Chapter 194 CXCIV

Chapter 194 CXCIV
What He Wanted

Xavier's POV

The cold water hit my back and I stood under it and let it run. The shift had taken forty minutes. I had gone into the grounds behind the building in the dark and shifted without planning the direction and ran until the Lycan had processed enough of what it was carrying that it could be brought back under the human form without forcing it.

Coming back had been harder than going out. I stood in the shower now in the small bathroom of the room I had been using in Levi's apartment building, the water cold because I had not adjusted the temperature, and I looked at the tile in front of me and thought about Isabell.

Not Isabell on the bed in the room down the hall, pale and still with dried blood on her collar and an IV line in her arm.

The other one.

Seraphine.

She had a habit of standing at the kitchen window in the mornings, before the day fully started, with a cup of something warm in both hands, looking out at whatever was outside. It did not matter what was outside. 

A city view or a garden or a car park. She stood at the window and looked at it while the world woke up, and something about the quality of her stillness in those moments was different from her stillness at other times.

She was thinking it was not about anything specific, she had told me once when I asked. Just thinking. Letting the morning settle before it made demands on her.

I had watched that happen from doorways more times than I could count. I stood in the doorway of whatever kitchen we happened to be in and watched her stand at the window and thought that I could do this indefinitely. That the specific sight of her in the morning light was something I would never find ordinary regardless of how many mornings followed each other.

Then there had been the morning she had stood at the kitchen window and turned around and told me about Aria.

She had not known for certain yet. She had the look of someone who knew something large and was carrying it carefully, the particular quality of controlled excitement and fear that came with news that changed the shape of everything.

I had stood in the doorway and watched her turn from the window and I had known before she said anything that the shape of our life had just changed.

Aria had arrived in the world seven months later with a volume of opinion about the process that she expressed immediately and at length, and Seraphine had held her and looked at her with the specific expression of someone who had not fully understood what they were capable of feeling until that moment.

She had sung to Aria from the first day. The song she said came from somewhere she couldn't name, that felt like it had always been in her, and she sang it while she fed Aria and while she walked with her and while she stood at the kitchen window in the mornings with Aria against her chest instead of the cup of something warm.

I had watched that from the doorways too.

I had watched it knowing what was coming. Knowing that the Covenant was rising, that the timeline was advancing, that the thing Seraphine had been born for was approaching the point at which it could no longer be delayed.

I had not told her soon enough.

That was the thing I had lived with for six years. Not the losing her, although the losing her had been its own consuming weight. Not telling her soon enough. She had found out with less time than she deserved to make her peace with what was coming, and she had been angry about that, briefly and entirely justifiably, before she had set the anger aside because she did not have time for it and she had never been someone who spent her resources on things that could not be changed.

She had held Aria for the last time when Aria was four months and six days old.

I had been in the room. I had watched her hold Aria and sing the song and then hand her to me with the specific care of someone passing on something irreplaceable.

She had not said goodbye to me. She had said see you in whatever comes next, which was more Seraphine than goodbye, and then she had turned to do what she had been born to do.

The water ran cold down my back and I pressed my hands flat on the tile.

I was not the same man who had stood in that room six years ago. That man had believed in the work. Had understood the necessity of the sacrifice and had accepted it as the price of a world that was worth living in. Had loved Seraphine and lost her and raised Aria alone and watched the pack territory where she had been reborn with the patient monitoring of someone who knew what was coming back around.

That man had made strategic decisions, had positioned himself in places that would be useful, had arranged things so that when the time came the necessary conditions would be in place.

That man had made a deal with the advance force's leadership at a river bank because he had calculated that the benefit outweighed the cost.