Chapter 17
Chapter 17:
I closed the camera app and set my phone face-down on the table.
So he hadn’t loved Ravenna. Hadn’t loved any of them. Ten women across ten years, and not one had been anything more than a tool—a weapon aimed at me, wielded with precision and discarded when the target moved out of range. He probably couldn’t name half of them. He had collected them the way some people collect grievances: compulsively, joylessly, as evidence for a case that was never going to trial.
And now the case had been dismissed, and the evidence was walking out the front door with suitcases, and Thane was alone in a house that had been designed to hold a crowd.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Then a sound that might have been a laugh, if laughs could be made of rust.
The news about Ravenna’s abortion reached me three days later, through Alaric, who delivered it with the careful neutrality of a man who understands that some information is both necessary and corrosive.
“She’s been walking the streets near the Nightblood compound,” he said. “Not going anywhere. Just walking. The staff says she hasn’t eaten p>
I closed my eyes.
I should have felt vindication. Or satisfaction. Or at least the cold comfort of symmetry—she had taken my mother, and now something had been taken from her. But grief doesn’t operate on a ledger. You can’t balance one loss against another and arrive at zero. All you get is more loss, distributed differently.
What I felt, inconveniently and against every rational impulse, was recognition.
Because I remembered.
One month after the wedding. The morning I’d pressed my hand against my stomach and felt, for the first time in that house, something that resembled hope. I had gone to Thane with the news wrapped in a joy so fragile I could feel it trembling in my hands, and for three seconds—I counted them, the way I count all the small, survivable moments—his expression had been unreadable. Not happy. Not angry. Just… processing.
Then the processing finished, and the verdict arrived.
He dragged me. Physically. Down the corridor, down the stairs, into the car, to a clinic that asked no questions because the Alpha of the Nightblood Clan didn’t require questions. They strapped my arms. I struggled—of course I struggled, the body has opinions about these things even when the mind has been trained to comply—and he stood over me and said, through his teeth, that I didn’t deserve to bear life. That my existence was an atonement, not a beginning. That the only woman who would ever have been worthy of carrying his child was dead, and I had helped kill her.
I never forgot the sound of those restraints. Leather on metal. Click. Click. The clinical efficiency of a decision someone else made about my body.
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Apparently, only the ghost of a dead girl earned the right to motherhood. And since ghosts don’t reproduce, the position remained permanently vacant.
These days, Alaric sat with me. Not because I asked—I hadn’t asked anyone for anything in years, a habit so deeply worn it had become structural—but because he seemed to operate on the principle that presence was a form of answer, even when no question had been asked.
If he noticed my silence, he told jokes. Bad ones, mostly—the kind with obvious punchlines and elaborate setups, delivered with such earnest commitment that the comedy lay not in the joke itself but in the visible effort of a powerful Alpha trying to make a broken woman smile like it was a military operation he could strategize his way through.
If he noticed the tears, he didn’t mention them. He simply moved closer—not touching, never touching without permission—and waited. Patient as geology.
“Here,” he said one evening, sliding a plate across the kitchen counter with the careful pride of someone presenting a thesis defense. “I made this for you p>
A steak. Perfectly seared—caramelized crust, pink center, resting on a bed of greens he’d arranged with suspicious deliberateness. A sprig of rosemary placed at an angle that suggested he’d consulted a reference photo.
An Alpha of the Silverveil Clan. One of the most powerful wolves in the territory. Standing in a kitchen with a floral apron he’d forgotten to take off, watching me with eyes that held the soft, unguarded expression of a man who has placed all his emotional chips on a single number and is waiting for the wheel to stop.
I looked at the steak. I looked at him.
“You made this yourself p>
He nodded. Eager. Almost boyish.
“Then you’re full of surprises,” I said. “It’s not every day you see an Alpha who can work a stove p>
I cut a piece. The knife went through like butter—which, knowing Alaric’s attention to detail, it probably also contained. The first bite was genuinely good: seasoned with something herby and warm, cooked with the precision of someone who had approached the recipe like a battle plan.
I gave him a thumbs up, and the smile that broke across his face was so unguarded, so entirely without strategy, that something in my chest—something I had assumed was permanently damaged—shifted. Not healed. Just… shifted. The way a broken bone starts to knit before you realize it’s happening.