Chapter 3: He Promised He Would Come Back

A week had passed and I was still waiting for it to feel real.

That was the thing about grief that nobody warned you about. It didn't arrive all at once like a wave you could brace for. It came in small, ordinary moments. The way I reached for my phone every morning before I was fully awake, already dialing her number before I remembered. The way I would think of something funny and turn to text her and then remember there was no one to recieve the text anymore. The way silence in a room had started to feel like a presence instead of an absence.

Elira was gone. Th only family I had left, was gone.

The man on the phone had been careful with his words. A welfare officer from Shadowfang he said. They had received a report. They found her at the cottage. He was very sorry. I didn't hear much after that because Iris had taken the phone from my hand at some point and I had let her.

Lucian drove us to Elenora Creek himself.

I remembered the way he held my hand the entire drive, not saying anything, just keeping his fingers locked around mine like he could hold me together through his palm. The cottage looked exactly the way it always looked from the outside, small and quiet and surrounded by the kind of stillness that only existed this far from the human world. But inside it was different. The kind of different that you felt before you saw it.

He stayed with us through the night. He stayed through the burial rights the next day. He made calls and handled things and spoke in low tones to people I didn't know while Iris sat with me on the floor of my aunt's bedroom and I went through her things with hands that wouldn't stop trembling. He was there in the morning after.

Then his phone rang and his face did something complicated and he came to find me where I was sitting on the porch steps with a cup of tea gone cold in my hands.

"There's a funeral." he said. "The Alpha King of Blackwater. I have to go."

I looked up at him. "How long?"

"A few days. Maybe more." He crouched down in front of me so we were level. His eyes were steady on mine the way they always were when he needed me to believe something. "I'm coming back. I need you to hear that."

"Okay." I said.

"Lena."

"I heard you, Lucian. I know."

Two gruesome days later, I saw his truck pull up in the track that was too big for the narrow read leading to the cottage. I thought he was finally back to take us to school. But it wasn't him. It was Jake, his cousin hanging out the window with a grin that was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"Ladies." he said. "Your chario awaits”

I looked behind him like Lucian might be in the passenger seat. He wasn't.

Jake's grin softened just slightly. "He got caught up." he said. "He asked me to make sure you got back safe."

I nodded and picked up my bag.

That had been a week ago.

I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my back against the bed and my knees pulled to my chest, which had become my default position for existing lately. I was back at the house I shared with Iris, I could stay ovevat Lucian's alone. The Elenora history book was on the floor in front of me. I had taken it from the cottage the day we cleared out Elira's things, tucked it under my arm without fully deciding what to do with it, and it had been sitting on my bedroom floor in the same spot I kept it since we returned.

I hadn't opened it.

I didn't know why exactly. Or maybe I did and I just wasn't ready to say it out loud. My aunt's last words to me were about that book and about Alphas and about running out of time and some part of me understood that opening it meant letting all of that in. It meant making it real in a way that her death hadn't fully made real yet. And i wasn't ready for that yet.

So it sat there. And I sat here staring at it like it was the cause of my problems. It probably is.

A knock at my door pulled me up.

"It's open." I called.

Jake came in with two paper bags and the energy of a golden retriever who had just been let off a leash. He looked around my room, clocked the state of it, clocked the state of me, and shook his head like he wasn't proud of the energy. He set the bags down on my desk and started pulling out containers.

"Rivel found this place that does jollof rice that tastes like somebody's grandmother made it." he said. "I got you two portions because you look like you haven't eaten since last Tuesday."

"I've been eating." I said.

"Cereal doesn't count."

I almost smiled. That was the thing about Jake. He made almost smiling feel possible even on the days when nothing else did. He had been showing up like this every other day since he brought us back from the creek, always with food, always with that grin that was half performance and half genuine warmth, and never once pushing me to talk about anything I wasn't ready for.

"Has he called?" I asked.

Jake paused for just a second before he kept unpacking. "He's dealing with a lot back home."

"That's not what I asked."

He looked at me then. Something moved across his face that was more complicated than his usual easy expression. "He'll come back, Lena."

"Everyone keeps saying that." I said. "Nobody's explaining why he isn't already here."

Jake didn't have an answer for that. He handed me a container of rice instead and sat on the floor beside me the way someone sits when they're planning to stay a while.

Iris arrived twenty minutes later with the righteous energy of a woman who had been holding her anger at a precise simmer for seven days and was doing the bare minimum to keep it from boiling over.

She came in, looked at Jake, looked at me, looked at the food, and sat down.

"Has he called?" she asked. "Jake already answered that question."

"Jake is too nice." She picked up a fork. "I want to claw his eyes out."

"Iris." Jake said.

"I'm being calm." she said. "This is me being very, very calm, Jake. You should see me when I'm not calm."

Jake looked at me sideways. I looked back at him and we shared a knowing look.

If Iris was left to her devices, she would certainly be crawling out people's eyes.

Iris pointed her fork in the general direction of the history book on the floor. "Are you going to open that?"

"Not today."

“What book?” Jake asked looking between Iris and I.

"Lena—"

"Not today, Iris." I huffed hoping that was enough to shut down the conversation.

She pressed her lips together and let it go. That was the other thing about Iris. She pushed exactly as far as she knew she could and then she stopped, and she never made me feel guilty for where the line was. She was furious on my behalf and gentle with me at the same time and I didn't know how she managed both but I was grateful for it every single day. And Jake knew it was too personal to pry.

We ate on the floor, the three of us, Jake telling a story about Rivel getting lost on campus that was probably forty percent true and a hundred percent entertaining. I laughed twice. Real laughs, the kind that I had no luxury luxury for recently.

Later, after Jake left and Iris was washing the containers in my kitchen sink, I looked at the book again.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach the way I had been doing more often lately.

Two things I didn't know how to carry. And only one person I wanted to talk to about either of them.

He had promised he would come back.

I was still waiting.

But i was getting really angry and he had a lot of explaining to do.