Chapter 4 – Ghosts and Phone Calls
1182 Words
By the time they let me go, my jaw ached from clenching it.
Riven walked us back to the main corridor in silence. Grace peeled off toward the ballroom, already barking orders into a comm crystal. Damage control. Rumor management. Whatever the palace called pretending nothing earthshaking had just happened in front of half the kingdom.
“Miss Rowan.” Riven halted near a side door that smelled of outside air and exhaust. “For what it’s worth, the King meant what he said.”
“About what?” I asked. “Not letting the Council take another swing at me? Or keeping me where he can watch me like a stray dog near his silverware?”
A corner of his mouth twitched. “Both.” He hesitated. “They will push. Hard. Be careful what you give them.”
“Story of my life,” I muttered.
Outside, the palace steps glittered with moonlight. El sat on the bottom one, dress hiked to her knees, cigarette glowing between two fingers in blatant violation of three different royal decrees. She sprang up when she saw me.
“Well?” she demanded. “Alive? Kidnapped? Secretly crowned?”
“None of the above,” I said. “Let’s get off palace property before someone changes their mind.”
We didn’t talk until we were in the back of the hired car, doors shut, city sliding by in a blur of lights. My wolf paced restlessly under my skin, bumping against the edges of my ribs like she’d outgrown them.
El finally exploded. “You’re just going to sit there and not say anything? Lia, what the hell was that?”
I stared out at the passing streets. The royal district gave way to older stone, then to the narrow, tangled lanes near the river where Mara’s townhouse clung like a stubborn barnacle to the past.
“The bond reacted,” I said. “On his side too.”
“Yeah, I gathered that when the King of Alphas looked at you like he’d just watched you climb out of your own coffin.” She dragged on the cigarette, then cracked the window, letting smoke curl into the night. “Did he… say anything?”
“He thought I was dead.” My laugh came out thin. “Which, you know, mood.”
“Asshole.” She thumped her head back against the seat. “Mara’s going to lose her mind.”
My phone buzzed in my clutch like it had heard its name. I pulled it out. Three missed calls from Mara. Six from El, from before she’d found me. One grainy photo from earlier tonight of a small boy in mismatched pajamas, cheeks sticky with something red, grinning around a bitten apple.
My chest hurt.
“Call her,” El said softly.
I hit dial. It rang once.
“Lia Rowan, if you don’t tell me you’re alive this second—”
“I’m alive.” I leaned my head against the cool glass. “We’re in the car. Ten minutes out.”
A rush of breath hit my ear. In the background, I heard the cartoon theme song that had become the soundtrack of my evenings. Something crashed. A small, familiar voice yelled, “Gamma, look!”
“Turn that down,” Mara snapped away from the receiver, then came back. “What happened? I felt something. A… pull.” Her voice lowered. “The way it felt the night they broke it.”
My fingers tightened spasmodically. El watched my face in the dim, cigarette ember flaring between us.
“It… flickered,” I said carefully. “He saw me. Smelled me. Whatever the Council did—”
“Didn’t hold.” Mara swore, an old‑country curse that tasted like iron. “I told you not to go to that palace. I told you—”
“I had to,” I cut in. “For the lawyers. For the house. For you.”
“For me,” she said flatly. “I’d sell that damned house to the first human with a decent checkbook if it meant you and my boy were on the next night train out of this city.”
As if on cue, a smaller voice piped up close to the phone. “Mama?”
My throat closed.
“Hey, bug,” I managed.
“Gamma let me stay up,” he announced, proud. “We made apple monsters. Mine had three eyes.”
“Of course it did,” I said, the knot in my chest loosening just a little. “You scare them all away for me, okay?”
He giggled. “Are you coming home?”
Home. A cramped spare room with peeling wallpaper, a leaky radiator, and a little bed shoved against mine. A sanctuary built out of thrift store furniture and sheer stubbornness.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m coming home.”
“Bring cake,” he added, then something beeped in the background and Mara wrestled the phone back.
“You have three days,” she said, voice low and fierce. “You sign what needs signing, you make sure the ink is dry, and then you get out. I don’t care what your wolf thinks she smells. I don’t care if he’s suddenly sorry. You don’t owe that boy a second chance.”
Boy. She still called him that, like Kaiden was frozen at eighteen in our shared nightmare.
“I know,” I said. The words tasted like ash and something sweeter I refused to name. “I’m not staying.”
A lie. Or a hope. It was hard to tell the difference with my pulse still humming in time with a bond that shouldn’t exist.
“We’ll talk when you get here,” Mara said. “And Lia?”
“Yeah?”
“Do not walk into that palace again alone.”
After we hung up, the car rolled to a stop in front of Mara’s street. Old stone houses leaned together like gossiping aunties, eaves nearly touching. Someone had strung fairy lights across the narrow lane; they flickered in the river breeze.
El stubbed out her cigarette. “So. How bad is it?”
I opened the door, city air cool on my overheated skin. The faintest trace of royal storm still clung to me, like ozone after lightning.
“He wants me where he can see me,” I said. “The Council will want worse. The bond is acting like a glitching live wire. And I just promised my aunt I’m leaving in three days.”
El whistled low. “That’s not thirty.”
“No,” I said, looking up at the slice of moon between the rooftops. My wolf pressed against my palm where it rested over my sternum, restless, alive. “It isn’t.”
The universe, apparently, had decided to rewrite my terms.
And I had the sinking feeling that neither the king, nor his Council, nor the bond itself had any intention of letting me go quietly.
- Writer
