Chapter 140: The Unfolding Truth XX

Third Person POV

The back garden was nothing like the one at the front of the estate.

The front garden was the kind of place that existed to be seen. Trimmed hedges, stone pathways, and flowers arranged in straight lines that did not deviate regardless of where they might have preferred to grow.

Everything in it had been placed deliberately by someone who thought about how things looked from a distance.

The back garden did not care how it looked from a distance.

The grass here was soft and thick, pressed down in places from years of feet walking the same paths without anyone telling them where to go.

Flowers grew in clusters that made no visual sense and did not apologize for it, tall ones crowding beside short ones, purple beside orange beside white, all of it reaching toward the same sky without any particular order.

The stone bench near the center had a small crack along the left armrest that nobody had gotten around to fixing, and the ivy along the south wall had grown over the top of the stones and started working its way back down the other side.

It was a garden that had been allowed to become itself.

On the bench, Alisa sat behind Helen, her legs on either side, her fingers moving through Helen’s white hair with the careful patience of someone who found the work satisfying.

She was braiding. Slowly, sectioning off pieces, working from the crown downward, the white strands lying across her dark dress like something from a different world.

Helen sat on the ground between Alisa’s feet, her legs folded, her hands loose in her lap, her head tilting wherever Alisa’s fingers directed it.

The sun was warm on her face and her arms. Not hot. Just warm. The kind that made a person close their eyes without deciding to.

Ellisa was on the ground across from them, legs crossed, a stick in one hand and a small knife in the other.

The knife moved in long, even strokes along the wood, curling thin shavings off the tip, dropping them into the grass.

Every few strokes she held the stick up, checked the point, and went back to work. She was not looking at anything specific. Just the stick. Just the motion.

The three of them had been like that for a while.

Nobody had felt the need to fill it with anything.

Helen was the one who broke it.

"I haven’t seen Kai in two days," she said. Her voice was quiet, not accusing, just stating something that had been sitting in the back of her mind since yesterday and had finally worked its way to the front. "Since we got here. Either of you know where he is?"

Ellisa kept her eyes on the stick. The knife kept moving.

"Probably hiding," she said, "from what’s about to happen."

Helen turned her head slightly. Alisa’s fingers tightened in her hair, redirecting.

"Stay still," Alisa murmured.

Helen straightened again. "What’s about to happen?"

Behind her, Alisa’s hands paused. Just for a moment. Just long enough to be noticeable. Then the braiding continued, smooth and unhurried, like it had never stopped.

"Brother Kai is going to be made Alpha," Alisa said. Soft. Careful. The kind of voice a person used when they were not sure how the information was going to land. "In two days."

Helen went still.

Not her head. She remembered to keep that steady for Alisa’s sake. But everything else in her went completely still, the kind that started in the chest and spread outward.

"He didn’t tell me that," she said.

It came out slowly. Not a question. Just the words arriving in the order they needed to arrive.

Ellisa stopped sharpening. She set the knife in the grass and held the stick upright between her knees, her thumb running along the point she had just finished. Then she looked at Helen.

"Probably because of the council," she said.

"What about the council?"

Ellisa turned the stick slowly between her palms. She looked at Helen’s face and then looked at the stick and then looked at Helen’s face again, like she was working out how to stack the next words so they came out the right way.

"Brother Kai wants to make you his Luna."

The words dropped into the garden like something solid.

Ellisa kept going, a little slower now. "And the council is not in support of it. Because of..." She stopped. Her jaw moved. She was looking for a way to say it that would not make her the one who said it cruelly.

She did not need to find one.

Helen already knew. She had always known. She knew it every time she wrapped her hair before going outside. Every time she saw the shift in a stranger’s face when the cloth slipped. Every time she read the particular quality of a stare that had nothing to do with admiration and everything to do with not knowing what to make of something.

"How can he be thinking about making me Luna," Helen said, "without telling me first?"

The braiding stopped completely.

Both of them were looking at her now. Ellisa was still pressing her thumb against the tip of the stick. Alisa with her hands resting in Helen’s white hair, not moving.

"He didn’t tell you?" Alisa said. "At all?"

"He said nothing."

Ellisa leaned back on her palms and looked at the sky. She let out a breath through her teeth. "I never knew Brother Kai could be this dumb."

"He’s never dated before," Alisa said. Not defending him exactly. Just providing context. "She’s the first. He doesn’t know how to do this. But this specific thing..." She shook her head. "How do you not tell someone something like this?"

Helen looked between them. "Where is he right now?"

The twins looked at each other.

Not the kind of look that happened when people were trying to decide something. The kind that happened when they had already decided and were just checking that the other one was on the same page before proceeding.

"Ah," they said.

Same word. Same moment. Same tone.

Helen waited.

They did not continue.

"Well?" she said.

They kept looking at her. Two identical faces, two pairs of green eyes, two expressions that carried far more information than the silence they were maintaining.

Helen pressed her lips together.

****

The door was beautiful in a way she had not expected.

Dark wood, heavy and carved all over with patterns that seemed to shift slightly when she was not looking directly at them, vines running into leaves running into something that might have been wolves moving through a forest, though every time she tried to look at the wolves specifically, they were just vines again.

The handle was old brass, worn to a shine in the center from hands that had found the same spot too many times to count. The stone wall around it had ivy working its way up both sides, meeting at the top and starting to spill over.

Ellisa stood beside it with her hands in her pockets, nodding at the door like it was the answer to something.

"He’s probably in there," she said. "Whenever he wants to be alone, he comes here."

Helen looked at the door. Then at Ellisa. "Then I should speak to him."

Neither twin moved.

They stood there with the particular stillness of people who knew something the other person in the conversation did not know yet, and were letting the moment breathe before handing it over.

Helen exhaled. "Can the two of you just say what you’re not saying?"

Alisa spoke first. "Whenever he’s in there, it means he wants to be alone."

"And when he wants to be alone," Ellisa added, "he locks the door."

Helen frowned. "So how would I..."

She stopped.

Because Ellisa was smiling.

It was the specific smile of someone who had broken this exact rule many times before and considered the experience formative.

"I always have a way in," Ellisa said.

Helen looked at her. "You know how to get in?"

Ellisa raised one finger and pointed it at her own forehead. "Look at my forehead very carefully." She waited. "Notice anything?"

Helen studied it. "It’s... slightly larger than Alisa’s."

Ellisa nodded, deeply satisfied. "Exactly. Because Brother Kai has been flicking this forehead since we were seven years old. And the reason for that is simple." She pointed at the door. "Rule number one that I enjoy breaking is this one."

Alisa crossed her arms. "Ellisa..."

"She needs to talk to him," Ellisa said. Not unkindly. She turned to Helen directly, her voice shifting from amusing to actual. "He’s going to be your Alpha. Which means he’s going to be your husband in everything except the legal paperwork. And you’re just going to stand outside and be cool about it because he locked the door?"

She stepped closer.

"You need to go in there," she said. "If you don’t want to be Luna, you tell him that. If you do want to be Luna, you still tell him that. He doesn’t get to decide your life without looking you in the face and asking what you want. That’s not how this works."

Helen looked at her. Then at Alisa, who had uncrossed her arms.

"She’s right," Alisa said simply.

Helen looked at the door.

She looked at it for a few seconds. At the carved wood and the brass handle and the ivy on the stone around it.

Then she looked at Ellisa.

"Okay," she said.

Ellisa was already moving.

She positioned herself beside the wall and crouched down, pressing her back against the stone, and put her hands together in front of her, palms up and low to the ground. A step. She looked at Alisa.

Alisa looked at her own dress. It was a good dress. She had put it on carefully this morning. She looked at the wall. She looked at the dress again.

"You don’t actually expect me to climb that," she said.

"How are you even breathing in that thing?" Ellisa said.

"I breathe fine, and I’m not climbing the wall."

"Then come here and be the step instead."

Alisa made a face. But she walked over and crouched beside Ellisa, pressing her back against the stone too, and put her hands together the same way. Low. Palms up. Steady.

Ellisa put one foot in Alisa’s palms and grabbed the top of the wall with both hands. Alisa pushed from below, legs pressing upward, her dress absolutely not surviving this without at least a crease. Ellisa hauled herself up and over the top.

A thud from the other side.

Then silence.

Then the sound of a latch being lifted.

The door swung open.

Ellisa stood on the other side, brushing her palms together, a fresh red scratch along her left forearm that she had not noticed yet. She looked at her forehead in an imaginary mirror, expression tragic.

"My forehead is definitely going to grow sideways at this point," she said.

Helen looked at the scratch on her arm. Then at her face. Then she pressed her lips together to keep the smile from fully forming.

She walked through the doorway.

Behind her, the twins pulled the door and left her to it.

****

The space inside the walls was not what she had been expecting.

She had expected something that matched the rest of the estate, grand in the way everything here was grand, formal in the way the great hall was formal. Deliberate. Placed.

What she found was quiet.

Enclosed on all sides by old stone walls, open to the sky above. Flowers growing in low patches along the ground, not arranged, just growing.

Colors that should not have worked together were somehow working together because nobody had tried to control them.

A small fountain in the far corner, the water falling in a thin steady stream, catching the light and throwing it back in small pieces.

She walked slowly at first. Taking it in. Letting the sound of the fountain fill the quiet.

Then she heard it.

A blade cutting through the air. The rhythm of it was even and repetitive, the same motion done again and again.

She followed the sound around a curve in the path, past a cluster of tall flowers she did not know the name of.

And she found him.

He was at the far end of the garden in a cleared space where the grass had been worn short. Shirtless, a sword in his right hand, moving through what looked like a sequence, the same series of strikes repeated, each one clean and controlled, the blade arcing through the air with the particular sound of something moving too fast for its size.

His black hair was damp and clinging to his forehead and the back of his neck.

The sun was on his skin and his skin was sheened with sweat and the muscles in his back and shoulders moved in long, shifting lines under it every time his arm came around.

He had not heard her.

She stood at the edge of the clearing and watched him.

The way his arm extended at the end of each arc, holding the position for exactly a breath before pulling back.

The way his feet stayed planted and his hips rotated into each swing, the whole body behind it, not just the arm.

The way his chest expanded and contracted in deliberate rhythm between movements was controlled and steady.

She watched him and her mind, without asking her first, began to wander.

She thought about what it would feel like to walk over to him.

To press her hand flat against his back and feel the warmth of his skin and the movement of his breathing.

To watch him turn around slowly and find her right there. His hands find her waist, warm and certain. His green eyes dropped to her face the way they sometimes did when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.

She was so far inside the thought that she did not notice he had stopped moving.

"Helen?"

She blinked.

He was looking at her. Sword lowered, breathing still working its way down from the effort, a bead of sweat running from his jaw down the side of his neck.

His green eyes were confused in an almost funny way, the specific confusion of someone who had been very certain they were alone and had turned around to find out they were wrong.

"How did you get in here?" he said.

"I want to speak with you," she said.

He looked at her for a moment. Then his eyes moved to the door in the wall, then back to her. "Did the girls.. "

"I said I want to speak with you."