Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 70: Distance

~LYRA’S POV~

I noticed on the second day.

Not that he was gone, he wasn’t gone. Eren was present for every joint council, contributed to the unification discussions with the same careful precision he brought to everything, answered questions when asked and offered analysis when it was useful. He was there. He was functioning at full capacity in every visible way.

But the other thing had stopped.

The private conversations. The moments where he’d appear in an unexpected place at an unexpected time and say something quietly perceptive that reoriented the way I was looking at a problem I’d been carrying all day. The particular quality of his attention, the way it felt when Eren was actually watching something, not observing it from a distance but genuinely attending to it, had shifted toward something more managed, more deliberate, more like the way he paid attention in a council room rather than in a corridor at dusk.

He’d given me space with Ryland and he’d given me space to grieve and he was continuing to give me space without anyone asking him to.

I noticed. I let it run for a few days because I had enough else to carry. Then on the sixth day I went and found him.

—

He was at the Moonveil border where the river met the forest, a specific place, I realised, that I’d never seen him at but that had the particular quality of somewhere a person went when they needed to think without being in any space that belonged to the current situation. The trees were dense enough to muffle the sounds from the packhouse. The river moved with that particular quality of river sound that was both constant and somehow not intrusive. He was sitting on a flat stone at the edge of the bank, and from the way he was positioned, settled, entirely still, not the stillness of someone who had just sat down, I could tell he’d been there for a while.

I sat down beside him.

He didn’t look surprised. He probably wasn’t.

"You’re avoiding me,"

"I’m giving you space," he said.

"Without asking me if I wanted space."

He didn’t respond to that immediately. He looked at the water. The river was moving with that particular unhurried directness that rivers had, going where it was going without commentary on the process.

"What do you want, Lyra?" he said.

"An honest conversation Ryland. The kind we used to have."

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that wasn’t empty, the kind where something was being sorted through before it came out, where the thinking was happening at speed and the speaking was waiting for it to finish. ƒreewebɳovel.com

Then he looked at me.

"I fell in love with someone who was destined," he said. He said it the way he said things that were difficult, directly, without approaching from the side, because Eren understood that the side approach was usually more painful than the direct one.

"The prophecy was real and the Moonborn was real and I spent years studying the theory of what that meant. And then you arrived and made it entirely personal." A pause. "I don’t know what to do with that."

I looked at him. At the particular quality of his stillness. Eren, who was always composed, always reading the room, always three steps ahead of what the room needed, sitting beside a river looking like someone who had, for once, genuinely run out of the ahead-of-it-ness that usually defined him.

"You could try talking to me," I said. "Instead of sitting alone by a river."

"That’s an option," he said. freewebnovel.cσ๓

"Eren."

"I know," he said quietly. He looked back at the water. His voice was even and measured and I could hear, underneath the evenness, the shape of something that he’d been sitting with for six days.

"I watched Kael die for you. I was there. I saw his eyes find yours at the end and I saw what was in them and I saw what was in yours."

He paused.

"And I thought, if it had been me in front of that strike. If I had been the one who moved. Would you have looked the same way? Would you have felt the same thing in that moment?"

The question sat in the air between us.

I didn’t answer immediately. He deserved the honest answer and the honest answer required a moment to find its actual shape rather than the comfortable shape.

The comfortable answer was yes, immediately, without qualification. The comfortable answer would have been easy and would have made him feel better in the short term.

The honest answer was more complicated. Because Eren wasn’t Kael, and the things I felt about Eren weren’t the things I felt about Kael, different in character, different in origin, built out of different material over different months. The bond with Kael had been painful and combustible and had spent most of its life being managed and contained before the garden and before the clearing.

The thing with Eren was something else, quieter, deeper in a different way, the particular pull of two people who understood each other at a frequency that didn’t require explanation.

Both were real. They just weren’t the same real.

"I would have," I said finally. "It would have felt different because you’re different from him. The grief wouldn’t have been the same shape." I met his gaze directly. "But yes. I would have felt it. I would have made the same sound."

He was quiet for a long time.

The river moved. The trees stood where they were. A bird somewhere in the upper branches made one sound and then was silent.

I waited.

"I know I’m not first," he said. Not as an accusation. As a statement of understanding, the way Eren stated things that he’d already thought through thoroughly.

"With you, I mean. I know Ryland has been there the longest in the particular way he’s been there. I know what Kael was." He paused. "I’m not asking to be first. I’m asking to know if there’s a place."

"You’ve had a place since before you knew my name," I said. "Since Mira’s room and the archives and every time you showed me how to think about something I was getting wrong." I held his gaze. "You saw who I was going to be before I saw it. That doesn’t go away because the war is over."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he looked at the river.

"Okay," he said.

That was all. Just that. Okay with the particular weight of Eren’s okay, which meant he had heard something and had processed it and had filed it in the place where things he’d decided to trust went, and would not be revisiting it for debate.

He didn’t say anything else.

After a while I stood and he stood and we walked back toward the packhouse together, not talking, the river fading behind us into the general sound of the forest. His presence beside me had the particular quality it always had, the calm awareness, the sense of someone who was fully attending to what was around them without narrating it.

The conversation had been short. It had also been exactly enough.

And that was very Eren