Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 63: Grief

~RYLAND’S POV~

I gave her three days.

Not because three days felt like the right number, there was no right number, and I understood that. But because the first day was survival and the second day was the beginning of processing and the third day was when people who were carrying grief either started finding their way through it or started walling it off, and I wanted her to have the space to do whichever one was true for her without me being a variable in it.

So I checked on her. I made sure she was eating, not by asking directly, which she would have deflected, but by making sure food was available and present and close to wherever she was, and by watching whether it disappeared. It mostly did. I noted that without commenting on it. She was taking care of herself in the minimal functional sense and that was enough for now.

I stayed close. Not hovering. I’d never been a hoverer. But within reach, consistently, so that if she needed something or needed someone or needed to not be alone in whatever room she was in, I was the available variable without having announced myself as such.

And I worked. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

There was more work than I’d ever had in my life, which was a thing I hadn’t fully anticipated and was simultaneously grateful for. The administrative aftermath of a three-pack war that had ended in the destruction of the central threat turned out to be enormous. Treaties needed drafting, not just affirming the existing alliance but converting it into something permanent and detailed, with territorial agreements and governance structures and provisions for the Shadowfang pack whose Alpha was dead. The list of fallen needed formal recording, and each name required a process, documentation, family notification through proper channels, the beginning of the honoring ceremonies that wolf culture required for the dead.

Thirty-two names. I wrote each one myself. I didn’t delegate that.

Kael’s name I wrote last. I sat with my pen on the page for a moment when I got to it. Not sentimental, exactly, Kael and I had never been friends and we’d both known it. But we’d been something. We’d been two people who’d arrived at the same place from different directions and had managed, in the end, to stand in the same direction for long enough that it had mattered. He’d been right about half the time and impossible about the other half and he had stepped in front of something aimed at Lyra without hesitating, and that was going to be part of what I thought of when I thought of him from now on.

I wrote his name and set the pen down for a moment and then picked it up and kept going.

The civilian families were beginning to return to their settlements. The Ashfen survivors were being helped to rebuild. Shadowfang was functioning under Dravec’s steady management pending the formal transition. All of it moved forward, slowly and with effort, the way things moved forward when a large and terrible thing had ended and the ordinary world had to be rebuilt in the space it had left.

On the fourth night, she came to find me.

I was at my desk. It was late, past eleven, the lamp burning low, the building around me mostly quiet now, most of the remaining people in residence having gone to sleep at more reasonable hours. I was working through a clause in the territorial agreement that Shadowfang’s surviving council members had flagged as ambiguous, which it was, and the fixing of it required care.

I heard her footsteps in the corridor before she reached the door. I knew her footsteps, the particular weight of them, the rhythm. I’d learned them the way you learned the details of people who mattered to you without deciding to.

She came in without knocking. She didn’t need to knock.

She didn’t say anything. She sat down next to me, pulled the adjacent chair close, sat down, and leaned her head against my shoulder with the particular quality of someone who had been carrying something alone for several days and had simply run out of the energy required to keep carrying it alone.

I set down my pen.

The document could wait. Everything could wait.

We sat like that for a moment without speaking. The lamplight on the desk. The quiet building around us. Her head on my shoulder and the warmth of her beside me that I had spent months learning not to react to inappropriately and was now simply present with, without management.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"No," she said. Simple and direct, the way Lyra said things when she was too tired to cushion them. "But I’m here. And that’s something."

It was something. It was, actually, considerably more than something.

I turned toward her. She tilted her face up toward mine, and the kiss between us was quiet and careful and entirely unhurried, nothing desperate in it, nothing that had to force its way out. It had the quality of something that had been approaching gradually for a very long time and had finally arrived at its destination, like a river that had been moving toward the sea since before either of them knew they were part of the same watershed.

She pulled back after a moment. Looked at me.

"I’m not over it," she said. Her voice was steady, but I could hear the shape of what was underneath the steadiness. "I’m not going to sit here and tell you I am because it wouldn’t be true and you’d know it wasn’t true, and I don’t want to start whatever this is with something that isn’t real."

"I know," I said.

"I need you to actually know it," she said. "Not to say it and then act like it’s resolved. I need you to know that there’s grief in me that’s going to be there for a long time and it’s no, it doesn’t mean what I feel for you is less. But it’s there. And I’m not going to pretend it isn’t."

I looked at her. At the exhaustion in her face that had settled into something different from battle fatigue, deeper, more personal, the particular tiredness of someone who had been carrying something for several days that didn’t get lighter with time, only more familiar.

"Lyra," I said. I kept my voice level and warm and entirely certain, because I was entirely certain and I wanted her to know it without any ambiguity. "I’ve been sitting next to you through all of it. The training, the leak, the night before the blood moon, the clearing, and every hour since. I know exactly what you’re carrying and I know exactly what I’m choosing when I choose to stay next to it." I held her gaze. "I’m not going anywhere. Not because of the grief, not because of the time it takes, not because of any of it. I’m here." freewebnøvel.com

She looked at me for a long moment. Something in her expression shifted, not resolving, not the grief lifting. But settling. The particular settling that came when a person stopped being alone with something even if the something was still there.

She leaned her head back against my shoulder.

"I just want to feel something else," she said. "Alongside all of this. Not instead of it. I’m not asking to not feel the grief. I just want something else in the same space."

I put my arm around her. She let it happen the way she let things happen when she was too tired to decide whether to allow them, which was its own kind of allowing, and I understood the difference.

"You can have both," I said. "You don’t have to choose."

She was quiet for a moment.

"I know," she said finally. "I know I can. I just needed to say it out loud to someone who wasn’t going to make it into a problem."

"It’s not a problem."

"No," she raised her head. "It isn’t."

Then my lips found hers.