WRONG LOVE 2: CHOICES

Chapter Nineteen: The Enemy of My Enemy

Three weeks since the carnival.

Three weeks of Shawn showing up at her door with the specific regularity of someone who had decided to be present and had not revisited that decision. Coffee sometimes. Walks sometimes. Sitting in comfortable silence sometimes — which she had not expected from him, the silence, had expected the cold exterior to make silence awkward and had found instead that his silences had the same quality as his presence.

They required nothing.

She gave nothing she didn't want to give.

He stayed anyway.

She had stopped telling him not to come.

She hadn't examined what that meant.

It was a Wednesday evening.

The house quiet around them in the specific way it was quiet on evenings when nothing was required — no attacks in three days, no Aaron appearing with his decided look, no Sydney in corridors. Just the house and the sofa and the stuffed wolf on the nightstand visible through the open bedroom door.

Shawn had appeared at six with food he hadn't explained and a film he'd pulled up on the screen before she'd fully processed that they were watching something.

"What is this," she said.

"Problem Child," he said.

She looked at the screen.

"This is a children's film."

"It's a comedy," he said.

"Shawn—"

"Sit down, Elara."

She sat down.

Fifteen minutes in she laughed for the second time since April.

Not the surprised small laugh of the carnival — this one built. Started as a smile she tried to contain and became something she couldn't contain and then became actual laughter, real and warm and entirely undignified, at a children's film on a Wednesday evening with a cold dangerous alpha wolf sitting beside her on her sofa eating whatever he'd brought.

He didn't laugh.

She'd noticed that about him — Shawn didn't laugh the way other people laughed. He smiled sometimes, the almost-smile that was more in the eyes than the mouth, and occasionally something moved in his expression that was in the same family as amusement. But laughter — full laughter — she hadn't heard it yet.

What he did instead was watch her laugh.

With those storm grey eyes doing the warm thing — the thing she'd seen at the carnival, the specific quality of someone who has decided that this person's happiness is something they want to be in proximity to.

She didn't examine that either.

She watched the film.

She laughed.

The bond was silent in her chest and the ring was on her finger and the shirt was on the pillow and the stuffed wolf was on the nightstand and she was watching a children's comedy on a sofa with an alpha wolf she hadn't known two months ago —

And she was laughing.

Both things can be true, she thought.

She watched the film.

The knock came forty minutes in.

Three knocks.

Not Shawn's cadence — she knew his cadence now, had catalogued it without meaning to the way she catalogued things about people she spent time with. This was different. Lighter. The specific knock of someone who found knocking faintly amusing and was putting that into the knock.

She frowned.

Looked at Shawn.

He had gone very still.

Not the comfortable still of someone pausing a film. The other kind. The kind that lived in the body of a predator that has identified something and is in the process of deciding what to do about the identification.

"Shawn—"

"Don't open it," he said.

She looked at him.

Three more knocks.

Lighter again. With a rhythm to them now — almost playful. The knock of someone who found the act of waiting outside a door entertaining and intended to keep knocking until the entertainment resolved itself.

"Who is it," she said.

Shawn's jaw tightened.

That was answer enough.

She stood up.

"Elara—"

She crossed to the door.

Opened it.

Max Ryder stood on her doorstep.

She knew him immediately — had known him before the door was fully open, had known from the knock, from the rhythm of it, from the specific quality of someone who moved through the world like everything in it was there for their amusement and had decided her front door was the current entertainment.

He looked exactly as she remembered.

The smile. That smile — loose and bright and entirely disconnected from anything behind it, like someone had installed it without connecting it to the mechanism that made smiles mean something.

Dark eyes moving over her with the cheerful assessment of someone cataloguing information they find interesting.

"Vampire," he said warmly. "You look terrible."

She stared at him.

At the smile.

At the face that had sat across from her at a family dinner once — the face she'd been told belonged to the wolf who had killed Malachar's children and started a war and separated her and Jace because the world had become too dangerous for them to be together —

Something moved through her.

Not cold.

Hot.

She pushed him.

Both hands. Against his chest. All the vampire strength she had directed into her palms and shoved.

He staggered back.

Not far — he was a wolf and wolves didn't move easily — but enough. Enough that the smile flickered for half a second. Enough that his dark eyes registered surprise before the smile came back.

"Elara—" From inside. Shawn's voice.

She pushed Max again.

"You," she said.

"Now—"

She pushed him a third time.

Harder.

He staggered back further this time — off the step, onto the path — and the smile did something complicated, like it was trying to decide whether to stay or become something else.

"You did this," she said.

Her voice was shaking.

She hadn't known it was going to shake. She hadn't prepared for this — hadn't prepared for Max Ryder on her doorstep on a Wednesday evening, hadn't prepared for the specific fury that had been sitting in her chest since April waiting for somewhere to go and had just found it.

"You made him leave," she said. "You are the reason. You—" She pushed him again, flat of her palm against his chest, "—started a war. You killed those children. You reignited everything and the fallout of it — the hunters, Malachar, the attacks—" Her voice cracked. "He left because of you. He left me because of what you started."

Max looked at her.

The smile had settled into something different now — not gone, never fully gone with Max, but underneath it something that might have been the closest thing to taking something seriously that Max Ryder was capable of.

"Careful, vampire," he said softly. "You're upset."

"You backstabbing wolf," she said. "You backstabbing son of a—"

"Elara."

Shawn's voice.

From directly behind her.

She hadn't heard him cross the room.

She hadn't heard him reach the door.

She was aware of him now — behind her, close, the specific warmth of a wolf at full alert — and she was aware that the quality of the silence between him and Max had changed.

She stepped back.

Looked between them.

Max and Shawn looked at each other.

And what happened in the space between them had nothing to do with her.

This was older than her front doorstep. Older than tonight. Something that lived between two specific people and had its own history and its own temperature and its own specific flavour of unresolved that had apparently been waiting for exactly this doorstep on exactly this Wednesday evening to find its expression.

Max's smile went very still.

"Shawn," he said.

"Max," Shawn said.

Two names.

Like weapons being identified.

"It's been a while," Max said.

"Not long enough," Shawn said.

Something moved in Max's expression — the first real thing she'd seen move in it, the first thing that cracked the performance of the smile and showed something underneath. Not fear — Max Ryder didn't do fear. But recognition. The specific recognition of someone who has encountered the one thing in the world that their particular brand of chaos cannot entirely dismiss.

"You look well," Max said pleasantly.

"You need to leave," Shawn said.

"I just got here—"

"Now, Max."

"—and your hospitality leaves something—"

Shawn moved.

What happened next was fast.

Not the controlled efficiency of Jace fighting — different. Rawer. The specific quality of something personal, something that had been waiting, something that had approximately two centuries of history behind it and had just been handed a location and a Wednesday evening and had decided the waiting was over.

Shawn hit Max with everything that history had been accumulating.

Max — to his credit, or perhaps simply to his nature — absorbed it with the cheerful resilience of someone who had been hit many times by many things and found the experience interesting rather than deterrent. He fought back. Of course he fought back — Max always fought back, it was perhaps the one consistent thing about him, the one place where the chaos became something almost focused.

They went through her entrance hall.

The wall received them.

The wall did not enjoy the experience.

She stood in the doorway watching two wolves dismantle her entrance hall with the specific detached attention of someone who has moved past shock into the territory of cataloguing information for later processing.

It didn't last long.

Max was good.

Shawn was better.

Or rather — Shawn was motivated in a way that had no ceiling to it, and motivation, she had learned over three centuries, was frequently the deciding factor.

Max hit the front path.

Hard.

He lay there for a moment.

Then — slowly, with the unhurried dignity of someone who has decided that the ground is simply another place to be — he got up.

Straightened his jacket.

Looked at Shawn in the doorway.

And smiled.

That smile.

The full one. The real one. The one that had nothing connected behind it and everything performed in front of it.

"Lovely evening," he said pleasantly. "We should do this again."

He turned.

Walked down the path.

At the gate he paused.

Looked back.

Not at Shawn.

At Elara.

"He misses you, you know," he said casually. "For what it's worth."

Then he laughed.

That laugh — the one she'd heard described by Jace and Cole and Nathan in tones that ranged from exhausted to genuinely concerned — high and bright and entirely disconnected from anything that warranted it.

It followed him down the street.

Until it didn't.

Until he was gone.

She looked at the entrance hall.

At the wall.

At Shawn standing in the doorway with his jaw tight and his storm grey eyes on the street where Max had been and something working in his expression that she had never seen there before.

Not the cold.

Not the warmth he'd been producing at unexpected intervals.

Something older than both of those things.

Old anger.

The specific kind that had been kept somewhere for a long time and had not diminished with keeping.

"Shawn," she said.

He turned.

Looked at her.

Took a breath.

"Come inside," he said.

She made tea.

She didn't know why she made tea — she didn't drink tea, didn't need tea, but her hands needed something to do and the kettle and the cups gave her hands something and she stood in the kitchen making tea for a wolf she wasn't sure she trusted anymore and tried to get her breathing back to something regular.

He sat at the kitchen table.

She put a cup in front of him.

Sat across from him.

Looked at him.

"Talk," she said.

He looked at the cup.

"The Ryder family," he said. "I've known them for a long time."

"How long."

"Long enough," he said. "Jace and I—" He stopped. Something moved in his jaw. "We were close once. A long time ago. Before—"

"Before Max," she said.

He looked at her.

"Before Max," he confirmed. "What Max did — not this. Not Malachar's children. Before that. Years before that." He looked at the cup again. "Something he took. Something that mattered. Something that—" He stopped again. "It doesn't matter what specifically. What matters is that it cost me something I didn't get back and Max thought it was funny."

She waited.

"So I made a decision," he said quietly.

"What decision."

He looked at her.

Directly.

Storm grey eyes holding hers with the specific quality of someone about to say something they know will land hard and have decided to say it anyway because anything else would be dishonest.

"The Ryder family," he said. "All of them. I swore I'd eliminate every last one of them."

The kitchen went very quiet.

She sat very still.

"Every one," she said.

"Every one," he said.

"That includes—"

"I know who it includes," he said.

She looked at him.

At the storm grey eyes that were holding hers and not flinching and not retreating and not offering her anything that softened what he'd just said.

"You swore to kill Jace," she said.

He said nothing.

Which was, from Shawn, confirmation.

She stood up.

Slowly.

The chair pushed back.

She looked at him across the kitchen table — at this wolf who had appeared in a forest and said stand down and taken her to a carnival and watched her laugh and sat beside her on a sofa watching a children's comedy —

Who had sworn to kill the person she loved.

"Get out of my house," she said.

"Elara—"

"Get out."

"If you'd let me explain—"

"You just explained," she said. "You explained perfectly clearly. Get out of my house."

"It's more complicated than—"

"GET OUT."

He stood.

Slowly. Like he was doing it on his own timeline and her instruction was one input among several he was considering.

He crossed to the door.

Stopped.

Turned.

"I haven't touched him," he said. "In all this time. I could have. Multiple times I could have."

"That's not—"

"I'm telling you it's complicated," he said. "I'm asking you to let it be complicated before you decide what it means."

She looked at him.

"Get out of my house, Shawn," she said. Quieter now. Which was worse.

He held her gaze for one more moment.

Then he left.

The door closed.

She stood in the kitchen.

Alone.

She pressed her hand flat against the table.

Felt the gold ring press into the wood.

He swore to eliminate every last one of them.

I know who it includes.

She looked at the stuffed wolf visible through the bedroom door.

At its wonky eyes.

At the nightstand where the ring lived at night.

She needed answers.

She needed them from someone who knew the Ryder family and knew Shawn and knew the history between them and had been there for whatever Max had done years ago that had started all of this.

She needed answers from the most unbelievable source available to her.

She pressed her hands to her face.

Thought about the cheerful psychotic laugh disappearing down her street.

He misses you, you know.

She dropped her hands.

Looked at the ceiling.

"I need to find Max Ryder," she said to the empty kitchen.

The empty kitchen offered no opinion on this plan.

She picked up her jacket.