Chapter 536
“I’m staying out of it,” Aria said.
“It’s nothing.” Kael said
“Of course,” Aria said.
“The root-”
“Absolutely,” Aria said.
“Why does everyone sound like that,” Kael said.
“Like what,” Nina said.
“Like they’re agreeing with me without agreeing with me,” Kael said.
“I’m agreeing with you,” Nina said.
“With that face,” Kael said.
“My face is professional,” Nina said.
“Your face is the opposite of professional,” Kael said.
“My face,” Nina said, “is neutral.”
“Your face has opinions,” Kael said.
“My face always has opinions,” Nina said. “That’s consistent and therefore shouldn’t be alarming.”
My wolf said: “They’re not going to let this go.*
I was aware, I said.
“This is going to be brought up for years, my wolf said.
Possibly, I said.
“That means you’re going to be here for years, my wolf said. “For them to bring it up to.”
I stood in the dark garden with the root behind me and Kael maintaining his position four feet away with the dignity of a man who’d been found on the ground in compromising non-circumstances and was reconstructing his authority through the sheer force of continued presence, and I thought about what the wolf had just said.
Years
The wolf was opumistic in ways I was going to have to catch up to.
“The root, I said, to the group, “is genuinely a hazard ripped on it specitu ally”
“We believe you Ivory sand, with the tone of someone believing me and also finding the believing very
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entertaining
“The next person to walk this path at night could have the same problem,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Jordan said.
ance is warranted.” I said.
git,” Nina said.
ng back to the clinic,” I said.
night, Ivory said. She said it normally. Not the loaded version, not the version with the Aaryon implication in it. Just goodnight, the way you said it to someone who was going somewhere an ed to go there.
oodnight,” I said.
walked back down the path toward the secondary clinic with the specific care of someone who was watching the ground very carefully.
Behind me, I heard Nina say something quietly.
And then Ivory’s laugh. The real one – the full version, not the contained professional version, the one that came from somewhere genuine.
And Jordan’s laugh.
And then Kael’s voice, saying something that sounded like *I hate all of you,* in the tone that didn’t mea it at all.
And then Aria’s laugh, which I hadn’t heard before at full volume, and which had a quality to it that was warm and belonging in the specific way of someone who’d found a place where they could laugh and meant it.
The secondary clinic’s window was lit from inside.
I went through the door and sat on the recovery room bed and listened to the distant sound of four peop laughing in a garden and
etending he wasn’t laughing with them.
My wolf was ver
Home, th
Not ye
G
adowmere settling into its night and thought that the wolf was, for once, nai
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a/n: i couldn’t resist. Ivory, Jordan and Nina are headaches.
Finished
Also i am not implying anything. NOTHING SEXUAL HAS OR WILL HAPPEN BETWEEN KAEL AND KILLIAN. i just thought it was cute, fluffy moments.
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Chapter 536
Chapter 536
KILLIAN
The room was in the main quarters.
00
Finishe
I noticed this immediately, because noticing things was what I did when I was in unfamiliar spaces, and the main quarters had a specific quality that was different from the secondary clinic’s recovery room in ways that went beyond the obvious. It was larger, better lit, the kind of room that had been built for peop who were expected to stay rather than people who were expected to leave when their function was complete.
The pack member who’d shown me to it – a young man whose name I didn’t know yet, who’d appeared a the secondary clinic door on Friday morning with the specific energy of someone executing an instructio they’d been given and hadn’t been told the full context of – had said: “Alpha Kael said this one.”
He’d pointed. He’d left. He hadn’t offered explanation.
I’d stood in the doorway and looked at the room and done the specific kind of accounting that you did when you’d been given something you hadn’t expected.
The room was in the main quarters corridor. The wing of the main building where the alpha family’s rooms were – not the Alpha’s own chambers, not the Luna’s, but the wing that housed people in the specific category of *belonging to the leadership’s immediate circle.* I knew this corridor. I’d been in it before. When I was fifteen and my mother and I had been brought here at my father’s insistence, during the Luna’s illness, when my father had decided that proximity to himself was a statement he needed to make regardless of the cost to anyone else.
I’d known it was wrong even then. I’d been fifteen and I’d known.
The wing had been reconfigured since. I could see that immediately – the layout was the same but the specific arrangement of rooms had changed, which meant at some point after the exile or possibly before it someone had done significant work on the space.
There was a wall.
At the end of the corridor, where I had a specific and not-comfortable memory of a door, was a wall. Not a emporary partition – stone, solid, mortared, the permanent wall of something that had been sealed with ntention. The door was gone. The space beyond it was gone, walled off completely, the architecture of the Corridor ending at the new wall the way corridors ended when someone had decided a thing was finished
Kael had sealed it.
Not the whole wing-just that specific end of it. The part that led to the room that had been the problem The room thas my mother had occupied. The room that had been given to her while the Luna was suck and dying, and my father had made that choice and my mother had taken it and I’d been nfteen and had known it was wrong and said nothing because saying nothing was what I did.
Kael had sealed it off completely
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Chapter 536-
I didn’t know when. I didn’t know if it had happened right after the exile or years later or at some sp moment when he’d decided that the architecture of the place needed to reflect a decision he’d alread made inside himself. Bar had been done deliberately, with the permanence of someone who wasn going to change their mind.
I stood in the corridor and looked at the sealed wall and understood something about what the new i
meant.
He’d given me the new room. Not the old one the new room, on the other side of the sealed wall, i wing that the old room had been in before the sealing. He’d placed me in proximity to the history wi placing me in the history itself.
That was a specific kind of message.
I filed it and went into the new room and put down the bag that contained everything I currently own
The room was good.
I’d been in enough bad rooms over the past twelve years to know a good one when I found it. The bed real – not a cot, not the functional-minimum of a recovery space, an actual bed with actual depth and actual linen that had been washed with something that smelled like Shadowmere’s specific laundry approach, which was different from everywhere else I’d been. The window looked at the pack grounds. The morning light was going to come through from the east, which meant I’d wake with it rather than fighting it, which was the wolf’s preference.
Someone had put things in it.
Not elaborate just functional. A few basic items, the kind that said this space is for someone to live in rather than *this space is for someone to stay in temporarily. The distinction was small and real.
I unpacked the bag. It didn’t take long. Twelve years of being mobile had produced the specific relationship with possessions of someone who’d learned that everything you owned had to be carriable, and carriable things were by necessity limited.
The bag was empty in six minutes.
Then I looked at the table.
There was a book on it
I hadn’t put it there. It hadn’t been in my bag. The room had been empty when I’d arrived and the pack member who’d brought me here had definitely not put it there – he’d been in the room for approximately eight seconds, which was long enough to confirm it was the right room but not long enough to leave objects on furniture.
Someone had been here before me.
Souicone had left a book.
The book had no identifying information on its cover which was itself information. A plain cover the kind that concealed what was inside from people who weren’t supposed to see what was inside. I knew this
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Chapter 536
Finished
specific type of cover because I’d encountered books with this type of cover before, in different contexts.
I picked it up.
Turned it over.
The back was also plain.
I opened it to a random page.
–
The page I’d opened to was not what I’d expected. It was dialogue and action, dense on the page, the specific density of a scene that was moving quickly through something significant. I read three lines.
I closed the book.
I put the book on the table.
I looked at it.
My wolf, which had been quiet since the corridor incident two nights ago, made a sound.
I knew, without any additional investigation, who had left this book. The corridor incident. The whispering.. The specific instruction that had been delivered with the composure of someone who was absolutely certain the instruction was going to be followed.
I was not going to read it.
I was completely certain I was not going to read it.
I sat on the bed and looked at the book on the table and was not going to read it for approximately four minutes.
Then I picked it up again.
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A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.