Chapter 13 13

Chapter 13 13
Chapter Thirteen
Xavier

I should have walked away.

I knew that. I had come to tell Rosaria something about the supply order, something entirely ordinary, and instead I had stopped at the garden entrance like a fool and stood there watching Hannibal talk to my mate and felt Apollo doing something that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite grief but lived in the neighborhood of both.

I made myself move.

I crossed to Rosaria's kitchen entrance and knocked and she opened it and looked at my face and said, "Don't."

"I wasn't going to do anything."

"You were thinking about it."

"Thinking isn't doing."

"With you the gap is smaller than you believe." She stepped back and let me in. The kitchen was warm and smelled of onions and something braised and slow. "The supply order. What do you need."

I told her. She wrote it down without looking at me, which was intentional. Rosaria had been running this household since before I was Alpha and she had developed a finely tuned ability to redirect me when I was being an idiot. I stood at the counter and watched her write and listened to the faint sounds from the garden, voices too low to make out, and tried to be a reasonable person.

"He went to her," I said.

"I noticed."

"I told him to wait."

"You told him she said not yet. She turned around and spoke to him." Rosaria set her pen down. "That was her choice."

"I know it was."

"Then what are you doing in my kitchen."

I didn't have a good answer for that. I picked up an apple from the bowl on the counter and turned it over in my hands and set it back down. Apollo was quiet now, that dense loaded quiet that meant he was paying attention to everything and filing it away.

"What are they doing," he said inside me.

"Talking," I told him.

"About what."

"I don't know."

"Go find out."

"We're not doing that."

Rosaria was watching me with the expression she reserved for situations she found both predictable and tiresome. "Go do something useful," she said. "Bruno was looking for you an hour ago."

I found Bruno in the east yard running the afternoon training rotation, which he was technically my Beta and didn't need to do personally, but Bruno had always been hands-on in ways that made the younger wolves love him in a way they respected me but never quite reached love, which was fine and also occasionally irritating.

He saw me coming and passed off what he was doing to the nearest senior wolf with a clap on the shoulder. He jogged over.

"He went to her," I said.

"I know. I tried to redirect him." Bruno fell into step beside me. "He was up before dawn, Xavier. Sitting in his room staring at the wall. He wasn't going to last another day."

"I gave him a condition."

"She spoke to him. That's not nothing." Bruno paused. "How did she seem."

I thought about Carmen in the garden, her back straight, her hands still moving, the particular quality of stillness in her when she'd turned to face him. "Like herself," I said, which was strange to say about someone I barely knew, and yet accurate.

Bruno was quiet for a few steps. Then, "Apollo's struggling."

"Apollo is always struggling."

"More than usual."

I said nothing. We walked the perimeter of the training yard and watched the younger wolves work and Bruno let the silence run its natural length before he said, "Have you eaten anything today."

"This morning."

"That wasn't what I asked."

"Bruno."

"You're going to be useless to her if you run yourself down." He said it practically, without sentiment. "Eat something, sleep tonight, and talk to her tomorrow when you're not vibrating at a frequency only dogs can hear."

Despite everything I almost smiled. "She asked me to tell her about him."

Bruno looked at me sideways. "What did you say."

"That I would."

"Are you going to."

"Yes."

"Everything?"

I considered that. What everything meant. What it contained. The war, Pablo, the territory dispute, what I had done and why, and the long chain of consequences that had ended with Carmen walking alone into a forest and finding the worst possible version of what came next. Whether any of that was mine to put in front of her.

"What she asks for," I said. "Nothing more and nothing less."

Bruno nodded slowly. "She's not what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect."

"I don't know. Someone more—" He turned his palm up. "Broken. After everything."

"She's not broken."

"No," Bruno agreed. "She's something else." He paused. "Fabrizio called this morning. He's got more information on the trafficking network, wants to meet. The operation the other night barely touched the surface apparently."

I nodded, pulling the thread of it back into focus. There was still work. There was always still work. The world did not pause for mate bonds and complicated gardens and men who had driven four days to fix something that might not be fixable.

"Tell him Thursday," I said. "Here."

"He'll complain about the drive."

"He always complains about the drive. He comes anyway."

We turned back across the yard and I glanced once toward the garden wall, just once, and caught myself and looked away. Bruno said nothing about it, which was his particular form of mercy.

That evening I sat at the head of the long dinner table with my pack around me and Carmen three seats down, quiet and watchful, eating Rosaria's food with the careful attention of someone who had not always been sure of their next meal, and Hannibal at the far end, not looking at her, making a visible effort of it.

The table was loud and ordinary and underneath it everything was pulled wire-tight.

I poured myself water and drank it and waited for whatever came next.