Chapter 18 018

Chapter 18 018


Zelyne's POV

He didn't cry.

I knew he wouldn't. I knew him well enough by now to know that's not where things went when they hit him. But I watched anyway. Kept waiting for something to crack somewhere on his face.

Nothing.

He just moved. Told the elders, dealt with the physician, sorted the soldiers, handled every single thing that needed handling before the sun was halfway across the sky. By evening he was at his desk with his father's papers in front of him like it was just another night.

I watched from a distance and felt something I didn't look at directly.

.....

Kael found me in the garden that afternoon.

Eyes still puffy. Not crying now but recently. He sat down and I didn't say anything and neither did he for a while and that was fine.

"Peaceful," he said eventually. "That's what they said."

"Good."

He looked at his hands. "Dominic hasn't stopped all day."

"I noticed."

"He did the same when our grandmother died. Went through the whole east building, every single room, three days straight." He almost smiled. Didn't get there. "Dad thought it was his way of grieving. I think it was just the only way he knew to put it somewhere."

A boy tearing through rooms because he had nowhere else to put it.

"Someone needs to make him eat," I said.

Kael looked over at me. Something tired and grateful in his face. "Yeah," he said. "Someone does."

.....

I took food to the study that evening.

Didn't knock. Walked in and put the plate on the corner of his desk and stepped back. He looked up. Looked at the plate. Looked at me.

"Petra—"

"Petra's busy with the mourning arrangements," I said. "Five minutes. Just sit back."

He sat back.

I pulled the chair from the corner and sat across from him. He looked at the plate and left it there and I didn't say anything about that. Just sat.

Outside the pack had gone quiet in that way that happens when someone important is gone — not silent, just different. Like the air had shifted to make room for the absence.

"He asked me once what I wanted." Still looking at the plate. "I was about twelve. Not what I'd be, not what I'd do for the pack. What I wanted for myself." A pause. "I didn't know how to answer. Nobody'd asked it like that." Another pause. "He never asked again."

I waited.

"I keep wondering if I ever answered it," he said. "To him or anyone else." He looked up. "I don't think I did."

"What did you want," I said. "When you were twelve."

Long pause.

"I don't remember," he said.

Said it like that was the part that hurt the most.

I pushed the plate closer to him.

He looked at it. Picked up the fork.

Good enough.

......

I stayed while he ate.

Didn't talk much. He started slow and mechanical and then somewhere in the middle of it he started actually eating like someone who hadn't realized how hungry they were. I looked around the room — the neat stacks of paper, the pack map with the border lines in his handwriting, the small stone sitting on the corner of the desk that I'd clocked before and never said anything about.

"What's that," I said.

He picked it up. Turned it in his hand. "My grandmother gave it to me. From the garden." He looked at it. "She said when things got too loud I should hold it. That the ground was still there."

"Did it help."

"Sometimes." He set it down. "She was the only one who knew it got loud." Just stating it. No self pity in it. "In my head. She was the only one who knew that."

Seventeen years of my own loud came up in me. The wolf pressing against something that was never supposed to be there. The weight of being nothing in a house full of people and keeping your face right about it every single day.

"I know loud," I said.

He looked at me.

Really looked. No management to it, no distance. Just his eyes on mine for a few seconds with nothing in the way.

Then he looked at the desk.

"Thank you," he said. "For this."

"You needed to eat."

"Still."

I picked up the empty plate and headed for the door.

"Zelyne."

Turned.

He was looking at the stone. "He liked you. My father." A pause. "He didn't say that about people easily. When he did he meant it."

I stood there a moment.

"He was good to me," I said. "I won't forget that."

He nodded. Eyes back on the papers.

I went back to the room and put the plate down and sat on the bed without turning the light on.

My wolf was warm in my chest. Not pushing, not loud. Just warm and steady like she'd settled into something and wasn't going anywhere.

I put my hand over my sternum and sat in the dark with it.

I knew what it was.

I'd known for a while.

Just wasn't ready to say it out loud yet. Not even inside my own head.

But it was there.

It had been there for a while now.