Chapter 405
I Will Always Protect You, Elena
When I had existed as a spirit, I had come across things that should have broken me a bracelet strung with beads crafted from what remained of my body, a statue shaped from my own flesh and blood, a book bound in human skin. I had seen all of it from a distance, floating and untethered, unable to feel it the way a living person would. I had never seen the actual moment my body was taken apart.
The photo on my phone showed me exactly that.
Seeing it hit me in a completely different way than Randy’s severed head had. My entire body began to shake before my mind had even finished processing what I was looking at. My eyes went wide and my throat closed up entirely, like something invisible had reached in and taken hold of it. I couldn’t make a sound. I had always assumed that extreme fear came with screaming but it didn’t. It came with silence. Complete, suffocating silence, while the world continued moving around you.
Whitney noticed before I could say anything. “Elena what’s wrong?”
I managed one word. “Photo.”
She took the phone, looked at it for less than two seconds, and turned her head. “Lewis!”
He was already moving by the time she called his name, coming through the door with the particular alertness of someone who had been listening for exactly this kind of sound. Whitney passed him the phone without a word. “Someone sent this to Elena deliberately.”
Lewis pulled me into his arms immediately, his voice low and steady against my hair. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
My thoughts were already moving faster than I could organize them. “It’s Wisteria. She’s not dead.”
No one else made sense. The Blackwells whoever might still be alive among them had no reason to send something like this. They didn’t hate me that way, not anymore. Whitney had been there the night of the heart transplant, but Vito had made sure she was removed before the worst of it. She had never seen anything like what was in that photo. Yael had told me once that he had come later, after the fact he hadn’t been present when those images were taken. And Amber, even consumed as she was with Lewis, wouldn’t waste time on something like this, especially not with Dominic beside her.
Only one person had both the motive and the capacity for something this specific, this personal, this designed to destroy rather than simply harm.
Wisteria. And Silas was gone, which meant there was no one left to temper whatever she had become.
The phone buzzed again in Lewis’s hand.
He checked it without showing me the screen first, which told me whatever it was, he was deciding whether I could handle it. After a brief pause, he read it aloud in a flat, controlled voice.
I will always be watching you, Elena. If I can’t have happiness, neither can you.
The room went very quiet.
Whitney’s expression darkened completely. “It’s her,” she said, almost to herself. “She survived.”
Lewis was already moving copying the number, forwarding it to his own device, sending it to someone who could trace it. He did it all without urgency, in the calm, methodical way he handled things that required precision rather than speed. When it was done, he turned back to me. “If she’s alive, then that’s a problem we can fix. Everything she’s done it’s in the past. Don’t be afraid.”
“Okay,” I said.
I focused on breathing. Slowly, the shaking began to ease, and the cold grip on my throat loosened enough for me to think clearly again. I made myself come back to the room, to Lewis’s arms, to the present.
“Lewis,” I said, once I trusted my voice. “Whitney mentioned yesterday that she felt someone following her on the way to school. You need to look into that. Whatever Wisteria is doing, it’s not random there’s a pattern here and I can’t see it yet.”
The situation kept pointing at me, but it kept circling Whitney. That connection was too consistent to be coincidence. Was Wisteria planning to go after everyone connected to the Morrigans? Or had she not found a clear path to me yet, and was making me suffer from a distance in the meantime while she waited?
Something still didn’t fit. I could feel it that specific unease of a puzzle with a missing piece that changes the entire picture.
“I’ve already sent someone to trace the route,” Lewis said. “The tracking puts her near the school, but there were too many people in that area at the time to isolate a specific person. Until we know more, both of you stay inside. Don’t go out.”
Whitney nodded. “Understood.”
Lewis got to his feet. “I need to step out for a bit.”
She looked up at him. “Any news yet? About the Blackwells?”
He shook his head. “Nothing yet. If anything comes through, I’ll tell you immediately.”
“Okay.” The heaviness in her eyes said the rest.
Lewis paused at the door and looked back at me. “Wisteria wants to take your happiness away from you. Don’t hand it to her. Try to eat something.”
“Okay,” I said again.
I knew the road ahead wasn’t going to be easy. My body had already developed a pattern of its own nausea hitting without warning, a few bites down, then everything coming back up. It happened again now. I forced myself through it, waited until my stomach settled, and tried again. The second attempt went a little better than the first. Slowly, my body was learning that food was not the enemy, even if it currently disagreed.
Whitney watched the whole thing with an expression that made my chest hurt. She reached out and placed her hand very gently over my stomach, her voice dropping to something soft and private. “Baby, please behave. Your mom is exhausted. She’s doing her best.”
I wiped my mouth with a tissue and smiled at her despite everything. “The baby isn’t even fully formed yet. It can’t understand you.”
Whitney’s whole expression shifted when the subject turned to the baby something lighter moved into her face, something that the grief and the fear hadn’t completely reached yet. “Do you think we’ll be able to hear the heartbeat in two weeks?”
I looked at her and felt, underneath all the weight of everything pressing down on us, a small and steady warmth.
“I hope so,” I said. “I really hope so.”