THE MATE THE ROGUE ALPHA WAS MEANT TO KILL

Chapter 22—Home

Elara's POV

Principal Marcella appeared at the classroom door during third period and asked for me by name, and thirty pairs of eyes turned in my direction with the particular interest people reserved for someone being pulled out of class unexpectedly, the kind of attention that followed you down the hallway even after the door had closed behind you.

I gathered my things and followed her into the corridor without asking why, because her expression was not the kind that invited questions, careful and neutral in the way she got when something was happening that she had decided in advance not to comment on, and we walked in silence toward the main building with the morning light coming through the corridor windows in long pale strips across the floor.

"You have visitors," was all she said before opening the door to her office and stepping aside.

I walked in and stopped.

My mother was standing near the window with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes already on the door, and my father was beside her with his arms crossed and his jaw tight in the way it got when he was holding something in, and for one second none of us moved.

Then my mother crossed the room and pulled me into her arms and held on, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I had not realised was still wound tight.

"My girl," she said quietly against my hair, and that was all it took.

I held her back and breathed her in and felt seventeen months of carrying something alone dissolve somewhere in the space between one breath and the next.

My father's hand landed on my shoulder from behind, warm and steady, and I turned and he pulled me in too and said nothing at all, because he was a man who had never needed many words when the right ones were taking too long to arrive.

We stood like that for a moment, the three of us, while Principal Marcella found somewhere else to be.

My mother pulled back first and held my face in both her hands and looked at me the way she always had, like she was checking for something specific and was satisfied with what she found.

"We heard about the shift," my father said, his voice rougher than usual in the way it got when he was feeling something he had not fully processed yet. "Blood moon. First one in Draven in over a decade."

"I know," I said.

"We should have been there," my mother said, and there was something behind her eyes when she said it that went past the words.

"You couldn't have known it was going to happen then."

"Still." She smoothed my hair back from my face, a gesture so familiar it settled something in me. "We should have been there."

My father sat down in one of the chairs across from the principal's desk and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at me directly.

"We want you to know something, Elara. The months before your shift, everything you went through here, we knew. Maybe not every detail but we knew it was not easy and we want you to know that not once, not for a single day, did we doubt you."

I looked at him.

"Your bloodline does not define your worth," he said. "We never needed you to shift to be proud of you, we were already proud, we have always been proud."

My mother's hand found mine and held it.

I had not known how much I needed to hear that said out loud by them specifically until the moment it was, and something in me that had been quietly displaced for a very long time settled back into place with the weight of something that had been waiting a long time to land properly. I stood in that office with the morning light coming through the windows and felt it go all the way down.

We talked for a while after that, the three of us sitting together while the school carried on without me somewhere outside the door, and it was easy in the way things were easy between people who knew each other completely and did not need to perform anything for each other.

My mother asked about my friends and smiled at the mention of Leo and Freya and Nyx, and my father asked about training and I told them about Kael's session on the field and watched his expression shift into quiet approval, the kind he reserved for things he considered genuinely worthwhile, and for a little while the last several months felt less like something I had survived alone and more like something that had simply happened on the way to here, to this room, to this moment with the two of them sitting across from me like everything was exactly as it should be.

When it was time for them to go my mother stood and straightened her jacket and looked around the office once like she was committing it to memory, and then she turned to me and hugged me again, tighter this time, and I felt her take a breath against my shoulder that was slightly longer than it needed to be.

She pulled back and looked at me, and I watched something move across her face, a thought or a decision arriving and then being carefully set aside, her mouth opening slightly and then closing again, and I felt it the way you felt things that were being held back, like pressure behind glass.

"Mum," I said quietly. "What is it?"

She looked at me for a moment longer, something careful sitting in her expression, and then she shook her head slightly and smiled and touched my cheek with the back of her hand.

"Nothing," she said. "Just that I love you."

She turned and walked out with my father, and I stood in the empty office and looked at the door long after it had closed behind them, because whatever she had decided not to say was still sitting in the room with me, and I had no idea what it was but I knew without question that it was not nothing.