Chapter 204 Leo Saves the Day
ELIJAH
Landon looked like a man who had already calculated his odds and didn’t like the numbers.
I walked further into the room and didn’t sit. Standing over him was intentional and we both knew it. Adriana had moved to the wall to my left, out of the space between us, and I could see from the corner of my eye that she was holding herself very still. She was not afraid, just waiting, giving me the room.
“You took my son,” I said.
Landon’s mouth opened.
“Whatever you were about to say, don’t. I’ve been standing outside your gates for three days and I have heard everything I need to hear from every child that came out of your facility. I don’t need your version.”
He closed his mouth.
“What I need,” I said, “is for you to understand exactly what you did. Not to me. To thirty children who had done nothing. To their parents who came to my palace gate and were turned away. To my son who spent weeks in your facility protecting frightened children while you tried to use him to get to his mother.” I leaned forward and put both hands on the desk. “Look at me.”
He looked at me.
“You spent ten years turning a rejection into a mythology,” I said. “You decided that what happened between you and Adriana was something that was done to you instead of something you caused. And then you built a plan around that mythology that destroyed real people’s lives.” I straightened. “That ends tonight.”
“You can’t—” he started.
“I can do anything I want,” I said. “You’re in a building surrounded by my soldiers. Your guards have stood down. There is no version of this where you leave this room on your own terms.”
He looked at Adriana. Something moved across his face, the last attempt at the performance, the reaching for whatever he thought he still had.
“Drea,” he said. “Whatever he’s told you—”
“Adriana,” she said, from the wall. Flat and final. “And I’m not going to help you.”
Landon stood up. It was not a controlled movement. The movement of a man who had run out of options and was defaulting to aggression because aggression was the only tool he had left. He came around the desk fast and I moved to intercept and he pivoted and went for Adriana instead.
She was already moving, trying to step aside, but the space was small and he was faster than I expected and he caught her arm and yanked her in front of him, putting her between himself and me.
“Back up,” Landon said. He had his arm across her chest, holding her against him, and his other hand was at her throat. “Back up or I will hurt her.”
“Landon.” Adriana’s voice was calm. “This is the last mistake you’re going to make.”
“Shut up.” He was breathing hard. “Back up, Lycan. You move for that door and I’ll—”
The window exploded inward.
Landon flinched away from it, his grip on Adriana loosening for half a second, and that was enough. She drove her elbow back into his ribs, hard, and twisted out of his grip and he stumbled and then the door behind me burst open and two of his guards came through it and grabbed me from behind, arms locked around mine, pulling me back.
More guards came in through the broken window. Four of them, maybe five, spread across the room.
I broke the grip of the first guard and took his arm with me at an angle that ended the conversation immediately. The second one was already swinging and I took the hit across the jaw and used the momentum of it to drive my elbow into his face and he went down.
But there were more of them and they were fast and in thirty seconds I had two of them on each arm and one at my throat and I was being held against the wall and Adriana was being held against the opposite wall and Landon was straightening his jacket and breathing hard and smiling in a sick way.
“You should have stayed outside,” Landon said to me. He picked up something from the desk. A heavy decorative piece. He turned it over in his hands. “You came here for your wife and your son. You’re going to watch me take both.”
Adriana was fighting. The two guards holding her had her arms pinned but she was using her feet, her weight, every angle available, and the guards were having to work for it.
“Adriana,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Stop,” I said.
She stopped fighting immediately, which the guards clearly hadn’t expected because their grip loosened fractionally on reflex.
Landon walked toward her.
“Now,” I said to Adriana.
She dropped her weight completely, and as they stumbled to adjust she drove both feet into the floor and shoved backward into both of them at once and all three of them went into the wall and she was free before they recovered.
She was halfway across the room toward me when the door opened again.
Leo came through it.
He had blood on his sleeve from somewhere and his eyes moved across the room in under two seconds.
He picked up the sculpture from the bookshelf beside the door.
Landon turned at the sound of movement.
He was still turning when Leo hit him.
The sound was bad. Landon hit the floor and the object in his hand clattered away and he did not get up.
The guards holding me loosened their grip in the shock. I broke free.
The room went very quiet.
Leo was standing over Landon with the sculpture still in his hand, breathing hard, looking at what he had done. His face was doing something I had never seen on it before — not horror exactly, not satisfaction, something in between that had no clean name.
I crossed the room to him.
I took the sculpture out of his hand carefully and set it down and put both hands on his shoulders and made him look at me.
“You’re okay,” I said. “You did the right thing.”
“He was going to hurt her,” Leo said. His voice was steady but his hands were shaking. “He was moving toward her and I—”
“I know.” I held his shoulders. “I know. You did the right thing.”
He looked at Landon on the floor and then back at me.
“Is he—”
“Yes,” I said.
Leo breathed in. Breathed out.
Adriana came to his other side and put her hand on the back of his neck and he turned toward her slightly, the involuntary lean of someone who needed grounding.
“That’s my boy,” she said quietly. “That’s my king.”
The remaining guards in the room were looking at each other and at the door. The sounds coming from the rest of the building were Elijah’s soldiers moving through it, controlled and systematic, and the guards knew what that meant. Two of them set down their weapons. The others followed.
I looked at Hazel in the doorway. She had been there for the last thirty seconds, I realized had come in behind Leo and had assessed the situation and had made the correct call, which was to let it finish.
“Secure the building,” I said.
She nodded and was gone.
I looked at my son. My wife. The man on the floor who had spent years building toward this moment and had arrived here anyway.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
Adriana nodded. Then she took Leo’s hand and he let her and the three of us walked out of Landon’s study and through his palace and out into the cold morning air where Aiden was waiting with the other children and the vehicles were running.
Leo looked at the sky as we walked.
“I told Daphne I’d be thirty seconds,” he said.
“You were longer than that,” Adriana said.
“I know.” He looked at her. “I had to make sure you were okay first.”
She stopped walking and looked at him with a soft expression.
“Come here,” she said, and pulled him in.
I put my arm around both of them, the moment belonged only to us.
Then we got in the car and went home.