Chapter 136 Speechless
ADRIANA
“Again.”
I reset my stance and tried to find the place inside myself where the shift began. I had found it before. The night it happened the first time, I had found it by accident and held on. The difficulty now was finding it deliberately, on demand, in the middle of a field with sore muscles and the sun already past its peak.
“Your weight is wrong. If you distribute it like that you’ll go down on your left side when the change starts.”
“Yara, I know where my weight is.” I grumbled.
“Then put it somewhere better.”
I adjusted and tried again and felt the heat moving up from my center, the edges of my awareness beginning to expand and then it slipped and I was just standing in a field again, breathing harder than the effort warranted.
I sat down on the grass.
“This was easier the first time,” I said to the open air. “Not easier, exactly. It was agonizing the first time. But at least it actually happened.”
“The first time happened because circumstances forced it. You had no choice and your body responded accordingly. Now you’re trying to do it consciously, which requires you to be in control of something your body has only done once. It’s harder.”
“Thank you for explaining that while I’m sitting here having failed repeatedly.”
“You haven’t failed repeatedly. You’ve attempted repeatedly. There’s a difference.”
I lay back on the grass and looked at the sky. The clouds were doing something slow and unhurried overhead and for a moment I just let myself be still.
I thought about the marking, which had happened a few days ago and which I still hadn’t entirely processed in the way it deserved. Elijah had been careful and deliberate about it, and afterward I had felt different in a way I had no adequate language for. Less like someone standing at the edge of a life that belonged to her and more like someone standing inside it. Less like an observer.
The color and weight of everything had changed slightly, and I was still adjusting to what ordinary things felt like now.
He was the love of my life. I knew that with the same certainty I knew my own name, which was a strange thing to know and also the most settled thing I had ever felt about anything.
His voice arrived in my head now, as if summoned by the thought of him.
“Can you come back to the house? There’s something I want to show you.”
I sat up. My muscles registered the movement with immediate complaint.
“Is it urgent? I’m in the middle of a session and if I stop now I’ll lose the momentum.”
There was a pause that lasted slightly too long.
“It’s important. I wouldn’t ask you to stop if it wasn’t.”
Something in his voice was different. Not wrong exactly. But different.
“Is Leo alright?”
No answer.
That was enough. Elijah would not ignore a direct question about Leo unless he was distracted by something that required his full attention. I gathered my things and started moving.
The pack around me was in organized motion, people carrying things, guards moving in coordinated patterns.
The evacuation to Elijah’s pack was underway, and watching it as I walked back I felt the weight of it. These people were leaving their homes because of something that had been set in motion long before they had any say in it. They were trusting me to make it worth the disruption.
I tried to reach Elijah again through the link as I walked. He didn’t respond.
The pack itself was calm when I arrived, which ruled out the Cult. If they had gotten through the perimeter the atmosphere would be completely different. Whatever was happening was inside the house.
I pushed through the door and was immediately hit with the scent of fresh flowers. Underneath it, there was something warm. Candles. Roses scattered along the hallway floor in a path that led forward, the petals catching the candlelight and throwing small orange shadows against the walls.
I stood in the doorway, unable to move or even comprehend what I was seeing.
At the end of the hallway, at the bottom of the stairs, there was a banner with arge letters. It had a simple and direct message.
MARRY ME?
The word had a question mark that somehow made it feel more honest than a declaration would have.
Elijah stood in front of it in a suit that I had never seen before, holding a bouquet, and when he saw my face he smiled in a way that was slightly uncertain around the edges, which was so unlike him that it made my chest ache with something tender.
He crossed the space between us and went down on one knee and took my hand.
“Adriana.” He looked up at me and his voice was completely steady. “I bless the day I found you in that forest. I bless the fact that I chose to follow that sound instead of turning back. You have been the truest thing in my life since the moment I pulled those ropes off your wrists. You have stood beside me through everything. You have loved Leo like he was always yours. You have been patient with my difficulty and my stubbornness and my inability to say things at the right time, and you have chosen me anyway, over and over, without asking for anything in return.” He paused. “I want to be your husband. I want to be yours in every way there is to be someone’s. Will you marry me?”
The ring was in the box he held open. I could see it catching the candlelight.
Everything I had ever wanted. The man I loved, on his knee, asking me to be his forever. I had thought about this moment in the abstract the way you think about things you’re not sure you’re allowed to want. And now here it was, completely real, and something in me was not moving the way it should.
Other things pressed on my mind. The Cult. The battle that was coming. The fact that in two days, by Yara’s latest estimate, everything we had been preparing for was going to arrive, and neither of us knew what the other side of it looked like.
What if I said yes and he didn’t come home? What if I said yes and I didn’t?
He was still looking up at me. His expression was beginning to shift, reading my silence correctly.
I wanted to say yes so badly it felt like something physical. But the word wouldn’t come.