Chapter 76: When are we going back

Azura’s POV

The quiet was the first thing I noticed.

Not the Wraithfen kind that sat on your chest and breathed with you. This quiet had walls. It had a ceiling and a bed underneath me and the kind of stillness that only existed in places where nothing was trying to kill you.

I opened my eyes.

White lace hung above me from the bed frame, soft and still, and beyond it, the familiar carved ceiling of the pack house caught the morning light. I stared at it for a second. Just let it be real.

I tried to sit up. The back of my neck disagreed immediately, sharp and mean in exactly the spot where Rhydor had hit me. I sat up anyway and pressed my hand against it and waited for it to decide it was done making its point.

Liona was lying beside me on her stomach. Both hands tucked under her jaw, legs raised behind her, feet swinging slowly back and forth in the air like she had been waiting for a while and had found a comfortable way to do it. She was already awake. Already looking at me.

"Hello sleeping beauty," she said.

"How long was I out?"

"A full day." She propped herself up. "We came back the evening before yesterday. You slept straight through the night and the whole next day." She tilted her head. "Your body basically said thank you for the opportunity and refused to waste it."

I sat with that for a second. An entire day. Gone.

It made a kind of sense, but I didn’t want to think about it too hard. We had not slept properly once in that forest.

Every time we closed our eyes something was either moving through the trees or making sounds that made sleep feel like a decision you would regret.

My body had been running on empty for days, and the moment it got a reason to stop, it had grabbed that reason with both hands.

"The boys," I said. "Where are they?"

"Healer’s ward. Axel is with them."

I threw the blanket back and moved to stand.

Liona did not say anything with her mouth. She just lifted one arm slowly, tilted her head toward her armpit, and looked at me with both eyebrows slightly raised.

I stopped.

Raised my own arm.

Smelled.

I put my arm back down and looked at her.

"How long were you lying next to that without saying a single word?"

"You looked so peaceful."

"Liona."

"Also," the corner of her mouth pulled, " I never knew you smelled that bad."

I went to wash before I said something I would regret.

The bath was the best decision I had made in days. I stayed in longer than I needed to and did not feel bad about it for even one second.

When I came out Liona had left food on the table. Still warm, set out neatly, timed so well that she must have known exactly how long I would be in there. I sat and ate quickly. My body needed it even if my mind was already somewhere down the corridor.

Liona moved around the room gathering her things while I finished.

"I am going home after this," she said. "I have not seen my family since before we left. I stayed until you woke up."

I set down what I was holding and looked at her properly.

The scratch along her jaw from the road. The tiredness sitting just under her eyes that had not been there before the Wraithfen.

She was not a warrior. She had never been one. She came from a good family, a comfortable life, people who loved her, and a home she could have stayed in while the rest of us walked into a forest that ate people.

She walked in anyway. Because I was going and she did not want me to be the only woman there alone.

"Liona."

She looked at me.

"Thank you," I said, it simply because there was no word big enough for what I actually meant, and she knew that. She always knew.

Something moved in her face. Her chin lifted slightly and she blinked once and looked away for just a second before she came back.

"You would have done the same," she said.

She picked up her bag. "Eat the rest of that food before you go anywhere." She pointed at the plate without looking back at it. "All of it. And please, for the love of everything, do not walk out of this room and immediately find something to destroy yourself with."

She left.

The room felt larger after that. Quieter in the specific way rooms did when the person who filled them most had just walked out of them.

I sat there for a moment after she left. Let the quiet settle. Then I stood, finished eating, dressed, and headed for the door.

I pulled it open and stopped.

Someone was standing there.

Rhydor

He was leaning against the wall directly across from my door. Arms crossed over his chest, one shoulder resting against the stone, completely still. Like he had been standing there for a while and had no particular problem with continuing to do so.

He looked at me the moment the door opened.

I looked back at him.

Neither of us said anything. A few seconds passed that felt longer than they were, his eyes on mine, mine on his, and then I stepped out and walked.

He did not call my name. Did not push off the wall or step forward or say a single thing. But I could feel him watching me the entire length of that corridor. The back of my neck knew it, that specific awareness of eyes that would not let go, and I kept walking and did not give him the satisfaction of turning around.

The guards near the end of the corridor bowed as I passed. Small, polite dips of the head, one after the other. I glanced at them and figured it was because Rhydor was standing back there and they did not want to look disrespectful with their Alpha watching. I did not think much more about it. My mind was already somewhere else entirely.

****

The woman at the healer’s ward entrance pointed me toward the boys’ room without me having to explain why I was there. I followed the corridor, found the door, and pushed it open.

Axel was the first person I saw. He stood by the window between the two beds, arms folded over his chest, more relaxed than I had seen him in days. He glanced up when I walked in and nodded once.

Then the boys saw me.

"Luna."

They were off the beds before I had fully stepped into the room. I barely had time to open my arms before they reached me. Both of them at once, wrapping around me, and my feet nearly left the floor from the force of it and my ribs protested sharply.

I held on anyway.

Leo looked eighteen. Ethan looked nineteen, close enough to my own age that it made something in my stomach turn in a way I was not ready to think about yet.

They were tall. Wide in the shoulders. Their arms around me felt like being held by walls. But the sounds coming out of them, the way they said my name, the way they were squeezing me like they were afraid I might disappear if they let go, that was still entirely the children I knew.

"We missed you." Ethan’s voice came out deep, so much deeper than it should have been. "We thought we were never going to see any of you again."

"We thought that was it," Leo said into my shoulder. "That you wouldn’t recognize us anymore."

My eyes burned.

I blinked hard and held on tighter and did not let anything fall. Not yet. Not in front of them.

"I can never forget you guys," I said. "You all are my responsibility."

When they finally pulled back I looked at their faces. The shape of them was different, older, fuller. But their eyes were exactly the same.

Leo’s eyes were the same eyes that used to go wide when I snuck them honey bread from the kitchen. Ethan’s were the same ones that watched everything quietly from the edges of rooms and missed nothing.

The same boys. Just in the wrong bodies.

Something cracked quietly in my chest and I kept my face still and sat down on the edge of one of the beds.

"Tell me what happened," I said. "All of it."

They looked at each other the way they always had, that quick sideways check, deciding together without words who was going to speak first.

Ethan went first.

"Amanda kept crying," he said. "After they took us, she could not stop. She was trying but she could not." He stopped. "The woman came and took her away. Said she was going to a punishment room. A place for children who cried." His jaw moved. "She looked at us and said if any of us cried we would go there too."

The room was very quiet.

"So we stopped," Leo said simply. "We decided we were not going to cry. We were not going to give her a reason to separate us." He looked at his hands, at those large unfamiliar hands sitting in his lap. "We do not know where Amanda went after that. They never brought her back to where we were."

I sat there and thought about Amanda alone in a room somewhere in that castle. Five years old. Crying for people who could not reach her. Being punished for it.

My hands were very still on my knees.

"She is going to be okay," I said. Because I needed to say it and because I needed to believe it and because the alternative was something I could not sit inside right now.

Neither of the boys said anything back to that.

After a moment, Leo looked up, and his whole face changed. The shadow of what he had just told me moved aside and something brighter and completely familiar took its place. He looked exactly like he used to look right before he asked me for something he already knew the answer to.

"When are we going back?" he said.

I looked at him. "Back where?"

"To the orphanage." He sat forward. "To see everyone. We have been waiting forever. When can we go?" He nudged Ethan with his shoulder. "I want to see Kael. Tell me Kael is still there."

Ethan’s face had already done the same thing, lit up from somewhere inside, the exhaustion and the heaviness of everything he had just told me pushed aside by something much younger and much more urgent.

"And Petra," Ethan said. "Is Petra still there? She always beat me at running and I have been thinking about that for ages. I need a rematch."

They were both looking at me now. Leo was leaning forward, Ethan with that quiet, hopeful expression he got when he wanted something and was trying not to want it too obviously. Two grown men sitting on healer’s ward beds talking about a rematch at running with a nine- year-old girl.

I looked at them.

At their faces. At the wide shoulders and the deep voices and the hands that were bigger than mine now. At the eyes that were still ten and eight years old and had no idea that the children they were asking about had kept growing without them.

That Kael and Petra and every other child in that orphanage had stayed the age they were supposed to be while Leo and Ethan had been pulled forward into bodies that did not belong to the version of childhood they had left behind.

They could go back. I could take them back tomorrow. But the moment they walked through that gate, the children who ran to meet them would look up at two strangers. And the games and the yard and the way things used to be, none of it would fit anymore. Not in these bodies. Not with this much taken from them.

I turned to Axel. He was quiet, not knowing what to say.

I opened my mouth.

But nothing came out.

What am I supposed to tell them?