Chapter 38 — The Leaving

I did not take a car. I did not take guards. I walked my son out of the Lycan King's estate on my own two feet, in the gray before sunrise, with a child on my hip and a bag on my shoulder and nothing else I wanted from that house.

The guards at the inner doors looked at me, and looked at the king behind me, and did not move — because no one had given them an order, and the absence of an order was itself the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened in that house. A queen was walking out, alone, at dawn, with the heir of two crowns asleep on her shoulder, and the king was letting her.

That was the thing that nearly stopped me. Not a hand on my arm. The absence of one.

Five years ago a man in white had stopped me with a sentence — I reject you — and I'd walked out of that hall with a torn bond bleeding in my chest and sworn I would never let anyone hold that power over me again. And here was the opposite of that hall. Here was a man who could have stopped me with one word, one gesture, one closed gate, and who chose, at the cost of everything in him, to say nothing at all. The first man rejected me and called it status. This one was letting me go and called it love. And the terrible joke of my whole life was that the letting-go hurt worse — because the letting-go was real.

Because I knew what it cost him. I felt it through the bond I hadn't bothered to wall — there was no point now — felt every instinct in him screaming to command the gates shut, to send a hundred wolves to ring me, to do the one thing he had always done, which was reach out and arrange the world into a shape where I was safe and small and his. I felt him want it with a force that should have leveled the house.

And I felt him not do it.

He walked behind me to the gate and no further. He didn't argue. He didn't bargain. He didn't decide. He let me make the worst decision of my life with my own two hands, in the open, unmanaged — because the only apology that could ever have meant anything from him was exactly this one, and he had finally, too late, learned how to give it.

"Aurora." Just my name. Not a command. A question with no right to an answer.

I stopped at the gate. I did not turn around. "Don't follow us. Damian's wolves have the road. We'll reach the Sanctuary and Luca will be safe, and that is the only thing left that I need from you — that you let us go and don't make it a war."

"I won't follow." His voice was wrecked. "I'll have the road watched from a distance you'll never see. I won't put a single wolf where you can feel it. And if you ever — if you ever need me—" He stopped. Started over, smaller. "I'm not going to finish that sentence. Finishing it would be me deciding what you'll need. Just—" A breath. "Go safe. Both of you. Please."

I almost answered him. I had a cruel thing ready and a kind thing ready, and in the end I gave him neither, because both of them would have been a door, and I had learned from a master — from him — that the cleanest way to leave is to give the other person nothing to hold.

But I did one thing, and I have never been sure, in all the years since, whether it was a mercy or a wound. I left the bond open. I didn't wall it. I walked out of his gate with the door between us standing wide, so that he would feel every mile I put between us — feel me not-turning-around in real time, the whole long distance to the Sanctuary. Because if he was ever going to learn to love a person without holding them, then he was going to have to feel exactly what it costs to let one walk away, and feel it the whole unbearable length of the road.

It was the most honest thing I had left to give him. It was also, I think, the cruelest. They are so often the same thing, with us.

I walked through the gate. I did not turn around. Turning around was a thing I had taught myself never to do.

The road outside the estate ran downhill into the waking gray, and I carried my son down it, and behind me I heard the great gate close, and then — for a long time — nothing.

He stood at the gate until I was out of sight. I knew it the way I knew everything about him now, through the open bond: I felt him standing there, watching the small shape of his whole family shrink down a gray road, refusing to follow, refusing to reach, holding still by an act of will that was tearing him apart at the root.

I was a quarter mile gone, just past the bend where the estate dropped out of sight behind me, when it came.

A sound I had never heard before and will hear in my worst nights until I die.

He had shifted in the tunnel to kill. That had been the king's wolf — the blade, the weapon, the controlled and terrible thing. This was the other one. The wolf he had not let out of his own chest in five years, the one that has no teeth for enemies because it only knows how to grieve. He went down to the old kennel where no one would see a king come apart, and he shifted, and he let it out, and he howled.

It rolled down the gray road after me, that howl. It went through the bond and through the dawn and through the bones of the whole estate at once, so that I learned later the staff had stood frozen at their posts and the guards had bowed their heads, and not one creature in that great house could pretend they didn't hear the Lycan King grieve.

I felt it hit me in the back like a hand.

I have been left. I know exactly how that feels — a ceremonial hall, a porch, a man in white. I had never, until that gray road, known how it feels to be the one who leaves a person you still love, who is being good, who is finally trying, who is breaking apart behind you in a kennel because he loved you the only way his ruined heart knew how, and it wasn't enough, and he understood that now, far too late to fix it.

The howl rose again. And again. The grief-wolf, calling for a mate who was walking away and would not turn around. Calling for a cub he would not chase. Calling into a dawn that didn't answer.

And I kept walking, with my son on my hip and my mate's grief in my chest and the worst decision of my life under my own two feet, down a gray road toward a mother I believed was dead.

I did not turn around.

It is the second time in my life I obeyed that rule when everything in me screamed to break it. The first time, my mother brought a mountain down behind me. This time, a king brought down himself.