Chapter 143: The Unfolding Truth XXIII

Third Person POV

"I am sorry for bringing you here. For asking you to come before you were ready. I am sorry for the trouble I have put you through." A pause that lasted slightly too long. "I just wanted you to be happy. Even if that happiness is not with me."

His voice cracked on that last part. Just slightly. She heard him cover it, heard the small effort of it, the breath he took over it.

"If you leave and you need anything, anything at all, you reach out for me. I will do everything I am able to do. As long as you are happy." Another pause. "That is enough for me."

The room was completely quiet.

She stared at her reflection. At the tear that had appeared on her cheek without her deciding to cry. The way her hands were flat on the dressing table, pressing down, holding something.

He waited.

She did not speak.

The seconds became something heavier. She heard him exhale. Small and final and decided.

His footsteps moved toward the door. She heard the handle. Heard the door open. Heard him step through.

He left it open behind him.

Helen sat at the dressing table and stared at the mirror watching the open doorway in it and felt the crack in her chest spread from its edges outward, quietly and completely, the way a crack spreads in ice when the pressure had finally become too much.

"You can come out," she said. "I know you’re there."

A pause. Then movement. The two of them slipped through the open doorway like they had been standing just outside it for the entire conversation and had been waiting with considerable patience for someone to acknowledge them.

Ellisa and Alisa.

Side by side in the doorway. Same face. Different expressions sitting on it, Alisa’s was open and wet-eyed, making no effort to hide anything. Ellisa’s was doing the thing Ellisa’s face did when she was feeling something she had decided not to feel, which was to arrange itself into something almost neutral with small failures at the corners.

"Are you really leaving?" Alisa asked. Her voice was small.

Ellisa’s arms crossed. She looked at the wall. "I mean. What would be the point of staying?" She was not asking. "They’ve already found someone the councils approves of. Someone they can parade out without the whole room going silent."

Helen looked at them both in the mirror.

"I thought you were going to stay," Alisa said. She wiped her eye with the back of her wrist quickly, as if she was fast enough it hadn’t happened.

Ellisa’s jaw moved. "We thought we were finally going to have a sister-in-law who was actually worth something." She paused. "But you’re leaving. Fine."

She uncrossed her arms and crossed them again.

"I’m not the type who gets emotional," she said. "I want to be very clear about that."

A beat.

"But Helen." She turned her head and looked at her directly for the first time since she had walked in. "Do you actually want to go? Not what you think you should do. Not what seems sensible. Do you, genuinely, really want to leave?"

The question sat in the room.

Helen did not answer immediately.

The twins looked at each other. Something moved between them, the way things moved between them that did not need words. Then they both turned toward the door.

Alisa went first. Ellisa followed.

At the threshold, Ellisa stopped.

She stood in the doorway with her back to Helen and was quiet for a moment.

"I was starting to get used to you," she said. Not loud. Not performing it for anyone. Just saying a true thing plainly. "I thought this was going to be different. Turns out happiness doesn’t work in this family."

She stepped forward.

"Wait."

Ellisa stopped.

Helen’s voice had come out soft and slightly unsteady and completely unlike the voice of someone who had made a clean decision. She was still looking at the mirror. At herself, at the white hair and the wet grey eyes and the tear that had dried on her cheek without being wiped away.

"Can you at least give me a parting gift?" she said.

The twins turned around.

Alisa’s face was fully wet now. She had stopped trying to manage it. Ellisa’s face was doing something complicated that it had not quite resolved yet.

Helen was still looking in the mirror. But the corner of her mouth had moved. Small and broken and absolutely there.

Both of them recognized it at exactly the same moment.

They looked at each other.

****

The great hall had never been this full.

Every member of the Zanzia pack had gathered. The torches along the stone walls burned high, throwing gold light across every surface, making the room feel both larger and more intimate than it was in the ordinary hours of a day.

The throne had been moved to the side. In its place, at the center of the room on a low raised platform, was the space where everything was going to happen.

Kai stood on it.

He had removed the formal robe at the edge of the platform, handing it off without looking at whoever took it. He stood in simple dark clothes now, feet bare on the cold stone, arms at his sides, head slightly bowed. The priestess stood before him, small and grey-haired, her hands steadier than her age had any right to produce.

She spoke the ancient words.

The language filled the hall in a way that bypassed understanding and went straight into the chest, settling there whether the people listening knew what it meant or not.

Kai answered when the words required an answer. He knelt when the words required kneeling. He repeated the vows that had been repeated on this platform for generations before him, his voice even and carrying and completely hollow underneath.

Though his body was present for all of it.

But his mind and thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

The priestess raised both hands.

"The Alpha is made," she said. Her voice filled the hall. "Long live the Alpha."

The hall responded. "Long live the Alpha."

The sound of it moved through the torchlight and the stone walls and the packed bodies of the gathered pack, rising and then settling. Kai stood. He looked out at all of them. He kept his face exactly as it needed to be.

"And now," the priestess said, turning to face the crowd, "the Alpha needs his Luna. The other half of the throne. Bring forward the one who has been chosen."

The doors at the far end of the hall opened.

The figure that stepped through was dressed in white. White gown, white veil over her face, the fabric catching the torchlight as she moved. She walked slowly down the center aisle, her hands clasped in front of her, her footsteps quiet on the stone. The crowd watched her pass. Some murmured. Some were simply still.

Kai kept his eyes on the floor.

He looked at the cold stone beneath his bare feet and he breathed and he did not watch her come toward him. He could hear her. Each soft step brings her closer. He could count them without looking. He did not want to look.

She reached the platform. Ascended. Stood beside him.

The priestess took her hands and turned her to face the crowd.

"Present your hands."

The woman opened her palms. The priestess drew the blade across one in a single practiced motion, clean and quick. Blood welled in a thin line.

She took Kai’s hand. The blade. His blood meets hers.

"Long live the Alpha and the Luna."

The hall erupted.

Kai made himself look up.

He turned toward her. He reached out with his bound hand, not looking at her face, just doing what was required of him. He would look in a moment. He would do what came next. He just needed one more second of not looking.

Her hand found his.

He went completely still.

The warmth of it. He knew that warmth. He knew the size of it, the way her fingers moved, the way they curled around his palm like they had found somewhere familiar. He knew this hand.

He had held it across a table in a small cottage kitchen. He had felt it pushing against his chest in a garden where he had almost done something unforgivable.

His head came up.

He looked at the veil. At the shape beneath it. At the small dark streak of hair that had slipped free near her temple, pressed against white fabric.

He reached forward and pulled the veil away.

The torchlight and the moonlight from the high windows found her at exactly the same moment, white hair catching both, bright and pale and impossible to miss, falling around her shoulders with the black streak at the front exactly where it had always been.

Her grey eyes were on his.

Wet at the edges. Trembling. But on his, and steady.

The hall went silent.

The silence started at the front and spread backward like something spilled on a flat surface, reaching every corner of the room before anyone understood why it was spreading.

"Impossible." The priestess had stepped back. Her voice had gone small. "This is... she cannot be... this is an abomination, she is not..."

Nobody was listening to her.

The council members were moving. Voices were rising near the back of the room. The noise was building, confused and sharp at the edges, the particular sound of a crowd that has seen something it does not know how to categorize.

Kai did not look at any of them.

He looked at Helen.

At her white hair in the torchlight. At the grey eyes that had found him and stayed. At the small tear that had escaped the corner of one eye and was running down her cheek without her wiping it away.

Something in his chest was breaking open. He could feel it happening, slow and unstoppable, the way something opened that had been held shut for too long.

Near the side door, pressed back against the wall so that most of the crowd could not see them, two identical faces watched everything.

Ellisa raised her fist.

Alisa met it.

The fist bump was quiet and satisfied and said everything that needed to be said without either of them saying a word.

They did not need to.