Dark

Chapter 4: Dark

Lucian's Pov

The lights going out in a building full of frightened Alphas is not a power cut.

I was on my feet before the backup generators tried and failed to do anything useful.

I could hear voices, movement, and the frequency of people who have been waiting for something to go wrong deciding that this is it through the wall.

Kae grabbed my arm in the dark. Not roughly, that's the part my brain filed away even though it had no business doing that right now, he grabbed my arm the way you grab something you don't want to lose and then he asked very quietly. "Do you know this building?"

"Yes. It has twenty-eighth floor, four stairwells, the east exit opens to the service road which means no cameras on that side." I paused. "You did your homework too, right?"

"I always do my homework," he said, and let go of my arm.

And with that, we moved. The hallway was chaos in the darkness.

It was filled with bodies moving without direction, voices calling names, and I kept close to the wall and kept Kae's footsteps in my ear because losing him right now was not an option I was willing to have.

We hit the east stairwell and the door had already been propped open by someone who got there before us and didn't bother closing it behind them, and we went down fast.

We weren’t running, running sounds like guilt, so I do say, we were just moving the way two men move when they know exactly where they're going and have every right to be going there.

We were at the fourteenth floor when Kae stopped. I almost walked into his back.

"Someone is below us," he said.

I listened and he was right, but the footstep sounded like it was just one person. And it’s like the person was moving up not down, and the weight of the step said huge wolf which narrowed the options in a direction I didn't love.

We pressed into the landing and waited, the footsteps got closer and closer, then a flashlight beam cut up the stairwell and I saw the face behind it and my entire chest went cold.

Karl Whispere. My Beta of nine years. He came around the corner with a cut above his eye and his jacket torn at the shoulder and he stopped dead when the light found me.

"Lucian," he said, and the relief in his voice was so genuine it almost undid me.

"I thought you were dead," I said.

"I nearly was." He looked at Kae and then back at me and something complicated moved across his face. "You need to come with me. Both of you. Right now, not in a minute, right now."

"Karl." I stepped toward him. "Who sent that message from your phone."

He looked at me and in nine years I have never seen Karl look like he didn't know how to say something to me, he is the most direct man I have ever employed and it is the quality I value most about him.

He looked like he didn't know how to say it.

"Who," I said.

"She did," he said. And I just stared at him confused.

"Lucian," Kae said carefully behind me, because Kae Armstrong reads rooms the way other people breathe, automatically and without thinking about it. "Who is he talking about?"

I couldn't answer that because the answer wasn't possible, the answer required a version of the world where something I knew to be true was not true, and I have built every decision I have made in the last eight months on that foundation and if it moved then everything built on top of it moved with it.

"She's alive," Karl said quietly. "She's been alive. She reached out to me six weeks ago and I didn't tell you because she made me promise and I know that was wrong and I'm telling you now."

"Who," Kae said again, and this time it was no longer a question.

I turned and looked at him and I thought about everything I had said to him in that room, the entire architecture of the reason I had done what I did tonight, and I thought about the fact that none of it was a lie and all of it was incomplete.

"Elara," I said. "She's alive."

Kae's face did something I had never seen it do before and hope it never does again, it went completely still in the way faces go still when the ground doesn't just move but disappears entirely.

"You told me," he said, and his voice was very quiet. "You told me they were all gone. You told me the thirty wolves were removed, and that is why you…" He stopped. "That is the reason you killed him. That is the reason I agreed to help you."

"It's still true," I said. "Twenty-nine of them are still gone."

"But not Elara." He almost yelled

"We are still on the same page." I yelled, and my voice echoed out.

He looked at me for a long time and I let him look because I owed him that much and probably more.

"Why is she here," he said finally. "In this building, tonight."

Karl cleared his throat and we both looked at him and he looked like a man who had been delivering bad news for a living and had finally hit the one piece he genuinely did not want to say.

"Because she's the one who told Lucian about Vane," he said. "Eight months ago. She came to him with the evidence, all of it." He paused. "She built the case. She handed it over. She told him exactly what to do with it."

The stairwell was very quiet.

"She used you," Kae said, and he wasn't saying it to hurt me, I could tell the difference, he was saying it because he was a lawyer at his core and he was just reading what was in front of him.

"She had reasons," I said, but even as I said it I was hearing it the way he was hearing it and it sounded like exactly what it was.

Karl's flashlight flickered a little bit. "There's something else," he said.

I looked at him.

"Elara wants to meet tonight," he continued. "She says she has the rest of it, the part she didn't give you, the names she held back." He stopped. "She says one of those names is in this building right now. And that it's someone you both trust."

Kae made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

"She says," Karl continued, like a man defusing something, "that the person who ordered your father's death, Armstrong, has been at this Summit table the entire night.”