Chapter 68 What stays

Chapter 68 What stays
Sera's Pov

"Is that even possible?" Maera cut across him, already turning to Tobias. "Biologically, magically, is it possible?"

"Apparently." Tobias gestured at me. "She's standing right there."

"Can they coexist?" Damien asked. His voice dropped to that register he used when he was working through a problem fast. "Without destroying each other?"

"I don't know yet," Tobias admitted.

"You have to find a better answer than you don't know.” Damien looked at Maera. "What does this do to her training timeline?"

"Everything we planned," Maera said slowly, "was built around two bloodlines. The wolf instinct, the Alpha power. If there's a third layer that just activated—"

"It changes the timeline," Damien finished.

"It changes literally everything. We don't know what we are working with anymore. She is the first of her kind.” Maera explained.

I was standing in the middle of all of it and I could hear every word and none of it was reaching my brain. It was like being underwater. Voices muffled, distorted, too far away to matter, when everything inside my chest was already screaming loud enough to drown them out.

My mother hadn't moved from the entryway. She was watching me with the look that I used to think meant love, and now I didn't know what it meant anymore.

"Sera." Caden's voice, low, near my left shoulder. I didn't look at him. "Sera, take a deep breath."

I realized he was right. I pulled in a breath. Then another, It didn't help as much as it was supposed to.

"Everybody stop talking," Damien said. Loudly enough to cut through every other voice in the room.

He looked around once. "Wren, you're staying in this camp tonight. Terry, find her somewhere to sleep and make sure she eats." He looked at Tobias. "I need everything you know about triple bloodline hybrids on paper, we need to think deeper. Not what you've heard. What you actually know." He glanced at Maera. "Training is suspended until we understand what this changes."

"You don't get to suspend my training schedule," Maera said flatly.

"I just did," Damien replied, equally flat. "If you want to risk her life and everyone else's, then he my guest."

He looked at my mother last. Whatever passed between them in that look, I didn't have the capacity to read it.

Then he looked at me.

"Go to anywhere you need to be that isn't this room." He held my gaze. "I'll handle this."

I stared at him for one long second, then I walked out.

I found the far passage. I sat on the crate and put my face in my hands.

I didn't cry even though I wanted to. The feeling pressed right up against the back of my eyes and every time it tried to break through, the part of me too exhausted to cry pushed it back down. I was too exhausted to cry, too angry to feel sad.

"The lantern's dying." I looked up.

Damien stood at the mouth of the passage. Arms loose at his sides. None of the authority he'd been wearing in that chamber was still on him.

"I know," I said. "I don't mind."

He looked at the lantern. Then at the crate. Then at the floor beside it. He walked over without asking, lowered himself to the ground, and sat with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him like he had nowhere else to be and no intention of pretending otherwise.

I stared at him. "What are you doing?"

"Sitting down."

"I can see that. Why here?"

"Because you're here," he said simply.

"I don't need company."

"I'm not here for company." He looked up at me. "I just didn't want you to be alone with all of that."

I didn't know what to do with that sentence. So I looked away from him.

For a while neither of us spoke. The lantern flickered. The passage was cold, the floor was stone, and Damien didn't complain about either.

"You were fast in there," I said finally.

"In where?"

"The chamber. After Tobias finished speaking. You had everyone moving in about thirty seconds."

"Someone had to."

"You didn't have to."

"Yes I did, because you couldn't," he said. "That's not a criticism. It's just what happened."

I turned that over. "You're not going to tell me I should have held it together better?"

"No."

"You're not going to tell me a Queen can't fall apart in front of her people?"

"You didn't fall apart," he said. "In fact you did better than I would in that situation. Learning that you're a witch now changes everything.’

I laughed before I could stop it. Short, humorless. "I wasn't in control, I was frozen. There's a difference."

"Sometimes they look identical from the outside."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"No," he said. "It's supposed to be true."

I looked at him properly for the first time since he sat down. He wasn't watching me with that calculating look he usually carried. He wasn't weighing me, measuring me, deciding what I was worth. He looked tired. Real. Like a person who had been carrying a lot of weight for a long time and had finally set it down for five minutes.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Yes."

"Why did you actually come after me?"

He was quiet for a beat. "I told you—"

"Not that reason," I said. "The real one."

He looked at the lantern. The light had dropped even lower, burning down to almost nothing now.

"Because I know what it's like," he said finally, "to be in a room full of people who are all reacting to news about your life and realize that not one of them is actually looking at you."

I didn't answer.

"Everyone in that room was processing what this means," he said. "For the Blood Moon. For the training schedule. For the political balance across every territory involved. And you were standing in the center of all of it." He looked back at me. "Nobody was looking at just you. Not at whether you were okay. Not at what you needed."

"Are you asking?" I said. "If I'm okay?"

"No," he said. "Because you're not. And you don't need me to confirm what you already know. What you need is for someone to sit here and not need anything from you for five minutes."

My chest pulled tight.

I didn't want it to. I wanted to stay guarded and clear-headed and angry enough to keep him at the distance I usually kept him, but that sentence cracked right through every wall I'd built in the last hour and I felt it hit somewhere I hadn't been guarding.

"I'm three lines and I don't know what any of them are."

"I know."

"The one that just woke up," I stopped. Tried again. "What if it changes me? What if whatever I am right now isn't—"

"Sera." His voice was even and low and completely certain. "You have been three things your entire life. Tonight just gave it a name."

I stared at him. He looked back without flinching, without adding anything, without softening it or taking it back.

The lantern flickered once. Then it went out entirely.

We sat in the dark and neither of us moved and the only sound was my own breathing and the low pull building in my chest that had been growing since the moment he sat down, and I realized that I didn't want him to leave.

That was when the footsteps hit the passage entrance.

"Damien." Maera's voice, tight in a way I had never once heard from her. "Sera, you need to come now."

"What happened?" Damien was already on his feet.

A pause that lasted exactly
long enough to pull my stomach to the floor.

"Wren collapsed," Maera said. "The marks on her arms are spreading."

"And they're not silver anymore.”