Semua Bab Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His: Bab 81 - Bab 90

ZADENNobody spoke getting into the car.Nobody spoke for the first fifteen minutes of the drive back.Damian was in the front with the driver. He had not been in the meeting room, he had waited outside, which was the arrangement we agreed on. He looked at me once in the rearview mirror when we got in. Read whatever was on my face. Looked away and did not look back.Smart man.Reina sat beside me with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the window and said absolutely nothing. Which was fine. Which was what I needed right now, silence and distance and the forty-minute drive to do something with what was happening in my chest.You're wasted here.Married to a man who called you a transaction.When you're ready to be treated like what you actually are, call me.How dare he to her, like I wasn't in the room. Like everything in that building belonged to him except me and I was just something she happened to be attached to.And she had sat there and not flinched.Not looked at me. Not look

ZADENThree attacks in three days.Tuesday. Thursday. Friday.I was in the strategy room when the Friday report came in. I read it once. Put it down. Picked it up and read it again."Get Damian," I said to Cade.Cade left without a word.Damian arrived in four minutes. Looked at the reports spread across the table. Looked at me."Talk to me," I said.He picked up the Tuesday report first. Then Thursday. Then Friday. He laid them side by side and stood back and looked at all three together."They're not trying to breach," he said."No," I said. "They're not.""Hit and leave. Every time. No attempt to hold ground. No attempt to push further." He crossed his arms. "This isn't aggression.""Then what is it?"He looked at the map on the wall. At the three marked points. "Tuesday was the northern ridge. Thursday was the eastern stretch. Tonight was the western boundary." He paused. "Three different locations. Three different patrol responses. Three different resource redirections." He turne

ZADENTwo minutes.The entire senior team assembled in two minutes.Nobody argued. Nobody asked unnecessary questions. They looked at my face and they moved. Cade had three vehicles running before I reached the courtyard. Warriors armed and ready. Damian coordinating the scouts."Alpha." Cade stepped forward. "What's the plan?""We go get her," I said."Tactically speaking…""We. Go. Get. Her."He looked at me.Stepped back."Yes, Alpha," he said.We held at the Blackthorn boundary.The scouts went ahead.Six minutes.I stood at the tree line and I was so still that nobody came near me.That was how they knew.When I was angry I moved. When I was managing a crisis I moved. When I was making decisions and handling problems I moved.When I went completely still like this, it meant something else was happening.Something that didn't have a name in operational language.Damian stood three feet to my left and said nothing for four of the six minutes.Then…"She's going to be okay.""I know,

REINAHe held my hand all the way to the car.Not loosely. Not like an afterthought. Like he had made a decision and the decision was this and he was not changing it.I didn't pull away.I probably should have said something. Made a joke. Broken the tension somehow. That was usually what I did when things got too heavy, found the edge of it and made it smaller with words.I had no words.I had nothing.Just his hand around mine and the Blackthorn grounds around us and the cold night air and the strange floating feeling of someone who has been through something and hasn't fully landed yet.The team was at the boundary when we came through.I felt them before I saw them. That collective exhale. Relief moving through a group of people who had been holding something tight and were now releasing it.Cade saw us first.He looked at me. Then at our hands. Then very deliberately looked somewhere else.Damian appeared at Zaden's shoulder."Unharmed?" he said."Unharmed," Zaden said.Damian loo

REINAI didn't plan to stay long.I was going to say thank you, make sure he was okay, and go back to bed. That was the plan. Simple. Fifteen minutes maximum.It was past two in the morning and I was still in his office.I don't know how we got to my mother.One minute we were sitting in silence and the next he was asking quietly, like he wasn't sure he had the right "What was she like?"I looked at him."My mother?""Yes."Nobody asked me about her anymore. Not since she died. People said sorry and moved on and that was fine, that was normal, but nobody actually asked what she was like.I sat with the question for a moment."Practical," I said. "Warm but practical. She didn't waste words. If she said something she meant it." I paused. "She made bread every Sunday. The whole house smelled like it." I smiled without meaning to. "She used to say bread was the only honest thing in the world. You put in the work and it gives you exactly what you deserve."Zaden was quiet."She sounds like