Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 75: Eren’s Confession

~LYRA’S POV~

We’d been reviewing Moonveil’s trade agreements for two hours when I noticed he wasn’t actually reading. ƒrēewebnovel.com

He was looking at the document in front of him, yes. His eyes were on the page. But Eren’s particular quality of attention, the one that was fully present with whatever it was directed at, the quality that made every conversation with him feel like it had his complete weight behind it, wasn’t on the trade routes. It was somewhere else, and it had been somewhere else for most of the last hour.

I put down the document I was holding.

"What?"

He looked up. He didn’t pretend he didn’t know what I meant.

"I need to tell you something," he said.

"Okay."

He looked at the table for a moment. Then at me. "I knew more about Selara than I told anyone. Before the battle. There was information I had, from the older records, the restricted texts, the documents that predate the standard Moonveil archive, that I didn’t share fully."

"What kind of information?" My voice came out even.

"About the prophecy," he said. "Specifically about what it required. There was a possibility, not a certainty, but a documented possibility in the older accounts, that the resolution of a Moonborn ascension of this scale required a significant death. A sacrifice, essentially. Not Lyra’s. Someone bound to her."

The lamp on the table between us flickered.

I sat with that.

"You knew about the warning,"

"I suspected it," he said. "I didn’t know it would be Kael. I didn’t know it would be anyone specific. I knew there was a possibility that the cost would be someone close to you."

"But you knew someone might die,"

"Yes, I knew."

The room was quiet. Not comfortable quiet, the specific quiet of something sitting between two people that had been waiting to arrive for a while and had finally arrived.

"Did you consider telling me?"

"Yes," he said immediately. "I considered it carefully. I thought about it for the better part of two weeks before the blood moon."

"And you decided not to."

"I decided not to," he said. "Because I thought knowing would change how you used your power in the fight. I thought if you knew someone bound to you might die as part of the resolution, you would pull the power back to protect everyone instead of releasing it fully. And if you pulled it back, Selara would absorb it and win. So I made a calculation."

I looked at him.

"You made a decision about what I was allowed to know, about my own life. About the people I love. You decided for me."

"Yes."

"Without asking me."

"Yes."

The evenness in my voice was doing what I needed it to do, keeping the anger below the surface where I could hold it and turn it into actual words rather than letting it run loose.

"Eren." I set my hands flat on the table.

"You watched me go into that battle without telling me that someone I cared about might not come back. You watched Kael train me and talk strategy with me and..."

I stopped. Started again.

"You watched me say goodbye at the gate with no idea that any one of you might be the cost. You had that information and you chose to keep it."

"Yes," he said. His voice was still even. He was not going to pretend he’d done something other than what he’d done, which was the most Eren thing about this whole conversation and also, right now, the most infuriating thing.

"Did it ever occur to you, that knowing might not have made me pull back? That maybe I would have made a different choice, a smarter choice, if I’d had all the information? That I could have positioned everyone further from me before the release? That Kael might still be..."

I stopped.

Eren was quiet.

The unfinished sentence sat between us and neither of us completed it.

"You assumed I would fall apart. "You looked at what I was going to have to do and you decided I couldn’t be trusted with the full picture of what it might cost."

"I made a strategic calculation," he said. "About power use and battle outcome. Not about your capacity."

"You made a decision about what I was ready to know. "That’s not a strategic calculation. That’s paternalism dressed up as strategy."

Something moved through his expression, not flinching, Eren didn’t flinch, but a shift that told me the word had landed where I’d meant it to.

"You’re right," he said quietly. "That’s an accurate description."

"I know I’m right Eren."

The lamp flickered again. The trade documents sat between us untouched, the trade routes of Moonveil waiting patiently for the conversation around them to finish.

Eren looked at me steadily.

"I still think it was the right call for the outcome of the battle," he said. "The Moonborn power released fully, Selara was destroyed, the packs survived. If you’d known and held back even fractionally, I don’t know that we’d be sitting here."

He paused.

"But I also think you deserved to have that information. And I chose the outcome over your trust. That’s not something I can undo."

"No," I said. "It’s not."

"I’m sorry,"

It was a clean apology, no qualifications, no circumscription, no immediately-following explanation that softened it into something easier to carry. Just the words, with the full weight of a person who understood exactly what they were apologising for and wasn’t trying to reduce the weight.

I looked at him for a long time. frёewebηovel.cѳm

He waited. He was good at waiting. He’d been good at it since before I met him.

"I’m angry at you," I finally said.

"I know,"

"And I understand why you did it," I said.

"Those aren’t the same thing," he said.

"I know they’re not, I’m saying I hold both. I’m angry and I also understand the logic. That doesn’t mean the logic was right. It means I can see what you were doing even while I’m angry that you did it."

"That doesn’t have to mean you forgive me, I’m not asking for that right now."

"I know you’re not, just give me time."

He nodded once.

He picked up the trade document he’d been pretending to read for the last hour and actually read it. I watched him do it, the shift back into the material, the attention going where it was supposed to go, Eren resettling into the task the way he resettled into everything, without drama.

I sat there for a moment longer. The anger was real and so was the understanding and so was the grief underneath both of them that the conversation had just touched the edge of without either of us going fully into it, because Kael’s name had been in the middle of the argument and I had stopped the sentence before it finished and Eren had not asked me to finish it, which was either grace or something else, and I wasn’t ready to decide which.