Chapter 2: Someone Else

I didn't sleep.

I tried. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and listened to Lucian breathe beside me and told myself that no news was good news and that there were a hundred reasons someone might not answer their phone at midnight and none of them had to be the worst one.

By three in the morning I had stopped trying to convince myself and just lay there, phone on my chest, waiting.

By five I was sitting up with my back against the headboard, calling again.

It rang. It kept ringing. That was the part that scared me more than anything else, that it was ringing at all, that the phone was still there and still on and nobody was picking it up. If something had truly gone wrong, if she had dropped it or left it behind or if someone had taken it from her, I told myself it would have gone straight to voicemail. The ringing meant something. I just didn't know what.

I called seven more times before the sun came up.

Lucian woke up and found me on the edge of the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and my eyes swollen from crying I didn't remember doing. He didn't say anything right away. He just sat up and put his hand on my back before pulling me into a warm embrace.

He was the only anchor I had and I subbed into his chest.

"She's not picking up." I hiccuped. Like he didn't already know.

"I know."

"She never ignores her phone. Even when she's upset with me she picks up and hangs up immediately just so I know she saw it. She's never just not there."

He didn't try to explain it away. That was one of the things about Lucian that I had never fully found the words for. He never tried to make things smaller than they were just to make me feel better. He sat with me in the reality of it. Something was wrong and we both knew that.

Elenora Creek was not the kind of place where help came quickly. I knew that better than anyone. The cottage where my aunt lived sat alone at the edge of a border that nobody particularly wanted to claim, caught between Shadowfang pack territory on one side and the outer limits of Blackwater kingdom on the other. The nearest neighbor was twenty minutes of dirt road away. The nearest town was forty. If something had happened to her in that house, she would have been alone with it for hours before anyone even knew to look.

That thought sat in my chest like a stone. Like a heavy weight I couldn't move.

Lucian tried to make me eat breakfast.

He made eggs. Simple and plain the way I liked them, which meant he had been paying attention at some point when I mentioned it and filed it away without making a thing of it. He set the plate in front of me and I looked at it and felt nothing that resembled hunger.

"You need to eat something." he said.

"I'm not hungry."

"Lena."

"I know." I pushed the plate half an inch to the left and then back again. "I know I need to eat. I just can't right now."

He sat down across from me and watched me for a moment. Then he said, "Tell me about her."

I looked up.

"Your aunt." he said. "Tell me about her."

So I did. I told him about the cottage and how it always smelled like dried herbs and old books and something faintly sweet that I could never identify. I told him how she used to check the locks twice every night, front door and back, every single night without fail, and how I used to tease her about it when I was younger and she would just smile and say old habits. I told him how she raised me after my mother died and never once made me feel like I was something she had been handed rather than chosen.

And then I told him what I had been meaning to tell him last night before everything fell apart.

"I was going to tell her about you." I said. "I had been putting it off because she was always strange about wolves. Not cruel about it, just careful. She didn't trust them and she never fully explained why and I never pushed because she had a way of shutting down conversations she wasn't comfortable with." I pressed my lips together. "I thought last night was finally going to be the night I told her. That I'd found someone and he was a wolf and I was happy and I needed her to try to be comfortable with that."

Lucian was quiet.

"I was going to tell you something too." I said. "Before she called."

He looked at me and I looked back at him, the words sat right there on the tip of my tongue but I couldn't make them come out. Not now. Not with this weight on top of everything. It didn't feel right to bring something that big into a morning this broken.

"It can wait." I said.

He didn't push. He just reached across the table and covered my hand with his and left it there.

“Just remember you can tell me anything and at anytime, Icy. And I'll always be there for you, through whatever.” he sooth rubbing small circles on my hands

“I know.”

Iris arrived at half past nine with food she had cooked herself, packed into containers that smelled like everything I hadn't been able to eat all morning. Nobody had called her. Nobody had sent her a message. She just appeared at my door with her warm smile and her arms already open and I walked straight into them without saying a word.

She held me the way she always held me when things were bad. Tight and unhurried, like she had nowhere else to be.

"Hey." she said into my hair. "Hey, I'm here."

"I don't know where she is." I said. My voice came out small and muffled against her shoulder.

“Uh, who's missing?” She asked, eyes wide.

"Aunt Elira. She called me last night and she sounded so scared and now she's not picking up and I don't know if she's okay."

Iris pulled back and looked at my face. Something moved behind her eyes, something that was there and gone before I could name it.

"What did she say?" she asked carefully.

"She said they were coming for me. She said to find some book and stay away from Alphas and then the line cut off." I shook my head. "It didn't make any sense. None of it made any sense."

Iris was quiet for just a beat too long. Then she said, "Okay. Okay, we're going to figure this out."

Lucian came back into the room and looked at Iris with the easy acknowledgment of someone who had heard enough about her to feel like he already knew her. "I can call home." he said. "I have people close to the creek. I can have someone run out there to check on her."

I stood up straighter. "You can do that?"

"Right now if you want."

I wanted. I wanted it more than I had wanted anything all morning.

He squeezed my shoulder once and then stepped out of the room, already reaching for his phone. Iris turned to me with a look that meant business.

"When did you last eat?"

"Lucian made eggs."

"Did you eat them?"

I said nothing.

She picked up the containers she brought and started opening them. "Eat." she said. "I'm not asking."

Two hours long hours passed slowly.

I was coiled into the corner of the sofa with a blanket over my legs that Iris had put there without asking. She sat on the other end, close enough that our knees almost touched, scrolling through her phone without really looking at it. Lucian was in the kitchen, on a call that had been going on for twenty minutes. I could hear his voice through the wall, low and controlled, but with an edge underneath it that told me the call was not going the way he wanted.

I kept my phone in both hands.

When it rang, I felt Iris go still beside me before I even processed the sound.

I looked down at the screen.

Elira.

Her name. Her number. Calling me back after hours of silence, several missed calls and a night I would not forget for as long as I lived.

I pressed answer before I could think about it."Aunty." Her name came out of me like something breaking open. "Aunty, I have been calling you all night, are you okay? What happened last night, who was in the house with you? I heard—"

"Miss Elenora."

I stopped.

The voice on the other end was not my aunt's. It was a man's voice. Formal and careful, the way people voices get when they have bad news.

The blanket slipped off my knees as I sat up slowly. Across the room I heard Lucian go quiet in the kitchen.

Iris was already watching my face.

I watched my hand start to shake around the phone and I couldn't make it stop.

Aunt was Elira was dead.

Murdered.