WRONG LOVE 2: CHOICES

Chapter Twenty: Glass and Ghosts

She found the Ryder estate on foot.

Not because she couldn't drive — because walking felt necessary tonight. Because the city between her house and the estate gave her something to move through and moving through things was currently the closest she had to a plan for what was sitting in her chest.

Shawn's voice.

Every last one of them.

I know who it includes.

She walked.

The estate gates were open when she arrived.

Not broken — not forced. Simply open. The specific carelessness of a house that had stopped expecting visitors or had stopped caring about them. The iron that had always looked imposing from the street looked different now. Just metal. Just a gate that wasn't doing its job.

She pushed through.

Walked up the oak corridor.

The trees on either side were the same trees — ancient, enormous, indifferent to the fact that the family they'd been framing for centuries had scattered to various corners of a war and left them standing here watching nobody arrive.

She knocked on the front door.

Waited.

Nothing.

She knocked again.

Nothing.

She tried the handle.

It opened.

The entrance hall was dark.

Not dramatically dark — not the dark of somewhere that had been sealed and forgotten. The ordinary dark of a house where nobody had turned the lights on today. The curtains were drawn in the rooms she could see from the doorway and the specific smell of a house between occupancies — not abandoned, not lived in — hung in the air.

"Max," she said.

Her voice went into the hall and came back.

No answer.

"Max Ryder."

Nothing.

She stood in the doorway for a moment.

Then she stepped inside.

The entrance hall held the ghosts of the dinner.

She could feel it — the specific atmospheric residue of something significant that had happened in a space. Thirty-seven wolves around a table. Jace's voice saying her name into the silence. Nathan's face. The cracked plaster on the wall where he'd put Max.

She looked at the wall.

The plaster had been repaired.

Someone had repaired it and not told anyone and she found that detail — the quiet anonymous repair of damage that hadn't been publicly acknowledged — more affecting than it had any right to be.

She moved through the hall.

Into the corridor.

Looking for Max.

Finding instead the quiet of a house that had held too much and was now holding nothing.

The study first.

Nathan's study — dark wood and old books and the desk that had been there for four hundred years. She stood in the doorway and looked at it and felt the weight of it and moved on.

The sitting room.

Victoria's chair by the window still held the shape of someone who sat there often. A photograph on the side table — she didn't let herself look at it directly. Looked at the floor instead. Moved on.

The dining room.

The table still extended to its full length.

All the leaves still in.

Like nobody had been able to bring themselves to reduce it back to ordinary size after the night it had held thirty-seven wolves and a secret and a son who had looked his father in the eye and said take it. I never wanted it anyway.

She looked at the table for a long time.

Moved on.

The corridor that led to the family rooms had a wall.

She almost walked past it.

She stopped.

The wall had three frames on it — side by side, evenly spaced, the kind of deliberate arrangement that meant someone had cared about the placement.

Diplomas.

She moved closer.

The first one —

Cole Ryder.

A degree. Old — the institution named on it no longer existed by that name, had been renamed sometime in the last century. Philosophy. With a distinction that the formal language of the certificate made sound understated.

She looked at it.

Thought about Cole — quiet, steady Cole who had chosen peace deliberately and made it look like nature — and felt something soft move through her.

The second —

Maxwell Ryder.

She stared at it.

A degree. Sciences. The same institution as Cole's, the same era. The grades listed were extraordinary — not just good, not just passing, the kind of academic achievement that required a specific type of mind. Focused. Precise. Capable of extraordinary concentration when it chose to apply itself.

She looked at it for a long time.

Thought about Max's smile.

About the precision behind the chaos.

About a mind capable of this choosing destruction instead.

She moved to the third.

Jace Ryder.

She pressed her hand flat against the wall beside the frame.

Not touching the certificate itself.

Just — beside it.

His name in formal script on aged paper. A different field — history, literature, something that surprised her for half a second before it didn't, before she thought about the piano melody and the four hundred years and the thousand years of accumulation that produced a wolf who chose those subjects because he had lived through the ones he was studying.

She read every word.

His name at the top.

His name at the bottom.

His name in the institution's formal language of achievement and completion.

Her eyes stung.

She took her hand off the wall.

Kept walking.

His room was at the end of the corridor.

She knew it before she opened the door — knew it the way she knew things about him that she'd learned without meaning to, the way months of living alongside someone deposits knowledge in you that you didn't ask for and can't return.

She pushed the door open.

Stood in the frame.

The room was dark.

She reached for the light.

Found it.

It looked like him.

That was the first thing — not the furniture or the layout, those were just objects in a space. The quality of it. The specific atmosphere of a room that had been occupied by one person for long enough that it had taken on their particular character.

Dark. Ordered. The kind of order that wasn't sterile but intentional — everything in its place not because someone had arranged it but because the person who lived here had always known where things belonged and put them there.

Books.

She looked at the shelves.

Ran her finger along the spines without pulling any of them out. History. Philosophy. A handful of things in languages she recognised and a handful in ones she didn't. One shelf of things that had no business being in the same collection as the others — lighter, casual, the books you read when you want to stop thinking — and the fact of that shelf, the evidence of him wanting to stop thinking sometimes, made her chest do something complicated.

His desk.

Still had things on it.

Small things — the things you leave behind when you pack quickly, when you're taking what matters and leaving the rest. A pen. A notebook closed and unremarkable. Something small she didn't examine.

His window.

Looking out over the east garden.

Victoria's garden — the one she'd planted four hundred years ago and tended every season. From here you could see the whole of it, laid out in the winter-grey with the specific patience of something that had been growing for a long time and intended to keep growing.

She stood at his window.

Looked at the garden.

Pressed her hand to her chest.

The silence.

Always the silence.

"Where are you," she said quietly.

To the garden. To the silence. To the north-east that had stopped telling her anything months ago.

No answer.

She pressed harder.

"Where are you."

Her eyes filled.

She let them.

Stood at his window in his room in the house he'd left for her and cried — quietly, briefly, the specific crying of someone who has found an unexpected ambush of grief in a room that smelled like pine and old books and him.

Three breaths.

Four.

She wiped her face.

Turned from the window.

Turned from the room.

Turned from his name on a diploma in a corridor and his books on a shelf and the garden he'd grown up looking at.

Max was not here.

The conclusion she'd been arriving at room by room crystallised in the corridor outside his door.

Not here.

Not today. Maybe not for a long time.

The house was empty of everyone — Nathan, Victoria, Cole, Max — the war and its consequences having scattered the Ryder family to wherever the Ryder family had scattered to and left this house holding their ghosts and their diplomas and their repaired plaster and their extended dining room table.

She stood in the corridor.

Looked at the three frames.

At his name.

And something shifted.

Not grief this time.

The other thing. The thing that had been sitting underneath the grief since she'd walked through the front door — patient, waiting for the grief to have its moment and step aside.

Anger.

She looked at the diploma.

At the house around her — empty and quiet and holding the shape of a family that had been blown apart by one member's deliberate calculated decision to detonate everything in reach.

You made him leave.

You started a war.

You backstabbing son of a—

She turned.

The first thing that went was in the sitting room.

A vase on the mantelpiece — expensive, old, the kind of thing that had been in a room long enough to become invisible to the people who lived with it. She didn't plan it. She was walking past and her hand moved and the vase hit the fireplace and the sound it made —

The sound it made was satisfying in a way she hadn't anticipated.

She stopped.

Looked at the pieces.

Looked at her hand.

Looked at the mantelpiece and the other things on it.

She picked up the next one.

A candlestick — ornate, silver, the kind of thing that required regular polishing and had clearly been receiving it because it caught even the dim light of the drawn-curtain sitting room with a gleam that was very nearly smug about itself.

She threw it at the wall.

The sound was different. Louder. The dent it left in the plaster beside the already-repaired section was significant.

She looked at it.

Good, she thought.

She moved to the cabinet.

Glass-fronted. Old. The kind of furniture that contained the specific category of objects that people put in glass-fronted cabinets — the things too valuable for regular use and too significant to store out of sight. Pieces collected over centuries by people who had lived long enough to collect things.

She opened it.

Looked at the contents.

Thought about Malachar's children.

Thought about a war reignited.

Thought about a forest in April and rain and I'm never coming back.

Thought about Shawn's voice at her kitchen table.

Every last one of them.

She picked up the first piece.

A crystal decanter — heavy, expensive, the kind of thing that would have cost a great deal even before it was old and was worth considerably more now.

She looked at it.

This is for the children, she thought.

She threw it at the fireplace.

The sound it made was extraordinary.

She picked up the next one.

This is for the war.

Against the wall.

The next.

This is for every wolf that came through the back door.

The floor.

The next.

This is for the forest.

The fireplace again because the fireplace was a satisfying target.

This is for the ring he put on my finger and the promise he made and the bond oath and the piano and the field and all of it—

She was breathing hard.

Her hands were shaking.

Not from exertion — from the specific physical expression of something that had been contained for months finally finding a direction and going in it with everything it had.

She looked at what was left in the cabinet.

She looked at the room.

At the pieces across the floor — crystal and ceramic and a hundred years of careful accumulation undone in three minutes by a vampire who had walked into the wrong house looking for the wrong wolf and found instead a room full of things that needed breaking.

She stood in the middle of it.

Breathing.

Hands still shaking.

"Feel better?"

She spun.

Max Ryder stood in the doorway of the sitting room.

Jacket on. Dark eyes moving across the room with the cheerful interest of someone taking in a scene they find entertaining. The smile. Always the smile.

She stared at him.

"You," she said.

"Me," he agreed pleasantly.

"Where did you—"

"Back door," he said. "I heard the first thing go and thought — well. This should be interesting." His eyes moved to the fireplace. To the floor. Back to her. "You've been busy."

She looked at him.

At the smile.

At the dark eyes that were watching her with that specific quality — not malicious, not threatened, simply interested. The way Max watched everything. Like the world was a performance he'd been given front row seats to and was determined to enjoy.

"I need answers," she said.

"I imagine you do," he said.

"About Shawn," she said. "About what you did to him. About the history between you and what he swore and why—" She stopped. "I need to understand."

Max looked at her for a long moment.

At the ring on her finger.

At the broken things on the floor of his family's sitting room.

At the vampire who had come to his house looking for him and had, in his absence, redecorated.

Something moved in his expression.

Not the smile. Underneath the smile.

Something that was almost, almost —

Real.

"Sit down, Elara," he said.

She looked at the broken things on every available surface.

"The sofa's fine," he said.

She sat on the sofa.

Max came into the room.

Stepped over a piece of crystal without looking at it.

Sat in the chair across from her.

Folded his hands.

And for the first time since she'd known of his existence —

Max Ryder stopped smiling.

"Alright," he said quietly. "Let me tell you about Shawn."