Chapter 110 Do You Want to go Back to Your Pack?
ADRIANA
I didn’t cry right away.
That was the part that unsettled me most. I just stood there, completely still, breathing through my mouth like someone had knocked the wind out of me and I hadn’t quite gotten it back yet.
I kept waiting for something to arrive. Sadness. Relief. Rage. Any of the things a person is supposed to feel when they hear news like this. But what came instead was nothing clean or nameable. Just a pressure. A strange, dense weight that settled somewhere behind my sternum and refused to move.
My father was dead.
I said it again in my head. Again after that. Like if I repeated it enough times the meaning would finally catch up to the words and I’d know what to do with myself. My father was dead. The man who had stood in our living room in front of every guest we’d ever invited into our home and pointed at me like I was a stranger he’d had the misfortune of encountering.
“She’s just as weak as you are. I hate weak people.”
He hadn’t whispered it or even pulled my mother aside or waited until the guests had gone home. He’d said it loudly, clearly, with the kind of confidence that told me he wanted every person in that room to hear him. To agree with him. To walk away from our house that night knowing exactly what he thought of us.
I used to wonder if he was drunk. Later I stopped wondering. It didn’t change anything either way.
I had always known something was different between Lisa and me. I could feel it without being able to name it, the way you sense a shift in temperature before you understand its source. My father made sure I never had to guess. He made the difference plain and public and permanent, and he never once seemed to regret it.
“Do you want to go back? Maybe check on your pack?”
Elijah’s voice pulled me out of my head. I looked at him for a moment, not quite registering why he was asking.
“Go where and do what?” I said. “Lisa is already in your care. Go ask her how she feels about it. He was her father too.”
I started to walk away. His hand caught my arm, not rough but with enough strenght to stop me.
“Are you still angry with me?”
I turned around slowly. I looked at him. I tried to figure out how to explain that I had no idea what I was feeling and there was no room in me right now to sort through anything additional.
“I just found out my father died,” I said. “I haven’t had a single moment to think about anything else. I don’t know what I am yet.”
He let go. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” He stepped back. “Take your time.”
I walked to my room alone, and when I closed the door I stood with my back pressed against it and just breathed. My heart was going too fast. My hands felt cold and strange. I could hear the sound of my own blood.
Who killed him?
He was a member of the Cult. That much I knew.
My thoughts drifted to Elijah. I thought about the way he’d looked at me just now, the way he was always looking at me, and I shook my head. If Elijah had wanted my father dead, he would have been dead long before this. That wasn’t how Elijah moved. He didn’t make quiet decisions and sit on them for months. He acted, and when he did you felt it.
This wasn’t him.
The Cult then. Or someone else, someone I didn’t know about, some consequence my father had been building toward for years without any of us seeing it coming. He had a particular talent for that, creating damage without creating anything useful alongside it. No real wealth. No real status. Our pack was small and his name didn’t carry the weight he’d always pretended it did. He was mocked more than he was feared, and I think on some level he always knew it, which was why he had to be so loud.
I remembered his face at my mother’s funeral. He’d stood with his friends and kept his chin up and said that he couldn’t cry over a mere woman. Like grief was something that happened to weaker men. Like she hadn’t spent years trying to love him into someone worth loving.
I had been twelve years old. I’d watched him say it and felt something inside me go quiet in a way that never fully came back.
My knees went weak. I didn’t decide to fall, my body just gave out from under me and I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wood and my hands in my lap. And something warm trailed down my cheeks, suddenly and all at once. I couldn’t stop it.
It wasn’t fair.
The thought was childish. I knew it was childish. But it kept surfacing anyway, stubborn and insistent: it wasn’t fair. Not because I’d wanted him in my life. Not because I’d loved him the way daughters are supposed to.
He had died the same way he had lived without ever deciding I was worth seeing. He was gone now and there was nothing left to wait for. No version of events in which he finally looked at me and understood what he’d thrown away. No chance of that anymore.
I pressed my fist against my mouth and breathed through it until the worst of it passed.
The Cult. That was the answer I kept coming back to. He must have failed them somehow, disappointed them the way he disappointed everyone, only this time the people he disappointed had a more permanent way of responding to it. That fit. That made sense.
I wiped my face and got up off the floor. I crossed to the mirror and looked at myself. My eyes were swollen and my skin was blotchy. I looked exactly like someone who had just been crying on the floor of their room, which was accurate, and I found I didn’t particularly care.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
I thought about my mother, the years she had spent inside a marriage that quietly destroyed her. Lisa, the way she’d absorbed every lesson my father had ever taught about cruelty and made it her whole personality. And me, the girl who had grown up flinching, learning to read rooms before she entered them, making herself smaller as a form of survival.
Every piece of it went back to one man. One man who had decided, at some point very early, that I didn’t belong to him in any meaningful way.
He was gone.
I waited for relief to arrive. I sat on the edge of my bed in a quiet room and I waited for the feeling of something lifting.
What came instead was silence. And underneath the silence, something that resembled grief, not for the father he had been, but for the one he had never once tried to become.