Chapter 160 Uncontrollable Power
ELIJAH
Adriana found me in my office twenty minutes later.
I heard her knock and said nothing and she came in anyway, which was exactly what I would have predicted and which I didn’t have the energy to object to. She closed the door behind her and didn’t immediately speak, which was one of the things I had come to value most about her. She understood the difference between a silence that needed filling and a silence that needed to be sat inside for a moment.
She sat in the chair across from my desk and waited.
“She doesn’t get to come back here,” I heard my voice, not even aware when I spoke the words.
“I know you feel that way.”
“It’s not a feeling. It’s a position.”
“Elijah.” She said it gently. “Do you know why she left?”
“I know what happened after she left. That’s sufficient.”
“Is it? Because it seems you’re making a permanent decision based on the half of the story you were there for.” She paused. “Hear her out. Not for her but for yourself. So that whatever you decide, you’re deciding it with everything in front of you.”
I looked at her. Her eyes were so unbelievably soft and understanding, filled with so much patience I felt my heart squeeze. I didn’t deserve her. She was perfect.
“You don’t know what her leaving did to my father.”
“No. Tell me.”
I didn’t want to tell her. Telling her meant going back into that period of my life, which I had organized carefully and stored somewhere that required deliberate excavation to access. But Adriana was looking at me with the patient, honest attention she brought to things she considered important, and I found, as I usually did, that I couldn’t maintain a position with her that I couldn’t fully defend.
“He loved her completely,” I said. “The kind of love that has no secondary structure built around it. When she left, there was nothing holding him up. He stopped eating and started drinking and the pack very nearly lost its Alpha, not to illness or challenge, but to grief. I was a teenager managing an adult’s responsibilities because the adult had stopped functioning. That is what she left behind when she walked out that gate.”
Adriana was quiet for a moment.
“And you held it together.”
“I didn’t have another option.”
“You were a child, Elijah. You shouldn’t have had to.”
I said nothing to that because there was nothing to say to it. The facts were what they were. I had held it together because someone needed to and I was the only someone available.
“Hear her out,” Adriana said again. “Please.”
I stared at her for a moment before sighing in defeat and getting up. She walked across the desk to me and she wrapped her arms around me, cocooning me in her warmth.
“I’m so proud of you.” She kissed the side of my lips. I turned and captured her mouth in mine, deepening the kiss.
I needed something to ground me and she was the best option. When I pulled back, she was slightly breathless but she smiled reassuringly.
“I love you.”
“I love you.” I pecked her again before walking out of the office. Not very confident in what I was going to do, but also knowing, and accepting it was the best thing to do right.
She was seated on the sofa. She looked smaller than I remembered her being. She had always been healthy, present, taking up her full space in a room. Whatever had happened to her in eighteen years had taken something from her physically that she hadn’t gotten back.
I sat across from her and said nothing, which was its own kind of statement.
She cleared her throat.
“I want to start with an apology. I know I won't change anything. I–I just…” she trailed off. “You deserve to hear it plainly. What my leaving cost you and your father was never what I intended and I am deeply, genuinely sorry.”
“Continue,” I said.
She folded her hands in her lap.
“Before your father, I was part of a sisterhood. The Sisters. I was one of them — trained, bound by their rules, operating within their structure. One of those rules was celibacy. It wasn’t arbitrary. It preserved a kind of purity that kept the full range of our powers intact.” She paused. “Then I met your father and I fell in love with him and I couldn’t find a sensible reason to stop. And then I was pregnant with you, and I was not willing to undo that. So I left the sisterhood. I chose you and your father.”
I kept my face still.
“Your father and I were not an easy partnership. I don’t say that to condemn him — I was not easy either. We had accumulated resentment and unexpressed things and we argued a lot because we’ve been storing too much for too long. And somewhere in all of that accumulation, I picked up something I didn’t know I was carrying. A spirit. The spirit of anger.”
She looked at her hands.
“I would lose time. Hours that I couldn’t account for. I thought at first it was stress, that I was simply exhausted. But then the incidents started. I would find things broken, things I couldn’t remember doing. Your father knew. He saw it before I did and he hid every piece of evidence he could find, which I know now was his version of protecting me. He didn’t want me to be frightened of myself.” Her voice went quieter. “A maid told me about the knife I had thrown at him during one of the episodes and it cut his arm and he told me he had fallen. When I confronted him he denied it and had the maid removed. But I kept asking until he told me the truth.”
I thought about my father’s arms. About every scar I had attributed to the drinking and the falls and the general disintegration of a man no longer taking care of himself. I had never considered another explanation.
“Once I understood what was happening,” she continued, “I knew I had to leave. It was not because I wanted to. Elijah, I promise no part of me wanted to leave you but I could not guarantee your safety. I could not guarantee his. The episodes were becoming more frequent and more severe and I was terrified of what I might do to one of you before anyone could stop me.” She finally looked up at me directly. “I chose to leave because the alternative was staying and hurting you, and I was not able to live with the second option.”
The room was quiet.
I had spent eighteen years building a structure around what had happened, and she had just removed several of its foundation stones in the space of ten minutes, and I was sitting with the strange, disorienting experience of a framework reorganizing itself around new information.
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
Neither did she.