Chapter 127 The Ordinary
ELIJAH
I needed air. I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t that house, somewhere I could hear myself think without the weight of every unresolved thing pressing down on all sides at once.
So I walked.
The grounds behind the packhouse stretched out far enough that if you went east toward the tree line you could lose sight of the building entirely, and that was exactly where I went. The late afternoon light was doing that low golden thing it did before the sun dropped, catching the tops of the trees and making everything look calmer than it was.
Adriana was furious. She hadn’t hidden it from anyone and she wasn’t trying to. She’d come downstairs with her bag already in her hand and her mind already made up, and the look on her face when she said she was leaving had made it completely clear that she had moved past the stage where words from me would reach her. She was done with the secrets. Done with the careful management of what she was and wasn’t allowed to know about her own life.
Hazel had tried to stop her. She’d stepped in front of her, kept her voice gentle, tried to find some angle that would make Adriana slow down and talk. It hadn’t worked.
It was never going to work because Adriana had already made her decision before she came downstairs. The packed bag was proof of that. This had been building for longer than just today.
I hadn’t stopped her.
Hazel came to find me not long after.
“Why are you just standing here? Why didn’t you say anything to her?!” She yelled.
“What did you want me to say, Hazel? She wasn’t going to hear anything I had to say. You saw how she looked at me. Talking to her in that state would have made it worse, not better.”
“So you just let her walk out?”
“I sent guards after her. She doesn’t know they’re there, but they’re there. She’s not alone out there even if she thinks she is.”
Hazel looked at me for a moment, then sat down on the low stone wall nearby.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to do?”
I sat down too, though not close. The light was fading faster than I wanted it to.
“I’m doing everything I can, Hazel. I know that doesn’t look like enough right now. Adriana is angry with me and she has every right to be, and Leo still won’t speak to me the way he used to, and Jane is somewhere in that house dying and I can’t even stay in the same room as her long enough to be civil. I am aware that I am failing on several fronts simultaneously.”
She didn’t say anything to that, which was somehow more useful than if she had.
“Your father would be proud of you,” she said eventually. “He would look at everything you’re carrying and he would tell you that you were doing it well.”
I looked at the tree line.
“My father was a genuinely great Alpha. He handled threats and problems without falling apart. I can’t keep two prisoners in a cell. I can’t keep my own mate in the pack. I can’t work out how to get Leo to eat a proper meal without negotiating for twenty minutes. What would he think of that?”
“He would think you’re human,” Hazel said simply. “And he would remind you that being Alpha doesn’t mean being immune to difficulty. It means continuing anyway.”
I didn’t respond to that. But I heard it.
We sat out there until the sun was gone and the grounds went blue and dim around us, talking about smaller things. Easier things. I deliberately kept the Cult out of the conversation because I didn’t have the reserves for it tonight and there was nothing new to say.
When we went back inside, Hazel stopped me at the door.
“Leo came downstairs. He’s in the dining room with Jane.”
I stood very still.
“Don’t make a face,” she said quietly. “Just go in and sit down and let it happen.”
I breathed out slowly.
The dining room was quiet when I entered. Leo was already seated, working through his food with the careful focus he brought to eating when he was determined to avoid looking at something.
Jane sat across from him, not eating, just watching him with an expression that had too many things in it to name easily. Tears were sitting in her eyes but she hadn’t let them fall.
I sat down.
The silence held for a moment and then Leo looked up at me and signed something small and slightly sheepish.
“I was really hungry. And I ran out of chocolate.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. The tension in the room shifted fractionally.
“You understand him?” Jane’s voice was quiet.
“Yes. I learned sign language when he stopped speaking. I needed to know how he was feeling and I wasn’t willing to guess.”
She looked back at Leo, and I watched her watch him, and I could see her taking inventory of every feature of his face, storing it the way someone does when they know they are running out of time to look.
“Eli.” She caught herself. “Elijah. I never thanked you. For everything you did for him. Everything you gave him that I should have been there to give. I don’t have the words for what that means to me but I need you to know that it means everything.”
I looked at Leo.
I had done it for Liam. And I had done it because the alternative was unthinkable. But sitting here now, watching this small boy eat his dinner with total composure while his dying mother sat across from him trying not to come apart — I understood that whatever I had given Leo, he had given me back something I hadn’t even known I was missing.
I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded and reached over and stole a piece of food from Leo’s plate, and he shot me a deeply offended look that made Jane laugh softly, and for a few minutes the three of us sat together in something that almost felt like the ordinary.