Elaris‘s Cruelest Gift

What Garrick Wanted

# Chapter 5 — What Garrick Wanted Done

They put me in a room with a locked door and called it hospitality.

Technically nobody said the word "locked." Technically a woman named Priya-who-was-not-Priya — I'd stopped trusting my own grip on names about ten minutes into the chaos — had shown me to "a place to rest while things get sorted," with an apologetic smile that didn't match the two very large, very silent men who'd walked me there and were now, as far as I could tell through the gap under the door, still standing in the hallway.

I sat on the edge of an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house three states from anything I recognized, staring at the pale scar on my wrist like it might rearrange itself back into something ordinary if I looked hard enough, and tried very deliberately not to fall apart.

It ends with her killing him. That's what the seer had said. Not *might.* Not *could.* *Ends.*

I heard raised voices before I heard the actual words — Ronan's, low and controlled in the particular way of a man working very hard not to shout, and another man's, older, harder, cutting through the walls with the flat certainty of someone used to being obeyed.

"—not a discussion, Ronan. You know the history. You know exactly what happened the last time this bloodline surfaced."

"I know what a two-hundred-year-old story says happened. I don't know that it's true."

"Maren confirmed the mark herself. In front of the entire gathering. You want to gamble the pack's future on hope instead of history?"

"I want to gamble on the fact that she is a person, Garrick, not a weapon that's already gone off. She didn't do anything tonight except get her wrist grabbed by a stranger and told she's destined to be a murderer at a party she thought was a family dinner."

"That's exactly the problem. She doesn't know what she is yet. That's the only reason she hasn't already—"

"Don't finish that sentence."

A long, taut silence. I'd crept close enough to the door to hear clearly now, pulse loud in my own ears, one hand pressed flat against the wood like I could absorb the conversation through touch alone.

"I've watched a bloodline like this before," Garrick said, quieter now, and something in his voice had shifted from cold command into something that sounded, unbearably, like grief dressed up as pragmatism. "Not this exact one. But I watched a prophecy like this play out once, thirty years ago, in another territory, with an Alpha who trusted the bond the same way you're about to. I watched what happened when he was wrong. I am not going to stand here and watch it happen to you."

"So your solution is what, exactly? Say it plainly. I want to hear you say it."

"You know what my solution is."

"Say it."

"Remove the threat before it activates." Garrick's voice didn't waver. "Quietly. Before she even understands what's happening to her. It would be over before she felt a thing, Ronan, and you'd still be alive to lead this pack for another fifty years instead of ending up a cautionary tale in somebody else's old records."

I stopped breathing.

"No." Ronan's voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before — flat, absolute, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with volume. "Say that again. I want to make sure I heard you correctly, because I think you just suggested murdering the woman Elaris promised me, in my own house, while she's sitting in a room I put her in myself."

"I suggested protecting the pack. You're letting a decade of wanting this to be real cloud—"

"I have wanted this to be real for ten years," Ronan said, and something in his voice cracked, just slightly, just enough that I heard the exhausted, furious grief underneath the control. "You have no idea what it's like to be promised something your whole life and start to think it's a story adults tell heirs to keep them patient. I found her, Garrick. She's real. She's terrifying and sharp and she made a joke about a poetry-reciting bar patron the first night I met her, and I have thought about that joke more times in the last month than I've thought about anything else in a decade. I am not going to let you touch her."

"Then you're choosing a prophecy over your own pack's safety."

"I'm choosing to find another way. There's always been another way, Garrick — you taught me that yourself, years ago, before you decided the fastest solution was always the right one. Maren said the bloodline story is two hundred years old. Nobody's actually read the whole thing. Not you, not me, not even her, not really — just the ending everyone's terrified of. I want the whole record. I want to know exactly how the curse works before anyone in this pack so much as looks at Ivy Calloway wrong."

Silence again, longer this time. When Garrick spoke next, his voice had lost its edge, settling into something tired and old and, worse than anger, afraid.

"And if the full record says exactly what the ending already told us? If there's no other way?"

"Then I'll find one anyway," Ronan said. "Because the alternative is unacceptable to me. All of it. Every version where she doesn't get to choose what happens to her."

I sat back down on the edge of the bed, hands shaking, the scar on my wrist suddenly feeling less like an old, unremarkable mark and more like a countdown clock I'd been wearing my entire life without knowing what it was counting toward.

The door opened a few minutes later. Ronan stood in the frame, looking like a man who'd aged five years in the last hour, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.

"How much of that did you hear?" he asked quietly.

"Enough," I said. "Enough to know your advisor wants me dead, and you're the only reason I'm not."

He crossed the room and knelt in front of me, taking my marked wrist in both his hands with a gentleness that didn't match anything I'd just overheard him say in that hallway. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you," he said. "I need you to believe that, even though I know I haven't earned it yet."

"And if the curse is real? If it turns out I really am built to kill you?"

His thumb moved once, slow, over the pale scar, and he looked up at me with an expression I didn't have a name for yet — something between fear and a decision already made.

"Then we'll fight that together too," he said. "Starting now."