All Chapters of Alpha Draco And His Omega Luna : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

SofiaWe left at first light.Three cars. Draco and I in the first, Xavier driving. Rocco and Lilly in the second Lilly had refused to stay behind with a quiet, complete firmness that none of us had been willing to argue with, and Rocco had said nothing except to get in the car beside her. Kara and Elara in the third, which had been Elara's arrangement and which Kara had accepted with the specific gratitude of someone who had been hoping for exactly that and hadn't known how to ask.My grandmother was staying.This was the conversation I had been most afraid of and it had lasted approximately forty-five seconds, because my grandmother had looked at me when I came to her room at dawn and said: "You're going to the packs.""Yes.""Good." She had adjusted the blanket on her lap. "Go.""I don't want to leave you.""I know you don't." She had looked at me with those eyes. "Go anyway. This is what I have been trying to tell you your entire life, the thing you're afraid of is usually the thi

SofiaWe left before dawn. The training happened in the dark thirty minutes in the grounds of the neutral estate with Elara on the phone, her voice unhurried and precise, talking me through the specific exercises she had developed over the past weeks with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that thirty minutes was enough if they were the right thirty minutes.I did not hold back.The difference was immediately apparent to both of us."There," Elara said, through the phone, when I stopped. "That. That's what it looks like when you stop managing it and just let it be what it is."I stood in the dark with my breath clouding in the cold air and the power moving back down to its baseline hum, and I thought: yes. That's what it feels like."How do you feel?" she asked."Ready," I said."Good. How is she?"She meant my grandmother."Comfortable," I said. "Certain that the chair is in the right place."A soft sound, the closest Elara came to a laugh before eight in the morning.

SofiaWe drove back as the afternoon light was thinning.The convoy of cars moved through the territory in the specific quiet of people who had been through something large and were sitting inside the aftermath of it not processing loudly, just present with what had happened and letting it settle at its own pace.Mira was in our car. She had asked, quietly, if she could ride with us, and I had said yes without hesitating, and now she sat in the back beside me with the contained, watchful quality of someone still learning the shape of a space they had found after a long search.She had not said much since the assembly hall.Neither had I.We were, I was discovering, similar in certain ways the economy of words, the preference for observation over announcement, the specific patience of people who had spent a long time moving carefully through worlds that were not entirely safe.My mother's people."She talked about you," Mira said, at some point between the neutral estate and the territ

SofiaKara knew about the arm thing by breakfast.I walked into the kitchen and she looked at me with an expression of such concentrated delight that I stopped in the doorway and considered leaving."Don't," I said."I haven't said anything," she said."Your face is saying everything.""My face is completely neutral.""Your face has never been neutral in your entire life," I said, and sat down and accepted the tea Gracie put in front of me with the expression of someone who had also been told and was being professional about it."Gracie," I said."Good morning, Sofia," she said, and went back to the stove.I looked at Kara."Lilly told you," I said."Lilly told me," she confirmed. "This morning. At approximately six forty-five. She knocked on my door specifically to tell me." She paused. "She was very pleased with herself.""She said she was going to," I said."And you didn't stop her?""She'd already decided," I said. "There was no stopping her."Kara looked at me with the delight st

SofiaI found Xavier in the east corridor the next morning.He was leaning against the wall with his phone in his hand and the expression of someone who had been standing there for a while doing something that looked like nothing but was actually a great deal of thinking.He looked up when he heard me."Sofia," he said."Xavier," I said.I kept walking.He fell into step beside me, which I had not invited and was not going to discourage, because Xavier falling into step beside you was simply something that happened and was generally worth letting happen.We walked for a moment."You wanted to talk to me," I said."I didn't say that," he said."You were standing in the east corridor at seven in the morning doing nothing," I said. "You're not a nothing person. You had somewhere to be and you were waiting to see if I'd come past first."He was quiet for a moment."Kara mentioned you sometimes come this way in the mornings," he said."She mentioned it to you specifically," I said."Yes."