Chapter 124 Cleverer
THIRD POV
The living room felt wrong in a way that was difficult to name precisely.
Hannah and Lisa sat side by side on a low wooden bench, both of them doing the same slow survey of the space around them with the careful eyes of people who were trying to determine whether they were in danger.
The furniture was sparse to the point of being almost absent. Strange objects hung from the ceiling at irregular intervals, some carved from bone, some wrapped in dark cord, some that neither woman could identify and neither wanted to look at for too long.
The windows were small and set high in the walls, letting in very little of the afternoon light. The whole place sat in the middle of a stretch of land that had nothing around it for as far as either of them had been able to see on the journey here.
If something happened to them in this building, no one would know. That thought had occurred to both of them independently and neither had said it out loud.
Hannah glanced sideways at Luke, who was standing apart from them near the far wall with his arms folded and his eyes fixed on some middle distance that had nothing to do with the room. He had been like this since he collected them from the cell. Present in body, entirely elsewhere in every other sense.
It wasn’t like him. Hannah had known Luke long enough to know when something had shifted in him, and something had shifted. She didn’t know what it was yet and she didn’t like not knowing.
She wanted to signal him. To catch his eye and communicate through the shorthand they had developed over years of working in proximity. But he wasn’t looking at her and something about his posture told her that even if she called his name he would take a moment too long to respond.
She pushed the thought aside. There were more immediate things requiring her attention.
The old man across from them had been talking for the better part of an hour. He spoke with unhurried patience. Like he had been holding his plans for a very long time and was in no rush now that he was finally laying them out. When he finally stopped, the silence that dropped over the room was complete.
Hannah was the first to break it.
“So what you’re saying,” she said slowly, making sure she had understood correctly, “is that you want us to kill Elijah. So that you can get to the wolf.”
“Not just any wolf.” The Grandmaster’s voice was measured and precise. “The particular wolf I’ve been working toward for a very long time. I won’t go into the full detail of why, it’s a longer conversation than we have time for today. What matters is that Elijah needs to be removed. His presence is the single largest obstacle between me and what I need. While he stands where he stands, I cannot move freely through that pack. He has to go.”
Hannah felt the words land in a strange way.
She had agreed to come here — had agreed to everything, really — because of what had been promised to her at the beginning. She had been told she would get what she wanted when everything was done. And what she wanted was Elijah.
She had been working toward that for years, patiently, stubbornly, surviving every setback and every humiliation and every moment of being looked past. The plan had always ended with him finally seeing her properly.
Killing him was not the ending she had agreed to.
“You told me I’d get what I wanted at the end of all this,” she said carefully. “That was the arrangement. The reason I agreed to any of it was because I thought—”
“I’ve told you what I want.” His eyes moved to her and then away, dismissive and final. “That’s what’s going to happen. Stop making problems where there aren’t any.”
The bluntness of it shocked her. He had been different in the beginning. Sareful with her, attentive, making her feel like a valued piece of something important. This version of him was something else entirely.
Lisa, beside her, had not reacted at all to the news about Elijah. She didn’t particularly care whether he lived or died. He had never been her primary concern. What she cared about, what she had cared about for as long as she could remember, was Adriana. Her sister. The source of every humiliation and every injustice and every thing that had ever been taken from her. Getting back to Adriana was the only plan that had ever really mattered to her. And if killing Elijah was the way to achieve that, then they could be her guests.
“How do we do it?” She asked. Her voice was practical and flat, like she was discussing logistics rather than a life. “Because removing an Alpha isn’t something you do carelessly. If we go back in there without a proper plan it falls apart immediately.”
The Grandmaster nodded, apparently satisfied with her thought process.
“You won’t go back yet. Right now every member of that pack is looking for the three of you. They will not stop looking quickly. Se is thorough, which is precisely what makes him useful as an adversary and inconvenient as an obstacle.” He folded his hands.
“You will stay here until the attention dies down. When it does, you go back and you blend. You become invisible. You watch and you learn and you wait until I tell you it’s time. You’ll hear from me.”
Lisa nodded. Luke, across the room, gave no visible reaction but he was listening.
The Grandmaster left shortly after, pulling the door shut behind him without ceremony.
The three of them sat in the remaining quiet for a moment.
Hannah turned to the other two.
“How are we just agreeing to this? We don’t know anything real about this man. We don’t know what he actually wants or why. He wants to kill Elijah — why? What does he get from it? What if we’re just pieces in something we don’t understand and when he’s done with us we’re the next problem he needs to remove?”
Lisa looked at her briefly and then looked away. She had nothing to offer on the subject of Elijah. It simply wasn’t her concern.
Luke was quiet. He had his own calculations running and he kept them to himself.
He had liked Adriana from the first moment he’d seen her. That had been the simple truth of it before anything else. She was his Alpha’s mate and that had made the feeling useless, something to be buried and ignored.
If Elijah was gone — if that obstacle was removed as cleanly as the Grandmaster was proposing — then the landscape changed entirely. She would be unmoored. Grieving, maybe, but unmoored. And he would be there. He would have been there through everything. That counted for something.
He said none of this. He simply stayed quiet and let Hannah talk herself in circles.
Hannah realized, after a moment, that she was alone in her objection. Neither of them was going to stand with her on this.
Fine. She would find another way.
She was not going to let Elijah be killed. Everything she had worked toward depended on him being alive at the end of this. She would play along for as long as she needed to, and when the moment came she would make sure things went differently.
They thought they were being clever.
She was going to be cleverer.