Chapter 117 Something is Moving
ADRIANA
I kept rehearsing it in my head and kept losing the words before they reached my mouth.
We were at the beach. Elijah had taken me to a restaurant first. We’d eaten well and talked easily, and afterward we’d walked without deciding to, following the shoreline until we ended up here, sitting side by side on the sand while the sun made its slow way down toward the water.
“You can just say whatever it is.” Elijah’s eyes were on the horizon but I could hear the slight smile in his voice. “I’m not going to break.”
“You’re not even looking at me.”
“I don’t need to look at you to know you’re working yourself up over something. What is it?”
I straightened. My palms pressed flat against the sand beside me and breathed out once.
“I don’t know how to start this. I’ve been going over it in my head for hours and every version of it sounds wrong so I’m just going to say it directly.” I paused. “I need to go home, Elijah.”
“If the wind is too cold we can call the car round—”
“Not the restaurant. Home. My pack.”
He turned to look at me then. The easy expression he’d been wearing shifted into something more careful.
“Why? Has something happened here? Have I done something to make you feel like you need to leave?”
“No. Nothing like that.” I shook my head firmly. “This isn’t about you and it isn’t about anything going wrong here. I love being here. I just have something I need to do back there. Something important.” I met his eyes. “And before you ask, I can’t fully explain it yet. To be honest, I barely understand it myself.”
Yara had finally come back to me and she confirmed what she’d said earlier. I needed to go back. I needed to stand in a place that had made me feel small for most of my life and claim something from it. I just didn’t know the full shape of why yet, and I wasn’t going to hand Elijah half an answer and ask him to be satisfied with it.
He was quiet. I counted the waves and let him think.
“Fine, but I’m coming with you.”
“Elijah—”
“I mean it.” He said it without heat but with absolute certainty, the way he said most things he’d already decided. “Hazel and Aiden can manage here. The pack isn’t going to collapse because I step away. I’m not letting you walk back into that place alone.”
My chest ached with how much I wanted to just say yes.
I reached out and took his hand. He let me, turning his palm up slightly so I could hold it properly.
“That means more to me than I can tell you. Truly.”
I had been terrified. Just the thought of walking back into that packhouse. Into those corridors where I’d been invisible for years. The people there had been taught to overlook me, had watched me be diminished and said nothing, had accepted the version of me that my father and Lisa had constructed and never questioned it. And now I was supposed to walk back in and tell all of them that I was their Alpha.
Having Elijah beside me would have made that feel possible in way.
“Did you just agree to him coming with you?”
Yara’s voice appeared so suddenly I gasped out loud and flinched backward. Elijah’s hand tightened on mine immediately.
“What happened? Are you—”
“Yara.” I pressed my free hand to my sternum. “She appeared without warning. Give me a second.”
He nodded, his jaw clenched tightly, and waited.
I turned inward. “Yes, I agreed. He wants to come and I want him there. He’s my mate, Yara.”
“He cannot come.”
“Why not? Give me a reason that actually holds.”
“Because where you’re going, his presence won’t protect you, it will endanger him. You are walking into something that requires your power, and he has none of what’s needed to face what may come. If something happens to him because you brought him, that falls on you. His pack would hold you responsible. You would hold yourself responsible. You know I’m right.”
The words settled into me like stones.
I hated that she was right. I hated it genuinely and completely. Because she was describing exactly what would happen. I could already see it clearly. Elijah, caught in something he had no defense against, because I’d been too afraid to walk back into my past alone. His pack’s already complicated feelings about me sharpened into something unforgivable. Every bridge I’d carefully tried to build, gone.
I looked back at him. He was watching me with understanding. Always patient.
“Yara says you can’t come.”
Something moved across his face. “Adriana—”
“It’s not because I don’t want you there. Please hear that.” My hand tightened around his. “She’s saying that what I’m walking into isn’t something you have a way to protect yourself from. And if something happened to you because of me—” I stopped. My throat worked as I swallowed. “I couldn’t live with that. And I wouldn’t deserve to.”
He walked slowly along the edge of the water, and I watched him.
When he came back he looked at me for a long moment before he spoke.
“I don’t like this.”
“I know.”
“I especially don’t like the idea of you going alone.”
“I know that too.”
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Can we agree not to decide tonight? Can we just—” he held out his hand to me— “have this evening, and decide tomorrow when everything doesn’t feel quite so immediate?”
I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet.
“Yes. Tonight is ours.”
He nodded, and something in his expression settled, though not entirely. I could feel what he wasn’t saying. He knew the Cult was somewhere in the edges of all of this, that whatever I was walking back into wasn’t separate from what we’d been facing all along.
He was right about that. I just didn’t say it either. Not tonight.
Although, somewhere below the surface of all of it, quiet and certain, I could feel something already shifting. Something that had been waiting for exactly this moment to take its next step.
I chose not to name it yet.
I just held his hand and watched the last of the light leave the water, and tried to hold onto the peace for exactly as long as it would let me.