Chapter 165 The Truth
ADRIANA
On the fourth morning I asked one of the sisters about Yaya being MIA.
“Her absence isn’t abandonment,” she said. She was the younger of the two who worked most closely with me. “She’s protecting herself the same way you’re trying to protect your children. The power that’s destabilizing you is also destabilizing your connection to her. When you find stability, she’ll come back.”
“Are you sure?” I probably sounded like a child needing assurance but I didn't care.
“Yes, you have my word.” she replied, still sounding patient.
“And until then?”
“Until then, you have to work without her. Which is harder. But not impossible.”
I thought about the first time Yara had spoken to me in that kitchen with my burned hand under the cold tap, the warmth of her voice arriving from somewhere inside me was like the first evidence that I was not as alone as I had believed. She had been with me through everything since. Her absence now felt like trying to do something with my non-dominant hand. It was possible, but it felt wrong and I couldn’t stop noticing.
I kept going.
I continued with pack duties in their modified form, which meant that instead of the full range of Luna responsibilities I was handling mostly administrative matters. Correspondence. Meetings with Hazel that were conducted sitting down in a quiet room rather than walking the pack grounds the way I usually did. It was less than I was used to contributing and I felt that reduction in a way that was difficult to articulate. A sense of being partial, of not quite being myself.
The pack noticed. The whispers had not stopped since the nursery incident. They had modulated, now less openly frightened, which was in some ways worse because watchful meant they were waiting for the next thing to happen.
I heard them. I was moving through spaces where people did not always remember that, and I heard things that were not intended for me.
“She destroyed half of the pack house. She could have killed those babies.”
“I heard the council met with the Alpha.”
“Do you think she’s actually in control? From what I saw—”
“My daughter is scared to come to the packhouse now. She said the Luna makes her nervous.”
Each one landed and I absorbed it and kept moving, because stopping was not something I had the option of doing. I had children who needed feeding and a pack that needed their Luna to remain upright and a power that needed managing and a husband who was carrying his own weight of this and trying to carry some of mine too without making it obvious that he was doing so.
Elijah was careful with me in. Not really distant but just… careful. Like I was fragile, or a ticking time bomb he expcted to go off at any minute.
He held me every night and asked how the training had gone and listened to the real answer, and he did not flinch from the difficult parts. He also did not push. He did not ask about the thing his mother had seen in the twin, which I knew she had told him because I had seen something shift in his eyes the day after the council meeting that had not been there before, and Elijah’s eyes were something I had been reading for long enough to know when they were holding additional information.
He was waiting for me to come to him with it.
I was not ready yet.
What I knew was that I had felt something in that moment when his mother’s hand and her face changed. A ripple in the air around the child. It resembled something I recognized from somewhere I did not want to recognize it from. Something old and dark.
I was not ready to say it out loud because saying it out loud would make it the next thing we had to fight, and I was not sure I had enough left to fight the next thing yet.
Training was going good, on the sevent day though. I felt something change.
It was not dramatic. There was no moment of clarity, no surge that I mastered spectacularly. I was standing in the training ground in the early morning light, working through a containment exercise the sisters had been building toward all week, and the power moved through me the way it always did and I held it.
The ground cracked slightly beneath my feet and one of the wooden posts at the edge of the training area splintered at the base. But I held it inside my own boundaries and I breathed through it and it subsided.
I stood afterward with my hands shaking and my vision slightly narrowed and felt something that was not quite triumph but was very close to it.
The sister who was working with me that morning did not celebrate. She made a note of what had happened and said, “Again.”
I almost laughed but I did as she asked.
I fed the twins and sat with them in the temporary nursery we had set up in a different room while the original was being repaired.
I thought about my mother’s words, from a memory so old it lived in the part of me that felt things before it understood them.
Your heart will tell you where to go.
I looked at my son.
I was going to protect him. From whatever this was, from whatever it intended to become. I was going to protect him with everything I had, the same way I had protected myself from every thing that had come for me before him, and I was going to do it without breaking anything else I loved in the process.
But first I was going to have to tell Elijah. He deserved to know. And I knew it wasn’t fair keeping it from him all this while. The knowledge had just felt heavy to me.
Tomorrow. I made the mental note.