Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 100: Kael In The Dark

~LYRA’S POV~

Eren’s instructions were specific.

"Don’t think about what he looks like," he said. We were in the corridor outside the strategy room, past midnight, and he was speaking quietly the way he spoke when he was giving something that mattered. "Don’t build an image. The in-between doesn’t respond to images — it responds to emotional frequency. Think about how it felt to be near him. A specific memory. Something with weight."

"Which kind of weight?"

"Real weight," he said. "Not the dramatic moments. Those have too much noise in them. Think about something ordinary. Something that happened when neither of you were performing anything."

I thought about the training ground. The morning he’d worked with me on physical technique — not gently, not carefully, just directly, correcting my form with the specific bluntness of someone who thought that treating me carefully would be an insult to both of us. I’d hated it at the time. Later I’d understood it was the first time he’d treated me like someone worth taking seriously.

I thought about the stables, where we’d talked the night before the blood moon, when he’d said things that weren’t wrapped in anything — no armour around them, no distance.

I thought about the weight of his voice when he’d finally told me the truth about my family. How it had sounded different from every other time I’d heard him speak. Quieter. Like the truth was something that had been heavy for a long time and he was putting it down.

"Go," Eren said. "Silver Forest clearing. Alone. Don’t try to force it. Just hold the frequency and wait."

—

I sat in the Silver Forest clearing past midnight with the moon overhead and my hands in my lap and I held everything he’d said to hold.

The training ground. The stables. His voice when he stopped choosing his words carefully for once in his life.

The specific particular terrible thing he’d said with a spear through his chest, in the last thirty seconds of his life, when he finally felt safe enough to mean it without it costing him anything.

I held all of it, and I didn’t try to build anything from it, and I waited.

Nothing for a long time. Long enough that I started to wonder if this was one of the things that worked in theory and failed in practice. Long enough that my hands got cold and I had to resist the urge to move just to warm them.

Then the air shifted.

Not dramatically. Not the way things shifted in the stories Mira told about supernatural visitations, with cold and light and sound. Just a shift — the specific two-degree drop in temperature that I’d learned to recognise, the particular quality of the air changing the way it changed when the in-between was thinning at a specific point.

I looked up.

He was there.

Not wolf form. Human — standing about ten feet away, looking exactly as he had the last time I’d seen him alive. Tall, dark-coated, the red eyes that had always been the first thing anyone noticed about him. He was looking at me.

The expression on his face was something I had never seen on him before. In all the months of knowing him — the initial cold contempt, the guilt, the regret, the desperate broken honesty in the garden — I had never seen him look like this. Wide open. Completely undefended. The expression of someone who had been stripped of every wall they’d built over every year of their life and was standing there in what was underneath.

I held very still. My heart was doing something complicated that I didn’t have clean words for.

"Can you hear me?" I asked.

He nodded. Just once. Certain, direct.

"Are you in pain?"

He shook his head slowly. Then stopped. Tilted his head slightly — the particular gesture of someone reconsidering an answer they’d given too quickly. He held it for a moment. Then looked at me with the expression that said the real answer was more complicated than yes or no, and he didn’t have a way to give me the complicated answer in the form of a gesture.

I took a step forward.

He raised one hand immediately — a clear, specific stop.

I stopped.

"I know," I said. "I can’t touch you yet." I remembered the smoke-warmth of my hand passing through where his face had been in the forest, the flicker, the vanishing. I knew what happened if I tried to close the distance before the in-between would allow it. "I know."

I looked at him standing in the moonlight ten feet away from me, in the Silver Forest clearing, looking at me with the wide-open undefended expression that I was going to have to find a way to stop looking at or I wasn’t going to be able to hold anything together.

I sat down on the ground.

He watched me sit. Something moved through his expression — not surprise, something softer than surprise. The specific quality of being seen doing something small and ordinary and having it register as real. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

"Then sit with me," I said. "You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to say anything. I don’t need anything from you right now except— just stay." I looked up at him. "I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. I just want to be near you for a while."

He stayed.

He found a position — about eight feet away, on the ground, which I hadn’t expected from Kael of all people, but apparently the in-between stripped things down considerably — and he sat, and we were in the Silver Forest clearing together, ten feet and whatever the in-between was made of between us, and neither of us said much.

It should have been unbearable. Everything between us was still there — all the history of it, the rejection and the grief and the garden and the clearing and the eight months of absence — and none of it had resolved into anything clean. It was all still the tangled, complicated, real thing it had always been.

But it was the most present I’d felt in months.

We sat. The moon moved slightly in the sky. An owl made one sound somewhere in the upper branches. I asked him a few things — small things, things that could be answered with gestures or expressions rather than words he couldn’t fully form through the barrier. Whether Shadowfang was visible from where he was. Whether he could see the blood moon from inside the in-between. Whether he’d been able to see any of the battle from wherever the in-between put him.

He answered in the limited way he could. Tilts of the head, small gestures, the particular expressions of someone communicating through everything except language.

It was Kael. Completely, recognisably, specifically Kael — the same person who had said you’re nothing and I love you and everything in between, now reduced to whatever the in-between left of a person, and still completely himself in all the ways that had mattered.

Forty minutes, roughly.

I tracked the moon.

When he started to fade — the edges of him going slightly less solid, the temperature beginning to equalise back toward normal — I leaned forward slightly.

"We’re working on it," I said. "Eren is working on it. There’s a way back." I held his gaze. "You just have to hold on."

Something moved through his expression. The wide-open quality settled into something that looked like it was trying to be steady and was almost succeeding. He held my gaze for a moment longer.

Then his mouth moved.

The sound came through the way sound came through water — distorted, distant, as if the distance between us was measured in more than feet.

"Lyra."

I went still.

"There’s something else in here with me."