Chapter 174 Penthouse
THIRD POV
Adriana rested her head against his shoulder and he kept his arm around her and they stayed there until the candles finally surrendered to the wind.
Many years had passed since Elijah had her mother cremated and they gave her the funeral she deserved. Adriana still came to the sea on this day every year.
She had been doing it since the beginning, this small ritual of marking the anniversary at the water. She started releasing a portion of her mother’s ashes into the current and standing quietly with whatever she had to say.
Visiting the ocean had started as grief and had gradually become something more complex and more complete. The grief was still present. It always would be. But alongside it now was gratitude and memory and a real quality of love she didn’t know was possible, or that she was capable of it.
This was the last of the ashes. The final portion, saved for the tenth year.
She stood at the edge of the water and held the urn and thought about everything her mother had not lived to see. The boys, who were extraordinary in ways Adriana could not have predicted. Leo at fifteen, serious and capable, spending his days at Elijah’s side learning the work of the pack with the focused determination of someone who understood what it meant and intended to honor it.
The twins, loud and impossibly energetic, filling every room they entered. And Lorain, the youngest, who had arrived as a surprise and whom Elijah’s mother had taken one look at and said, quietly, that she had wondered when it would finally happen. The first daughter born to this family in longer than anyone could easily calculate.
Adriana’s mother would have loved all of them without reservation.
She opened the urn.
The question of succession had required fighting for. There were pack members who had raised objections to Leo’s position in the line. He was not biologically Elijah’s, he had not been born with the Alpha’s name, there were traditional arguments that people who liked traditional arguments had made with the confidence of people who had never had anything taken from them and therefore considered their positions secure.
Adriana had dealt with each objection personally.
She knew what it felt like to have your place denied because of circumstances outside your control. She was not going to allow that to happen to her son. Leo had been formally adopted, legally recognized, and his right to succeed was documented and defended and she had made very clear, to anyone who wanted to press the matter, that pressing it was an error they would regret.
No one had pressed it twice.
She released the last of the ashes into the current and watched them move and felt, not for the first time, that her mother was somewhere in the watching. Aware of the life her daughter had built. Proud in whatever form pride takes when it no longer has a body to live in.
“I have everything you wanted for me,” Adriana said quietly. “I hope you can see it.”
The ocean moved. The light on the water shifted.
She took that as a yes.
They arrived at the hotel in the early afternoon and stood in front of it for a moment before either of them moved.
It was exactly as Elijah had described it when he told her they were finally taking their honeymoon. Large and elegant and situated directly against the sea.
The architecture was intentional. Clear in their plan of making the outside world feel like something that happened to other people. The building itself was pale stone that caught the light at this hour and held it warmly, and the sound of the ocean was present from the forecourt, constant and unhurried.
Adriana had wanted this. She had imagined it, not obsessively but persistently, in the years since their wedding when everything had conspired to push it further down the list of things they could realistically do. First the pack stabilization, then the twins arriving earlier than expected, then the matter of succession that had required more of her time and energy than she had initially anticipated, and then Lorain, who had arrived with the cheerful disregard for timing that seemed to characterize her entire personality.
Elijah had promised her they would get here. She had believed him because he did not make promises he wasn’t intending to keep, which was one of the things she had understood about him early and valued ever since.
“You’re not looking at the hotel,” she said without turning to him.
“No,” he agreed.
She turned and found him looking at her with the expression that was filled with content.
“We should go in,” she said.
“Probably.”
They collected their key card from the front desk and took the elevator up through more floors than Adriana had expected, and when Elijah stopped them at the correct level and led her down the corridor and unlocked the door, she walked in and immediately stopped.
She had been expecting a room. A nice room, certainly, Elijah did not do things by half.
This was not a room. This was a penthouse that occupied the top of the building, with windows that ran the full height of the wall on the ocean side and through which the sea was visible in its entirety, the light on the water and the horizon line and all of it laid out as though someone had decided the view deserved to be taken seriously.
She walked to the window and stood in front of it.
“Elijah.”
“Mm.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“It’s our honeymoon.”
“We have four children.”
“Which is precisely why we deserve a ridiculous penthouse.”
She turned around and looked at him standing in the middle of the room in his travel clothes, arms folded, watching her with that quiet satisfaction, and she crossed the room and put her arms around him and held on.
“Sometimes I still can’t believe you’re real,” she said into his shoulder. “I spent so many years not expecting anything good and then you just appeared and kept being good and I still don’t entirely know what to do with that.”
He held her back and said nothing for a moment.
“You do the same thing to me,” he said eventually. “Every day. You don’t know what you changed.”
She pressed a kiss to his shoulder and then pulled back.
“We should go to the beach,” she said. “We’re at the ocean. We’re not going to stand in a hotel room being emotional.”