Chapter 16 016

Chapter 16 016


Darius's POV

I've been dying for six weeks now.

Not slowly — or maybe slowly, depending on how you measure it. The physician measures it in days. I measure it in the things I can no longer do. Three weeks ago I stopped being able to walk the wall. Two weeks ago I stopped making it to the dining room for meals. This week I stopped being able to sit up without it costing me something I couldn't afford to spend.

The body keeps its own accounts.

I've been Alpha of Moon Fire Pack for thirty one years. Took the title at twenty two from a father who didn't want to give it and held it through three border wars, two succession challenges, one famine winter that I still dream about sometimes, and more ordinary hard years than I can count. Thirty one years of decisions, most of them right, some of them wrong, a few of them so wrong that they live in me still like splinters too deep to reach.

I think about those ones most now.

That's what dying does. It strips the day to day away and leaves you with the things that actually mattered and the things you wish you'd done differently and not much else.

.....

Aliya.

I think about Aliya.

I think about the man I was when I chose her — young, ambitious, dazzled by her the way you get dazzled by something beautiful before you understand that beautiful and good are two entirely different qualities that don't always come in the same package. She was from old blood, powerful family, the kind of match that made political sense and personal sense and every kind of sense except the kind that takes twenty years to understand.

I understood it eventually.

Too late to do much about it. That's the honest version.

She gave me two sons and I love them both in ways I've never been good at showing and I've known for fifteen years what she is and what she does in those rooms at night and I told myself it was contained, it was managed, it wasn't hurting anyone I could see.

That was cowardice dressed up as pragmatism.

I know that now.

I've known it for longer than I want to admit.

.......

The girl came to see me yesterday.

Or I sent for her — it comes to the same thing. I'd been watching her since she arrived, the way I watched everything from this bed now that this bed was where I lived. Petra talked more than she realized. Kael came every evening and sat with me and said more in what he didn't say than in what he did. And Dominic — Dominic I could read the way I could only read my own son, which is to say imperfectly and partially but better than anyone else could.

Something was happening with my son.

Something I hadn't seen in him before and had stopped expecting to see — a crack in that stillness, something getting through it that he wasn't managing as well as he thought he was.

The girl.

Zelyne.

I'd chosen her name for Aliya to suggest to her father. That's the truth of it and I'm not proud of it. I'd done it because I'd read the reports my people brought me about the Beta's daughter with the dormant wolf and I'd understood what dormant meant in this context even if her father didn't, even if she didn't, even if Aliya thought she was the only one who saw it.

I saw it.

And I made a calculation the way I'd made calculations my whole life — cold, practical, looking at the pieces on the board and moving them where they needed to go.

I told myself it was to protect her. Get her out of that house, away from a father who used her like furniture, into a situation where what she was could surface properly.

That was partly true.

The other part was that I wanted whatever she was near my son. Near my pack. Because I was dying and my pack needed what she carried whether they knew it yet or not.

I used her.

I've been sitting with that.

......

But she came in here and she sat in that chair and she said I'm managing and there was something in those two words — the flatness of them, the refusal to perform either misery or false contentment — that told me everything I needed to know about who she was and what she was made of.

Not soft. Not hard either, not the brittle kind of hard that breaks under pressure. Something else. Something that had been pressed down and suppressed and overlooked her whole life and was only now, slowly, beginning to understand its own dimensions.

I told her about Aliya.

Not everything — I couldn't give her everything, couldn't hand her a full account of what her mother-in-law was and what she'd done without collapsing the whole structure before Zelyne had enough footing to survive the collapse. But enough. A warning with enough weight behind it to be taken seriously.

She took it seriously.

Didn't flinch, didn't fall apart, didn't ask the questions a frightened girl would ask. Just looked at me with those steady eyes and said I won't and I believed her.

More than that — I felt something ease in my chest that had been tight for a long time.

.......

I think about my sons.

Dominic who got my stubbornness and his mother's self-containment and has spent his whole life trying to be a fortress and succeeding at it in ways that cost him more than he knows. Who is good — genuinely, fundamentally good in the way that people are when goodness isn't performed but just the thing they are underneath everything — and who has never once in his life let anyone close enough to see it except Kael and even then only partially.

Kael who got my wife's intelligence and none of her coldness and has always been the easier one to love and the harder one to worry about because his openness is both his greatest quality and the thing most likely to get him hurt. Who sees people clearly and feels things fully and has been quietly carrying something these past weeks that I've watched land on him and settle and watched him choose not to act on, which took more from him than anyone knew.

I'm proud of both of them in ways I've never said out loud.

That's one of the splinters.

......

Dominic came in after Zelyne left.

Sat in the same chair. Looked at me the way he always did — steady, giving nothing away, waiting to see what was needed.

I looked at my son.

Really looked. The way you look at something when you know you're running out of time to look at it.

He'd been a serious child. Quiet. The kind of boy who watched everything and said little and felt things in that deep internal way that has no outlet and no release and just accumulates. I'd tried to teach him how to lead and I think I did that well enough. I'd tried to teach him how to be hard when hardness was needed and I did that too well. The other things — the softer things, the human things — I didn't know how to teach because I wasn't sure I'd ever properly learned them myself.

Your mother and I aren't — I started once, when he was maybe sixteen. Stopped. Tried again. We don't —

I never finished it.

He'd looked at me with those eyes and I'd seen that he already knew and I'd taken the coward's road and said nothing more and changed the subject and that conversation has sat in me unfinished ever since.

"How are you feeling," he said.

"Same," I said.

He nodded.

We sat there.

"She's good," I said. "The girl."

He looked at the window. "Yes."

"Better than you expected."

A pause. "Yes."

"Better than you're letting yourself admit."

He looked at me then. That flat look. But underneath it something moved, something quick and unguarded, and I saw it and I think he knew I saw it and neither of us said anything about it.

"She's going to need you," I said. "What's coming — she'll need you fully. Not managed. Not kept at arm's length. Fully." I paused. Let that sit. "You understand what I'm telling you."

"I understand."

"Do you."

He held my gaze. "Yes," he said. Quiet and straight. "I do."

I looked at my son for a long moment.

"Good," I said.

He stayed until I fell asleep.

I know that because the chair was warm when I woke and the room was dark and he was gone and there was a blanket over me that hadn't been there before.

He never said he loved me.

Neither did I.

That's the biggest splinter.

Still too deep to reach.