Chapter 185 Shared Weight
ADRIANA
Elijah was already moving when I finished.
Not physically, he hadn’t moved from the spot he was standing in, but I could feel the shift in him, the transition from receiving information to organizing it, and I knew what came after that transition.
“Elijah.”
“Golden Blade,” he said. “The Beta always attended meetings. The Alpha was never present. I accepted it because they were never our problem.” His jaw tightened. “That was an error.”
“It was. And we can pick it apart thoroughly when Leo is home. Right now I need you to stay with what Leo told Brianna before anything else.”
He looked at me.
“He said don’t come in loud,” I said. “He memorized the route on the way in because they didn’t blindfold him. He’s been in there for weeks building a picture of that facility, protecting those children, waiting. If we go in with force before he signals readiness, we destroy whatever he’s constructed.”
“He’s fifteen.”
“He’s your son. He thinks exactly the way you think, which means he’s already ahead of whatever Landon is expecting. He needs us to trust that.”
Landon.
The name sat in the room with us and I watched it land on Elijah. We haven’t set eyes on Landon since the night he’d watched a grown man slap an eighteen year old girl across the face in front of her father and call her a whore while her father said nothing. Landon, with accumulated power and apparently convinced that five years and a mate bond he had thrown away entitled him to something he had never deserved.
“He has Leo because of me,” I said. “I want to say that plainly before we go any further. This is personal for him. It has nothing to do with the kingdom or the pack or any strategic objective. He took our son because I am Leo’s mother and he wanted something that would make me move.”
“What does he want?”
“He’ll make it clear in a letter. I’m expecting it soon. He’ll frame it as a trade or something along those lines, me for Leo and the other children.” I kept my voice level. “He thinks he knows what version of me he’s dealing with. The version from before. The girl with no wolf who had nothing and nobody.”
Elijah was very still. “You’re not alone anymore.”
I nodded appreciatively. “Let him think whatever he wants to think. I’m not going to him,” I said, before he could open his mouth. “I’m going to use the letter. Whatever he puts in it tells me something about where he is, what state he’s in, how confident he’s feeling. Information. That’s all it is.”
He held my gaze.
“He’s had this planned for a long time,” he said. “He’s been watching us.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know yet. But the children started disappearing at the beginning of the year. This has been building for at least that long.” I paused. “And someone told him you were going to Golden Blade before you left. That didn’t come from outside this palace.”
His expression shifted.
Hazel. The thought arrived in both of us at the same moment — not Hazel herself, but the absence of her. The gap her injury had created, the window the elders had used to push Shawn into position, the eighteen months of reports and grieving parents and missing children that had piled up in that gap like water behind a blocked drain.
I had been managing my powers and three children and my duties as Luna. Elijah had been managing a kingdom and a recovering injury and the thousand daily demands of his position. And Hazel had been in a recovery house somewhere outside the pack, healing from a border skirmish, while we had both meant to visit more and visited less than we meant to.
The guilt of it was familiar. I carried it every time I thought about Hazel, which was not as often as it should have been, and that was its own form of guilt.
“She should never have been out of position,” Elijah said.
“No. She shouldn’t have.” I touched his arm briefly. “One thing at a time. Leo first. Shawn after.”
He ran his hand through his hair. He was agitated even if he did a good job of not showing it.
“I need the real layout of Golden Blade,” he said. “Not the public-facing version. Where the facility actually is, how many men Landon fields, what the access points look like.” He paused. “And it cannot go through Shawn.”
“Martine and I are already working on it. We started last night.”
He looked at me with the expression he wore when he had remembered, again, that I had been running this investigation alone while he healed and held the kingdom together and had not once waited for him to be ready before doing what needed doing.
“You’ve been carrying this,” his voice softened, filled with affection and appreciation.
“We both carry it. We’re a team, remember?” He pulled me close and pressed his lips to mine. I forgot everything that was going on for those few seconds.
When he pulled back, I smiled and placed my hand on his chest. “Our arrangement is to carry the weight for each other. Now, go find out what you can about Landon’s current position. I’ll have something for you by morning.”
He held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary, which was his version of saying several things at once without saying any of them.
Then he straightened and became the King, and we went to work.