Chapter five
1175 Words
AMELIA'S POV
The elevator doors closed and I stood there with my hand wrapped around the locket through my jacket and listened to the floor numbers counting down.
By the time I hit the lobby I already knew where I was going.
The doorman said good evening as I walked through and I nodded without stopping and pushed through the glass doors into the cold night air and pulled out my phone and called the only person I trusted inside that pack who had never once looked at Gabriella the way everyone else did.
It rang twice.
"Amelia." Serena's voice was alert in the way of someone who had not been asleep. "Are you alright."
"I need somewhere to stay tonight."
A pause that lasted exactly one second. "How far away are you."
"Twenty minutes."
"I will leave the light on," she said and hung up.
I flagged a cab at the corner and got in and put my bag on my lap and watched the city move past the window and did not think about Damien's face when I stepped back from his hand or Gabriella's smile shifting underneath itself in the hallway because thinking about those things was not useful right now and useful was the only thing I had time to be.
The cab pulled up outside Serena's building eighteen minutes later.
I paid and got out and went up.
She opened the door before I finished knocking.
She looked at me for a moment, then at the bag in my hand, then back at my face, and something in her expression settled like a decision she had been putting off for a long time had just made itself.
"I wondered how long it would take," she said and stepped aside.
"You knew."
"I suspected." She closed the door behind me. "There is a difference." She moved toward the kitchen. "Have you eaten anything."
"No."
"Sit down."
I sat at her kitchen table and put my bag on the floor and she moved around the kitchen with the particular efficiency of someone who feeds people when they do not know what else to do with them.
"Damien called me twenty minutes ago," she said without turning around.
"What did you tell him."
"That I hadn't heard from you." She set a plate in front of me and sat down across the table. "Which was true at the time."
"And now."
"Now you are sitting in my kitchen so technically I still haven't heard from you." She folded her hands on the table. "What happened tonight."
"I asked for a divorce."
She looked at me for a long moment. "Good," she said simply and got up to pour water into two glasses.
My phone buzzed on the table.
Damien.
I turned it face down.
It buzzed again almost immediately.
Then again.
Then it stopped and thirty seconds later it buzzed one more time and this time when I looked at the screen it was not Damien.
It was Gabriella.
Serena watched me from across the table. "Are you going to answer it."
"Yes," I said and picked up.
"Amelia." Gabriella's voice was warm and careful, the specific warmth she used when she was managing a situation she had not fully mapped yet. "I just wanted to make sure you were alright. Tonight was a lot and I know how you get when things feel overwhelming."
"How I get," I said.
A brief pause. "I just meant that you seemed upset and I—"
"Gabriella, where is the locket."
Silence.
Not the surprised kind. The kind that knows exactly what you are talking about and is deciding how to respond to it.
"I don't know what you mean," she said finally.
"Yes you do. The locket from the night of the attack three years ago. The one you picked up off the ground after I went down." I kept my voice completely even. "Where is it."
"Amelia I think your imagination is—"
"I have it," I said. "I found it today outside the clinic. So I am not asking where it is anymore. I am asking you what you thought was going to happen when I found it."
The silence this time was longer.
"You should get some sleep," she said and her voice had lost the warmth entirely now, down to something flat underneath. "You have clearly had a very difficult day."
"Goodnight Gabriella," I said and hung up.
Serena was watching me from across the table with both hands wrapped around her water glass.
"How much do you know," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. "Enough to have stayed quiet when I should not have." She set the glass down carefully. "I am sorry for that Amelia. I saw things that did not add up that night and I made the choice to say nothing and I have thought about that choice every single day since."
"What did you see."
"I saw Gabriella come in from the east side of the estate that night," she said. "Dry. Her clothes were completely dry. And she had been out there for twenty minutes apparently pulling Damien through the rain." She looked at me steadily. "I noticed and I said nothing because saying something meant going up against Victor and Elena and I was not ready to do that alone."
"Are you ready now."
She looked at me for a long moment. "Are you."
I picked up my phone and opened a new message and typed slowly and deliberately.
*Gabriella Crosswyn has been in direct communication with Ronan Blackridge for eight months. She has been feeding him information about pack movements, security rotations and elder council decisions. I have seen the messages. I can provide dates and details on request.*
I turned the screen to face Serena.
She read it and looked up. "Who are you sending that to."
"Elder Dowan."
Something moved across her face. "Amelia, if you send that to Dowan there is no walking it back. Not from him."
"I know."
"He will open a formal investigation. It will touch everyone including Damien."
"I know," I said again.
She looked at me for another moment and then she sat back in her chair. "Then send it."
I pressed send before I could talk myself out of it.
The screen showed delivered.
Then it showed read.
Serena and I sat in the quiet of her kitchen and waited.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
Then the phone buzzed in my hand and I looked down at Elder Dowan's response sitting in the blue bubble, four words that made the hair on my arms stand up completely.
Does he know what she is.
I stared at it.
Serena leaned forward. "What did he say."
I turned the screen to face her and watched her expression change in a way I had never seen on Serena's face before, something between recognition and fear landing at exactly the same time.
"Amelia," she said quietly. "What exactly did you marry into.”
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