Chapter 89 Closer
Calix POV
Finn told me about the dorm situation at breakfast and I was on my feet before he finished the sentence.
"Simone broke into her room last night," he said. "Apparently Maddie and Elara were waiting for her and the whole thing turned into a standoff."
"Is Maddie okay?"
"From what I heard she held her own but Simone threatened to expose her to the Alpha so it didn't exactly end clean."
I left my tray on the table and walked out of the dining hall without finishing my food. I knew where Maddie's dorm was and I went straight there without stopping to think about whether it was a good idea or not because that kind of thinking was exactly what got us here in the first place.
I knocked twice and Elara opened the door and looked at me for a second before stepping aside without saying anything.
Maddie was sitting at her desk with a book open in front of her that she clearly wasn't reading. She looked up when I walked in and her expression didn't change much but her eyes asked the question before her mouth did.
"I heard what happened," I said.
"Of course you did," she said. "Sit down or leave. Standing in the doorway is annoying."
I stepped inside and sat in the chair across from her desk and Elara quietly slipped out of the room and pulled the door shut behind her.
Maddie closed the book and leaned back in her chair. "She didn't find anything because there was nothing to find. It was a setup to catch her in the act."
"Smart," I said.
"It worked," she said. "Mostly. She threatened to tell your father what I am before she left so the situation isn't exactly resolved."
"I'll handle my father."
"You don't have to do that," she said.
"I know I don't have to," I said. "I want to."
She looked at me for a moment and then looked away. "What are you doing here Calix."
"I've been thinking about what you said," I told her. "About the curse. About my father giving it to me when I was ten and me just accepting it without ever questioning it."
"And?"
"And I went to my father yesterday to ask about it and he shut the conversation down before it even started," I said. "Which tells me more than any answer he could have given me."
"What did he say exactly?"
"He said my grandfather tried to break it and couldn't. But he wouldn't give me names or details or anything I could actually follow up on. Then one of his guards stepped in when I noticed something on the wall and that was the end of it."
Maddie straightened slightly. "What did you notice?"
"An image of a white wolf," I said. "Partially hidden behind a cabinet in his private study. It looked deliberate. Like whoever was in that image meant something to him personally."
She was quiet for a few seconds after that and I could tell she was putting something together in her head but she didn't share it yet.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
"Because I'm done making decisions out of fear," I said. "I don't have answers yet and I'm not standing here pretending everything is figured out. But I'm done letting fear be the thing that decides everything for me."
Maddie didn't say anything right away and I didn't push her to. I knew she wasn't going to make this easy and I wasn't asking her to.
"You've said things like that before," she said finally. "You pull close and then you pull back and every time it happens I'm the one left dealing with it."
"I know," I said.
"So what's different now."
"I went to my father," I said. "That's different. I've never questioned the curse out loud to him before. I've never pushed back on any of it. But I did yesterday because of what you said and that's not nothing."
"It's not enough either," she said.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," I said. "I'm not here for that. I just didn't want you sitting here thinking you were dealing with Simone on your own."
She looked at me for a long moment and then something in her posture loosened just slightly. Not much but enough that I noticed.
"She's going to come back harder," Maddie said. "Whatever I did last night bought time but it didn't stop anything."
"Then we stay ahead of her," I said.
"We," she repeated.
"Yes," I said. "We."
She didn't argue with that so we kept talking and somewhere in the middle of it the conversation stopped being about Simone and started being about everything else.
She told me more about Silverthorn and what happened with Jace and her best friend and I listened without interrupting.
I told her more about my mother and what the months before she died actually looked like and Maddie listened the same way, without trying to fix it or fill the silence.
We talked for hours and by the time the light outside the window shifted toward afternoon neither of us had moved from where we were sitting.
Nothing was resolved between us.
She hadn't forgiven me and I hadn't asked her to and we both knew the road between where we were and something real was still long.
But the space between us felt different than it did yesterday and we both felt it without saying so.
When I finally stood up to leave Maddie walked me to the door and stopped just before opening it.
"The image of the white wolf," she said. "Don't let that go."
"I won't," I said.
I meant it too. On my way back across campus I had already decided where I was starting.
The pack house had records going back generations, old documents kept in the lower archive room that most pack members never touched.
If the curse had a real origin there would be something in there and if it didn't then that would tell me something too.
I was going to find out the truth and I was going to do it myself.