Chapter 205 Back Home
ELIJAH
We had been on the road for four hours when Hazel called.
I had Leo in the back seat with Adriana’s head on his shoulder because her ankle had swollen badly enough that lying down was the only tolerable position and she had refused, three separate times, to let me stop at a hospital before we crossed back into our territory.
“It’s done,” Hazel said. “Golden Blade is secured. Landon’s senior guards stood down once they understood the King was dead and who was outside the gates. There was minor resistance but nothing significant. We have the building.”
“And Shawn?”
“Drek led us to him. Shawn was in a property forty kilometers south of the pack boundary. He’s in custody now. He didn’t let it be easy.”
“I didn’t expect him to.”
“He has a lot to say about how everything that happened is Adriana’s fault. I won’t repeat the specifics.”
“Good. I don’t want to hear them.” I glanced in the rearview mirror. Adriana was asleep, finally, her head still on Leo’s shoulder. Leo was awake and looking out the window with an expression I couldn’t fully read from this angle. “And Martine?”
“She was with Shawn.” Hazel’s voice was careful. “She’s in custody. She had documents on her communications between Shawn and Landon going back ten months. We have the full picture now.”
“Good. Don’t tell Adriana until we’re home and she’s been seen by a doctor. She doesn’t need to hear about Martine in a moving car.”
“Agreed.” Another pause. “Elijah.”
“What.”
“Leo killed Landon.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“I know,” I said.
“He’s fifteen.”
“I know how old he is.” I checked the mirror again. Leo had not moved. “He made the right decision. I’m not going to have a conversation with him that suggests otherwise.”
“He’s going to need to process it.”
“I know that too. I’ll handle it.” I shifted lanes. “What’s the situation with Golden Blade going forward? Landon had a council structure?”
“Rudimentary. His second is a man named Briggs who is apparently relieved that Landon is dead and has already indicated he wants to negotiate terms with us. He’s been running most of the actual governance for years while Landon was preoccupied with—” she paused “—his personal projects.”
“Set up a meeting for next week. Give Briggs the basic terms: and get formal acknowledgement and compensation, the families who were planted in our pack are identified and removed, and any remaining members of Landon’s network inside Golden Blade are handed over to us for questioning.”
“And the pack itself?”
“That’s what next week is for.” I took the turnoff toward our territory. Twenty minutes from home. “Hazel.”
“Yeah.”
“Good work. All of it. From the beginning.”
She was quiet for a second. “Get your family home.”
The call ended.
In the backseat, Leo said quietly, without turning from the window: “She’s going to be okay, right? Her ankle.”
“Yes.”
“It sounded bad when it happened. When she landed.”
“Broken ankles heal. She’s had worse.” I glanced in the mirror and he was looking at me now. “You did well, Leo. Everything you did in there — the other children, the drawings, the information you held onto and got out to us. All of it.”
He looked back at the window.
“He was going to keep hurting you guys,” he said. “I could hear it through the door. I knew what was about to happen.” His jaw was tight. “I didn’t think about it. I just went in.”
“That’s how it works,” I said. “When it matters, you don’t think. You move.”
“Is that what it was like for you? When you found her the first time? In the forest?”
I thought about a dark cottage and a girl tied to a chair and the particular cold certainty that had moved through me the moment I understood what was happening.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly like that.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’m not sorry,” he said softly. “That he’s dead. I feel like I should be but I’m not.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“That’s not something you’re supposed to say.”
“I know. I’m saying it anyway because it’s true. The world is not worse without Landon in it. You protected your mother and me, and you protected yourself and you got out. That’s the full accounting of what happened.” I held his gaze in the mirror for a second. “Are you okay?”
He thought about it honestly, which was something I had always valued about him — he never gave the easy answer just to end the conversation.
“I will be,” he said. “Not right now. But I will be.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
Adriana shifted in her sleep and her hand found Leo’s arm without waking up, fingers loosely around his sleeve, and he looked down at it and his expression did something complicated and private.
I turned back to the road.
The pack gates came into view ten minutes later and I slowed and pressed the window down and a guard came to the driver’s side and saw who was in the car and stepped back and waved us through without a word, because sometimes the King coming home was its own kind of announcement and didn’t need anything said around it.
The twins were waiting at the front door, which meant someone had told them we were five minutes out. They both started running the moment the car stopped.
I got out and they hit me at full speed and I caught one under each arm and held them up and they were both talking at the same time, which was their natural state, and I looked over their heads at Leo getting out of the car with careful consideration for Adriana’s sleeping form.
Leo looked at his brothers and then at me.
“They’re not going to let go for a while,” he said.
“No,” I agreed.
“I’m okay with that,” he said quietly. And went inside.