From Hell to Alpha

Chapter 4 — The House That Would Not Soften

We stayed in the council room because this was our house and this was the room where hard words belonged. The windows showed a strip of gray sky and the oak that had grown here before either of us was born. The table between us was wide, polished, and useless. It did not help two people cross it.

Jones stood on one side with his hands set flat like he could press the moment into a better shape. I stood on the other and did not give ground.

“She will not stay here," I said. My voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. The words were the line.

His jaw tightened. “I can't believe you. After everything, you would refuse a sick woman a room?"

“I refuse to host my own humiliation," I said. “I refuse to pretend this house is large enough to hold your first love and your wife without splitting down the middle."

His eyes flashed the way they did when orders were challenged. “You call that humiliation. I call it compassion."

“Compassion has an address," I said. “Clinic. Cottage. Any place that is not this room, this roof, this bed that still remembers my shape."

He pushed away from the table like the wood had burned him. “I always thought you were the one who was fair. The one who would see beyond yourself."

“I do see beyond myself," I said. “I see what happens to a marriage when you drag a ghost inside and give her a key."

He laughed once, hard, like a bark. “Ghost? She's flesh and blood and hurting. She needs care."

“And I need respect," I answered. “She can have one without stealing the other."

We stared at each other. The clock on the far shelf clicked like a throat clearing. Rain dragged its knuckles across the window and then let go. Nothing else in the house moved. Even the dust held its breath.

He tried again with a softer tone that had worked before the gate, before the jungle, before the things that changed my spine. “Isabella, be reasonable. She will be quiet. She will keep to a room. A week, two at most."

“You said months this morning," I said. “Don't bend the word just because it looks ugly in the light."

He rubbed his thumb over the edge of the table. “I am trying to do right."

“Then start with me," I said.

The door opened before he could answer. A blur of pale cloth came in fast and stopped two steps inside as if the room itself caught her. Sophia. She was thinner than the last time I saw her in this same house. The scarf at her throat was a shade that made people think of forgiveness.

“I'm sorry," she gasped, breath shaking. “This is my fault. I shouldn't have come back. I shouldn't have asked for anything." Her eyes shone. She spread her hands as if offering the room back to us, then pressed them to her chest the way people do when they want their pain to be witnessed. “Please don't fight because of me."

Jones turned toward her like a compass finds north. “Sophia—"

She shook her head. “No. I'll leave. I'll go now. I can't bear to break what you have." The words tripped over one another and still found their marks.

I said nothing because there was nothing to add to a performance that had already decided its ending. The air around her seemed to thin. Her knees bent. Her face drained. Then she folded down in a slow collapse that looked graceful because she had practiced making weakness look like grace.

“Sophia!" Jones lunged, catching her before she hit the floor. He lifted her like a man who had done this before—one arm under knees, one under shoulders, careful with the scarf, careful with the story. He looked at me across her pale face, and the look said more than any sentence: This is what you made me do.

“Call the physician," he ordered into the hall. “Now."

Footsteps answered. A guard's shadow crossed the threshold and vanished. Jones took three long strides and the room let him go. The door banged against the frame and then caught itself. The clock remembered to tick again.

Silence filled in what they left. I let it. I pressed my fingertips to the table until the skin went white, then released and watched the color return. The oak outside lifted once in the wind and settled back to its work of being rooted.

Hours seeped into each other after that, though the day was still the same day. No one came to tell me how she was. No one asked whether I needed anything. When I finally stood and stepped into the corridor, a guard straightened. He was young enough to look sorry and old enough to obey orders.

“I'd like to see the Alpha," I said.

“I'm sorry, Luna," he said, and I believed that he was. “He's asked not to be disturbed."

“He can be disturbed by me," I said. “Move."

Another guard appeared behind him as if the house had produced a second spine. “Physician's orders," he added, eyes lowered. “Quiet is best right now."

I smiled without humor. “For whom?"

Neither answered. They didn't need to. I could see the answer in the way they placed their bodies between me and the hall that led to the guest wing. It was the same answer I had found at the camp when a door closed and stayed closed: Not for you.

I went back to the council room because it was the only room that still felt true. The table remembered what we said. The chairs remembered how we held ourselves. I sat with my back to the oak window and made myself breathe in counts of four. Control is a muscle; you keep it by using it.

Night took the light out of the windows piece by piece. A maid left a tray near the threshold like you do with a stray animal you don't want to startle. I didn't touch it. My phone sat on the table like a small flat heart that refused to beat.

When it finally did, the vibration rattled against the wood. A message lit the screen. Unknown number, but the rhythm of the words wore a familiar shape.

Meet me at the east cliff. We should talk. —J

I stared at the single letter. It could have been anyone. It looked like him. It felt like him. It hit me as if it were him.

I stood. I shrugged into my coat. My hand was on the latch before the thought of dignity could speak. In the corridor, the same guard stepped into my path. I lifted my phone. “He asked for me."

The guard's eyes flicked to the screen, then to my face. A second passed while he measured duty against sense. Then he shifted half a step, not enough to be disobedience and just enough to be human. I walked past without thanks because gratitude would break what I was trying to keep straight inside myself.

The house was quiet in the way houses get when they are listening. The front door let in a slice of night and shut on it. Gravel moved under my boots. The air had the clean bite it gets after rain. I cut across the side path and through the stand of pines because I knew their spacing from every morning I had spent trying not to be looked at. The lights in the upper windows glowed like a story I was no longer in.

At the gate, the watch changed. The old guard gave a nod that could be read three ways and chose none of them. The new guard checked the dark beyond the lamp and pretended not to see me go. I went.

The east path climbed in a curve that calves remember. Trees gave way to rock, rock gave way to scrub. The wind rose and flattened my coat against my legs. The creek below made the same argument it always made, steady and unconcerned with what people decided above it. My breath kept pace. My anger did not. It lagged behind, confused by a message that had come like a rope thrown backward into a storm.

I reached the top and stepped onto the ledge. The cliff held its shape the way it had the day before and the day before that. I stopped three strides in, enough to see the edge, enough to stay safe from it. No one stood there. I did not call his name. I had learned not to call names into empty air.

I waited. Waiting can be an action if you choose it.

Wind slid along the rock and tugged at my hair. The mist left on the trees separated into small threads and melted. Seconds collected and became minutes. I checked the phone and read the same short line again. Meet me. We should talk. —J. My thumb hovered over reply and did not lower. If he had sent it, he already knew I was here. If he had not, my answer would go where I did not intend to send it.

A sound came from the right: not the footfall of a wolf, not the heavy stride of a man. A smaller, careful step. A figure separated from the treeline, pale where the fog had thinned and darker where the branches brushed her shoulders.

Sophia.

She came out onto the stone with the kind of balance that looks like fragility and is actually practice. The scarf at her throat had been tied again. Her hands were empty. Her face was composed in the gentle way that makes other faces want to be kinder.

I did not move closer. I did not speak. I watched her watch me, and I understood what the message meant.

It had not been from him.

The creek below kept talking to the stones. The wind braided our hair in opposite directions and let it go. The edge waited, patient and exact. I set my feet where the grit told me to stand and made my body quiet.

We were two women on a rock that had no opinion. The sky pulled a dark cloth over the light and the light did not argue. I could feel the house behind me, the guards at the gate, the oak in the window, the table that would remember what came next. I could feel the word No still lying where I had put it down hours ago.

I didn't pick it back up. I didn't say anything at all.