Chapter 28 *

Chapter 28 *
Emery’s POV
The main card ended with a split decision that half the room didn't agree with, and I had four pages of notes, a dead pen, and the specific kind of tired that came from watching eight fights back to back while also trying to memorize the energy patterns of a live venue.
Damon appeared in the doorway of the reception room. "Alpha's waiting."
I looked up from my notes. "Waiting where?"
"Outside."
"Outside like — the car? Or outside like—"
"The car, Emery."
I capped the dead pen, folded my notes, and followed him.
We drove for twenty minutes in a direction I wasn't tracking. I watched the city thin out through the window and then the car stopped.
I looked out the window.
A quiet lane. No signs. No gate number. Trees on both sides, old ones, the kind that had been here longer than whatever road ran between them. Nothing that would tell you there was anything here.
"What is this place?" I said.
Damon got out first. He opened my door. "Alpha's inside." He tilted his head toward the stone arch at the end of the lane. "He'll find you."
I stared at him. "You're not coming?"
"No."
"So I'm just supposed to — walk through a gate in the middle of nowhere at ten o'clock at night."
"There's a path." He was already getting back in the car.
I stood there for a second.
Fine.
I walked toward the arch.
The smell hit me before I saw anything. Dense and sweet and almost overwhelming, like something had been holding it in reserve for exactly this moment. I went through the stone gate and then stopped.
The trees went up on both sides of the path, old and heavy, and every single one of them was in full bloom. Purple-blue flowers, dense enough to block out parts of the sky, and the light from the lanterns along the path moved through them and turned everything a color that didn't have a clean name. Petals were coming down in the warm air — not fast, just drifting, slow and steady, landing on the stones and the grass and on the back of my hands when I held them out.
Jacaranda.
I stood there, and I felt something in my chest give way.
We missed them, I'd said. Looking at the bare branches on the Albion boulevard, those last few stubborn flowers hanging on past their season.
A petal landed in my palm. I closed my fingers around it.
He remembered.
I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know what to do with any of this — the garden, the lanterns, the way the trees went back further than I could see. This wasn't a park. The density of the trees alone, the age of them, the sheer cost of keeping something like this in bloom — this was somebody's, and they'd kept it private, and I was standing inside it.
Something activated in my chest that I didn't have clean language for.
"You're staring at it like it's going to disappear."
Logan was leaning against one of the stone pillars along the covered walkway to my left, jacket over one arm, looking out at the trees the same way I had been. Relaxed.
"It might," I said.
He glanced over.
"Petals," I said. "They fall."
He looked back at the trees. "They'll be here through the week."
I turned and faced the garden again. A cluster of blooms came loose from the branch directly above me and drifted down, and I watched them go.
"Thank you," I said. "I mean it. This is—" I stopped, because I didn't actually have the right word and I wasn't going to pretend I did. "Thank you."
He was quiet for a moment.
"That's not enough."
I turned.
He'd pushed off from the pillar. "You owe me something," he said.
I raised an eyebrow. "We're doing this here?"
"You answer me something. Right now." He held my eyes. "You don't go take care of Margaret Remington."
The garden went quiet in my head.
I looked at him. "What?"
He reached into his jacket and held out my phone.
I took it and looked at the call log. Four missed calls from Keaton. One answered, five minutes and change, time-stamped during the fight card.
My jaw tightened. "You picked up."
"I recorded it." He watched my face. "You want to hear it?"
I did, and I didn't, and I pressed play anyway.
Keaton's voice came through the speaker and I stood there in the middle of a jacaranda garden and listened to my ex-husband rattle off instructions for me like I was still the person who restocked his medicine cabinet at midnight. My mother had a cardiac event. Be back before six. Handle the staff.
I need you back.
I stopped the recording.
The anger that moved through me wasn't loud. It was the cold kind, the kind that settled low in your stomach and just sat there.
"He doesn't even—" I stopped. Started again. "He called me with a list. An actual list. Like I'm — like I'm still on his payroll."
"Then you understand why you're not going."
I looked at him.
He said it simply, like the conclusion was obvious. Like the whole thing was settled and we were just wrapping up the conversation.
I turned back to the trees.
The petals were still coming down.
I heard him take a step toward me. "Emery."
"That's not the same thing," I said.
"Mrs. Remington and Keaton," I said. "Those are two separate things."
"She was good to me." My voice came out lower than I meant it to. "Two years — she taught me the pack calendar, she made sure I knew which elders to call by title and which ones would think that was stiff. She covered for me at a dinner once when I got the seating wrong and Keaton didn't even notice because she'd already fixed it." I exhaled slowly. "She never let me look stupid in front of anyone. Not once."
"You were Keaton's wife for three years," he said. "That's done."