Chapter 84: The Vision

Azura’s POV

Liona’s scream was still ringing in my ears.

She had stopped screaming but somehow the sound was still there, bouncing around inside my skull like it had decided to move in permanently. I sat on the edge of the bed, chewed my bread, stared at the wall, and let it ring.

Liona was sitting beside me, vibrating with everything she was holding in, her eyes going to my neck every three seconds even though my hair was covering it. She was quiet. Which meant she was thinking. Which meant something was coming.

"So," she said.

I chewed.

"How was it?"

I looked at her.

She looked back at me with the most innocent face she had ever constructed in her life. "Having the Alpha inside you."

"Liona," I said her name the way you said a warning. Low, clear, and final.

"What?" She blinked. "I am just asking."

"That is disgusting."

"Is it?" The innocent face cracked slightly at the edges. "Because from what I just saw on your neck, disgusting does not seem like the word you were using last night."

"Stop." I pointed at her. "Stop talking. Right now."

"I bet you enjoyed it."

I exhaled through my nose, long and slow, looked back at the wall, and took another bite of bread. There was nothing to say to that. Absolutely nothing. Any response I gave her would become ammunition and she would use it without mercy for the rest of our natural lives. So I said nothing. I just chewed and breathed and finished the bread with the focused energy of someone completing a very important task.

When the last piece was gone I set the plate down on the bed beside me and looked at her properly.

She looked back at me with bright eyes and a smile she was barely keeping inside her mouth.

I stood up. Went to the wardrobe. Pulled out a towel without saying a word. Tucked it under my arm and walked straight into the bathhouse and pulled the door shut behind me.

The warm water was the first genuinely good thing that had happened to me since yesterday. I stood in it and let it do what it could and tried not to think about anything at all, which worked for about thirty seconds before everything came back anyway. I stayed until the water started to cool and then I stayed a little longer just because the idea of going back out there and being a person again felt like more than I was ready for.

When I finally came back out, towel wrapped around me, hair dripping, Liona was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dress laid out neatly beside her. She had gone to the wardrobe while I was in there and picked something out and smoothed it flat with her hands the way she always did without being asked.

She looked up when I came out and smiled.

Not the teasing smile from earlier. Just a real one. Small and warm and completely Liona.

I took the dress without a word and started getting dressed.

She stood up, stretched her arms above her head, and looked toward the door. "I am going to go and find my Torin," she said. Casually. Easy. Like the words meant nothing.

My Torin.

I looked at the back of her head.

She was already moving toward the door, fixing her hair as she walked, completely unaware of what her own voice had just given away. The small pink color at the edges of her ears. The way she said his name like it was something she had been saving up.

Something quiet moved through my chest.

Not amusement. Something underneath it. Something that knew exactly what it looked like when a person tried to carry feelings that were bigger than the space they had given them. I had been doing my own version of it long enough to recognize the shape of it in someone else.

Torin was good to Liona. He was easy with her, warm, attentive in his own way. He noticed things about her. But I had watched them together enough times now to see the difference between the way she looked at him and the way he looked at her. She was somewhere he was comfortable. For her, he was something else entirely.

I did not know what to do with that knowledge except hold it and say nothing and hope quietly that I was reading it wrong.

She reached the door.

"Liona."

She turned.

I looked at her directly. Not harshly. Just clearly. "Not a single soul. Not in this pack. Not outside it. Not anyone you trust and definitely not anyone you do not. What happened in this room today does not go anywhere."

She straightened. Her fingers came up to her lips slowly, pinching her thumb and forefinger together as she made a deliberate stitching motion across her mouth. Then her right hand lifted.

"I swear," she said, with the gravity of someone taking an oath before a council. "On Torin’s life."

I stared at her.

She held it. Four full seconds of complete seriousness.

Then the grin broke through and she was already half out the door before I could say anything back.

Something in my chest loosened just slightly. Not enough to call it a laugh. But close.

The door clicked shut and the room went quiet.

I stood in it for a moment, just breathing. Then I sat down at the dressing table and looked at myself in the mirror. Tired eyes. Flushed skin that the bathhouse had done nothing to help. I reached for the small clay pot of covering oil at the edge of the table and worked it carefully along my neck, over the marks, across my wrists where the faint pressure bruises sat quietly against my skin.

Slow. Methodical. Covering everything.

When I was done I set the pot down and just sat there looking at my reflection for a moment. The room was still. The morning light was coming in properly through the window, falling soft and pale across the table beside it where the empty plate sat.

It will help you.

I pressed my lips together and looked away from the plate.

My hand moved under the dressing table on its own, and my fingers found the small hidden shelf built into the underside. A flat space barely wide enough, barely deep enough. Nobody knew it was there.

My fingers found the journal.

I pulled it out and set it on the table.

It was dusty. A thin layer of grey sitting soft on top of the brown cover. I looked at it for a moment. The worn edges. The familiar weight. I could not explain why I had reached for it right now. I just had.

I wiped the cover clean with my palm and opened it.

The pages fell open. Nine words. One on each page, sitting alone in the center, written in a hand that was not mine. I turned through them slowly. Read each one. Sat with all of them together.

They felt important in the same way they always did. Like something my bones understood even when my mind did not.

Then I remembered.

The last time I had opened this journal I was not wearing my pendant.

I touched my throat. The pendant was there, warm under my fingers the way it always was when something was shifting around me that I had not caught up to yet. I looked at the journal. I looked at the pendant. Something in my chest said to use both at the same time.

I wrapped one hand around the pendant and placed the other flat on the open page.

I started reading the words out loud. Quietly at first, just my voice in the empty room, going through each page one at a time.

"Key. Lock. Seal. Break..."

Then I went back to the beginning and read them again.

My voice sounded normal. The room sounded normal. I kept going.

Then my mouth stopped listening to me.

I told it to stop. It kept going. The words kept coming out, moving through me like they had always lived there and had just been waiting for the right moment to surface. My hand on the pendant. My hand on the page. I pushed the instruction down again, clearly and firmly.

Nothing.

The words kept coming.

Then the pendant pulsed.

I looked down. It was glowing. Soft and warm, a pale steady light coming from inside the metal, quiet as a heartbeat sitting under my fingers. I stared at it. My mouth was still moving. Still going through all nine words in order without stopping, over and over, my own voice getting further and further away in my ears like I was hearing it from the end of a very long corridor.

Getting quieter even though I could feel my mouth still moving.

The table blurred. The mirror blurred. The walls. The morning light. Everything at the edges first and then everything else, slowly and steadily, like the world was being folded away around me.

And then I was somewhere else entirely.

Trees everywhere. Tall and thick and close, branches tangling high above and blocking most of the sky. Mist hanging low and heavy between the trunks, white and completely still. I did not know this place. I turned slowly in every direction and saw nothing but trees and mist and a silence that felt like it had weight pressing down from every side.

"Hello?"

My voice came back from everywhere at once.

Then I heard footsteps. Fast and desperate, coming from somewhere inside the mist. Getting louder. The sound of someone running hard with everything they had.

A figure broke through the trees.

A woman in a black cloak hood pulled all the way forward, hiding her face completely. Her arms wrapped tight around something against her chest. A baby. Small and bundled, crying, the sound cutting straight through the mist and the silence and everything else in this place.

She was running directly at me.

I opened my mouth to call out.

She went straight through me.

Like I was air. Like I was made of nothing at all.

I gasped and spun around. She was still running. Still holding the baby. The black cloak disappeared between the trees, swallowed slowly by the white mist. I tried to follow. Told my feet to move.

They would not move.

I stood there completely rooted and watched her get smaller and smaller until the mist closed around her and there was nothing left. Just the fading sound of the baby crying, getting quieter and quieter until that too was gone.

Just silence.

Just trees.

Just me, standing in a place I had never been, watching something I did not understand, unable to move a single step toward any of it.

Azura.

Far away. Someone was saying my name.

Azura. Azura.

I opened my eyes.

Ceiling.

I was on the floor.

Flat on my back on the cold floor of my room with no memory of how I had gotten there. The journal was closed beside me. The pendant was cold against my chest, every trace of warmth completely gone from it.

Liona was above me, both hands on my shoulders, eyes doing that careful controlled thing they did when she was more frightened than she wanted to show.

"What happened?" Her voice came out steady but only barely. "I forgot something. I came back and you were on the floor." She searched my face. "Azura. Say something."

I sat up slowly.

I looked at the dressing table above me. The chair pushed slightly back from where I had been sitting. The journal was on the floor beside my hand.

I had been sitting in that chair.

I knew I had been sitting in that chair.

Liona watched my face for a moment. Then she tried the only thing she knew how to try when something felt too heavy to hold straight.

"Did he work you that hard?" she said softly. Carefully. "That you had to come and collapse on the floor as well?"

I looked at her.

Nothing came. No laugh. No reaction. The joke landed somewhere just outside of me, in a version of this moment I was not currently inside. I looked at her face and felt completely still in a way that had nothing to do with calm.

Liona’s smile faded.

She looked at the journal on the floor. Then at my face. Then at the journal again.

I picked it up slowly and held it in both hands without opening it.

I thought about mist. About trees I had never seen. About a woman in a black cloak running through me like I did not exist. About a baby crying and then fading into silence.

I looked at Liona.

She was still waiting. Her eyes were full of questions, her mouth had not found the words for yet.

I had nothing to give her.

I don’t have one for myself either.