Chapter 23 024

Chapter 23 024
Chapter Twenty-Four
Carmen

The resettlement took three days.

Not because it was logistically complicated, though it was, but because people who have been held against their will don't move like luggage. They move like people, with questions and fears and specific small needs that matter enormously and can't be rushed. Some of them had families to contact. Some of them had no families. Some of them had come from packs that had sold them or looked away while someone else did, and going back was not an option, and figuring out what instead looked like took time and care and a great deal of Rosaria's food.

I worked alongside Lucia for most of it. We fell into a rhythm quickly, she handled the physical and I handled everything adjacent to it, the woman who wouldn't speak, the older man who needed to be given a task before he could settle, the young wolf who kept drifting to the perimeter of whatever room he was in to check the exits. I knew that particular behavior. I had done it myself.

Mari stayed.

Not permanently, she was clear about that, she had her own life to reassemble and she knew where she wanted to do it, but she stayed through the three days and she was more useful than anyone except possibly Lucia. She had a way of moving through the group that was neither intrusive nor distant, just present, and people gravitated toward her the way they gravitate toward warmth.

On the second evening she found me in the garden after dinner.

"You look tired," she said.

"You look worse," I said.

She laughed, which was the first time I had heard her laugh properly, and it was a good laugh, full and unguarded. She sat on the low wall beside the rosemary and I sat beside her and we looked at the darkening sky for a while without talking.

"Your Alpha," she said eventually.

"He's not—" I stopped. "Xavier."

"He watches you constantly and thinks he's being discreet about it."

"I know."

"It's not unpleasant to watch," she said. "The watching. It's not that kind of watching." She paused. "I've seen the other kind. Up close. I know the difference."

I looked at my hands. The wrappings were off now, Lucia had removed them that morning, and the skin underneath was healed and new looking. "I know the difference too," I said.

"Good." She was quiet for a moment. "The other one. The one who left."

"Hannibal."

"He came to me before he left," she said. "In the south room. He said he wanted to thank me for looking after you." She turned to look at me. "He stood there with his bag on his shoulder and he looked like a man who was trying to figure out how to carry something he knew he didn't get to put down."

I looked at the sky. "He's going to be alright," I said. "Eventually."

"I think so too." Mari pulled her knees up. "What about you."

"I'm already alright."

"That's not what I asked."

I smiled despite myself. "I'm getting somewhere better than alright," I said. "That's the honest answer."

She nodded, satisfied with that.

We sat until the stars came and then Rosaria appeared at the garden door and said something about tea in the tone that meant it was not optional, and we went inside.

Xavier found me after, in the corridor outside the library. He had the look of a man who had been in logistical conversations for twelve hours and was reaching the natural end of his capacity for them, slightly worn at the edges in a way he rarely allowed to show.

"Fabrizio confirmed the last three families reached their destinations," he said. "The remaining twelve have accepted the temporary housing offer."

"And the young wolf. The one checking exits."

"Bruno's taken him on." A brief almost-smile. "He'll be fine."

We stood in the corridor and the house was quieting around us, the particular sound of a place settling into night, and I felt the low warmth of the bond between us the way I had been feeling it for days now, something I had stopped startling at and started simply living alongside.

"Mari leaves tomorrow," I said.

"I know. I've arranged an escort through the territory."

"She'll argue about the escort."

"Bruno will handle it."

I looked at him. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his hair loose and he looked, in this particular corridor light, less like an Alpha running a tactical operation and more like a person who was tired and was allowing himself to be tired in front of me, which I understood was not a small thing.

"Come here," I said.

He looked at me.

"You've been standing at arm's length for three days," I said. "I've been watching you manage it. You don't have to."

He was still for a moment. Then he pushed off the wall and crossed the corridor and stopped in front of me and I reached up and put my hand against his jaw the way he had done to me in that first morning in my old pack, and felt him go very still under my hand.

"Carmen," he said. Very quiet.

"I know," I said. "I feel it too."

His hand came up and covered mine against his jaw and we stood in the corridor and the bond moved between us like something breathing, and Apollo pressed forward and I felt it as warmth rather than weight, as arrival rather than pressure.

"The mark," I said.

His eyes changed.

"Not tonight," I said. "But soon."

"How soon," he said, and his voice was entirely different now, lower and more careful, the voice of someone holding something very gently.

"Ask me tomorrow," I said. "After Mari leaves. When it's quiet."

He turned his head slightly and pressed his lips to my palm and I felt it everywhere, and the corridor was dark and warm and the house was quiet around us, and I thought, this is what safe feels like, and let myself believe it.