice operated differently at four-thirty in the morning.

"She is back," I said. "Stable."

"Good," he said. A pause. 

"I have been doing some research, Levi. Since our father arrived and started asking questions about the Aldric line. I have contacts in places the Blackthorn family has connections to that go back a long time."

"What did you find?" I said.

"I found some things about the Assembly," he said. "About what they actually want versus what they tell people they want. And some things about the Aldric bloodline specifically that I don't think even Xavier fully knows."

"What things?"

"I will tell you in person," he said. "It's not a phone conversation." Another pause. "But Levi, I need to ask you something first. And I need you to tell me the truth because what I do next depends on it."

"Ask," I said.

"Isabell," Adrian said. "She's the last of the Aldric bloodline, isn't she?"

The room was quiet around me. I looked at Isabell's face as she was breathing. The blood on my shirt from her blood during the four days she had spent in a white room because people who knew what she was had decided she was something to be used.

"Why are you asking?" I said.

"Because if she is," Adrian said, and his voice had dropped to something more careful than his usual register, "then what the Assembly is planning is not what they told Vanessa it was. And you need to know that before they regroup and come back."

The apartment was completely quiet.

"Adrian," I said.

"Yes."

"Come to the pack tomorrow," I said. "In person and bring everything you've found."

A pause. "She is, isn't she," he said. Not a question this time.

I looked at Isabell breathing.

"Tomorrow," I said. "In person."

I ended the call.