Wrong love 2

Chapter Six: Everything He Gave

She noticed in first period.

Not immediately — it took approximately seven minutes, which was six minutes longer than it usually took her to read him because the classroom was full and the morning was loud and she'd been distracted by the specific low hum of something unsettled that had been sitting in the bond since she woke up.

His end of it.

Not pain. Not fear. Something quieter than both of those things and considerably harder to name. The specific texture of someone who has made a decision and is living in the aftermath of it — past the making, past the certainty, into the part where the consequences start arriving one by one and have to be met.

She looked at him across the classroom.

He was sitting at his desk with his textbook open in front of him and his pen in his hand and his silver eyes fixed on a point approximately six inches above the page that had nothing to do with the page.

Not reading.

Not writing.

Just — somewhere else entirely.

Jace Ryder, who was present in rooms the way very few people were present, who paid attention to everything as a matter of instinct and survival, who she had never once seen genuinely fail to engage with his surroundings —

Was somewhere else entirely.

She felt it through the bond more clearly now that she was looking — that low unsettled quality, that weight of something unresolved sitting in his chest and pulling his attention inward.

She turned back to her own textbook.

Gave him the morning.

He didn't get better in second period.

Or third.

By the time they reached the corridor between third and fourth she had accumulated enough evidence to stop waiting and simply ask — but the corridor was full and Jace moved through it with the automatic pilot of someone whose body knew the route even when the mind was elsewhere, and she matched his pace and watched him from the corner of her eye and said nothing yet.

Mason fell into step on his other side.

Caught Elara's eye over Jace's shoulder.

Gave her a look that said I know what it is and I'll tell you later and yes it's significant all in approximately one second.

She looked back forward.

Lunch, she decided.

She'd wait until lunch.

The courtyard was cold.

January doing what January did — pressing down low and grey and determined, the kind of cold that wasn't dramatic about itself but was absolutely committed. She sat across from Jace at their usual table with her hands wrapped around a coffee she wasn't drinking and watched him look at the food he wasn't eating and decided the waiting was over.

"Tell me," she said.

He looked up.

Silver eyes coming back from wherever they'd been all morning — focusing on her face with the gradual return of someone surfacing from deep water.

"Tell you what," he said.

"Whatever has been sitting in your chest since last night," she said. "I've been feeling it through the bond since I woke up."

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he set down his fork.

Leaned back in his chair.

And told her.

He told her about the dinner.

All of it — the table, the thirty-seven wolves, the silence that fell when he said her name and the explosion that followed when they understood what she was. He told her about Nathan's face. About the alpha title being placed on the table between them like a bargaining chip and what he'd said when it was.

He told her quietly.

Without drama. Without performing the weight of it — just laying it out, fact by fact, the way Jace laid most things out when he wanted her to understand them clearly rather than feel them first.

She listened without interrupting.

Around them the courtyard moved — other students, ordinary Tuesday lunch, the specific indifferent noise of a school that had no idea what was sitting at this particular table in the cold.

When he finished she was quiet for a moment.

"He took it," she said. "The title."

"Yes."

"And the house."

"Technically I offered the house," Jace said. "He accepted."

"Jace—"

"I'm moving out today," he said. "End of day. I've already arranged it."

She stared at him.

"Today," she said.

"I'm not going to sit in his house and have this argument every morning," Jace said. "It's not good for either of us. I have a place — I've had it for a while, actually. I bought it two years ago." A pause. "I don't entirely know why I bought it at the time. I think some part of me knew I'd need it eventually."

Elara looked at him.

At the silver eyes that were steady now — steadier than they'd been all morning, steadier than the bond had been since she woke up, as though the act of telling her had resolved something that had been sitting unresolved since last night.

"You gave up the alpha title," she said quietly.

"I gave up a title I never wanted," he said.

"You gave up your home."

"I gave up a house," he said. "There's a difference."

"Jace." Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "You gave up your family's—"

"I didn't give up my family," he said. "Cole is still Cole. Mason is still Mason. My mother—" He paused briefly. "My mother will come around. She always does." He looked at her. "I gave up a title and an address. That's all."

"That's not all," she said.

"Elara—"

"That is not all and you know it," she said. "Don't minimise it. Don't do that thing you do where you make enormous things sound like nothing because you've already processed them and moved on." She leaned forward slightly. "You sat at a table with your entire family last night — the night they buried your uncle, the night everything was already broken — and you told them you were marrying me. You gave up the thing your bloodline has been building toward for a thousand years."

He was quiet.

"I know what that cost," she said softly. "I felt it. I've been feeling it since last night through the bond. That's not nothing, Jace. That's everything."

He looked at her across the table.

The courtyard moved around them.

The cold pressed down.

Something in his expression shifted — the composure not breaking exactly, but becoming transparent, the way it did sometimes when she looked directly at the thing underneath it and refused to let him redirect her.

"It was an easy choice," he said quietly. "That's the honest answer. When it came down to it — in that moment, with my father looking at me and the title on the table — it was the easiest choice I've ever made." He held her gaze. "That's not minimising it. That's just true."

"Jace," she said.

"You are the easiest choice I have ever made," he said simply. "Every time. In every room. Against everything."

She looked at him.

At the ring on her finger.

At this wolf who had walked into a room full of grieving furious family and announced her name and then gone home and packed his things and arranged to be out by end of day.

For her.

Because she was the easiest choice.

She felt the bond between them — warm and steady and very much alive — and felt something in her chest that was too large for the cold courtyard and too real for a Tuesday lunch and entirely, completely true.

"I don't deserve you," she said quietly.

The corner of his mouth pulled up.

"You stepped in front of a smoke demon for me," he said. "And nearly died doing it. I think we're even."

She almost smiled.

"Your new place," she said. "Is it—"

"Three miles from yours," he said. "Yes. I checked."

She looked at him.

"You checked."

"I'm thorough," he said.

She shook her head slowly.

Looked down at the ring.

The pure gold catching what little winter light the grey sky was offering — warm and present and permanent.

"After school," she said.

"Mm."

"I'm helping you move," she said.

"You don't have to—"

"Jace."

He looked at her.

"I'm helping you move," she said again.

Something settled in his silver eyes.

That thing — the weight that had been sitting in the bond since last night, that low unsettled quality that had followed him through three periods of not concentrating — eased.

Not gone.

But eased.

He picked up his fork.

Actually started eating.

"Fine," he said. "You can help."

"How generous," she said.

"I thought so."

Mason dropped his tray onto the table beside them and looked between them with the specific radar of someone who had missed the conversation but was reading the aftermath of it accurately.

"Is everything—"

"Fine," Jace said.

"He's moving out today," Elara said simultaneously.

Mason looked at Jace.

"Today."

"Today."

"End of day today."

"Yes, Mason."

Mason picked up his sandwich.

"Cool," he said. "I'll bring boxes."

He brought seventeen boxes.

Which was — as Elara pointed out standing in the entrance hall of the Ryder estate at four in the afternoon surrounded by cardboard — excessive for one person.

"I have things," Mason said defensively.

"They're not your things," she said.

"I'm emotionally invested in his things."

Jace appeared at the top of the stairs with a bag over one shoulder and looked down at the seventeen boxes and then at Mason.

"Why," he said.

"I panicked," Mason said. "The shop had them."

Victoria found Jace in his room.

He was taking the last things from the shelf above his desk — books, mostly, and a few items that had been there so long they'd stopped being visible and had just become part of the room — when she appeared in the doorway.

He turned.

They looked at each other.

She came in.

Sat on the edge of the bed the way she had when he was young — centuries ago, a different world, a version of this room that had been smaller and louder and full of a boy who didn't know yet what a thousand years would make him.

"Your father," she said. "Means well."

"I know," Jace said.

"He's frightened," she said. "That's what that looked like last night. Fear."

"I know that too."

She looked at the shelf. At the spaces he was making.

"I haven't met her," Victoria said.

"No."

"I'd like to," she said. "When things are—" She paused. "When things are less."

Something moved in Jace's expression.

"I'll arrange it," he said quietly.

Victoria nodded.

Stood up.

Paused in the doorway.

"Your uncle," she said without turning around. "Would have had something extremely loud to say about all of this."

"Probably several things," Jace said.

"He would have come around," she said. "He always came around." A beat. "That's where you get it from, you know. The stubbornness."

"I thought I got that from you."

She turned then.

Looked at him.

The ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile but was in the same family as one.

"You got it from both of us," she said.

She left.

Jace stood in the room for a moment.

Looked at the shelf. The spaces. The shape of what he was leaving.

Then he picked up the last book.

Put it in the box.

And walked out.

By seven that evening the new place had seventeen boxes in it and Mason had already found the kitchen and was making something that smelled like it would eventually become food and Elara was standing in the main room looking out the window at the street below.

Three miles from her house.

She turned when she heard him come in.

He stood in the doorway of his own new space — smaller than the estate, quieter, with none of the centuries of history in its walls — and looked at it.

Then at her.

Standing in the window of his new place in the evening light with her blue-black pixie cut and the gold ring on her finger and the bond warm and present between them.

"How does it feel," she said softly.

He looked around the room.

At the boxes. The bare walls. The beginning of something rather than the continuation of something else.

"Like a start," he said.

She smiled.

Really smiled — full and warm and the one that he had said once, in an empty theater with a piano between them, had been the moment he knew.

He crossed the room.

Stood in front of her.

Tucked a strand of blue-black hair behind her ear.

"Our start," he said quietly. "When you're ready."

She looked up at him.

"I'm ready," she said.

The bond burned between them —

Warm.

Permanent.

Home.