Free Web NovelChapter 91: Chapter 91 Helping Her
_Pierre’s POV_
The guard at the Ashthorne gate had a job to do and he was doing it.
I respected that. I told him so. I also told him that I understood completely and that all I was asking was for him to pass a message to Nana Seraphine that Alpha Pierre Ashford was at the gate and was requesting a few minutes of her time.
He looked at me with the expression of someone who had decided this was the most efficient path to ending the conversation and made the call.
I waited outside the gate in the early evening air and thought about what I was going to say and in what order. Seraphine was not a woman you approached carelessly. She was sharp and she was observant and she had been managing complicated situations involving people she loved for a long time.
Walking in without a clear sense of what I was there for was going to produce a short and unproductive meeting.
The guard came back and opened the gate.
I was shown through the entrance hall and into the front sitting room. It was a well-kept room, the kind of room that had been furnished with care and maintained consistently for a long time, everything in it chosen rather than accumulated.
Nana Seraphine was already seated when I came in.
She looked at me and her expression told me that whatever she was feeling it had been sitting with her for several hours and had not become simpler with time.
I sat down across from her.
"Five minutes," she said.
"That’s all I need," I said. "Thank you for seeing me, Nana.”
She looked at me steadily. "You were there today, weren’t you?” She asked.
"Yes." freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
"The whole time." It wasn’t a question.
"Yes," I said.
"You saw her register. You saw her prepare. You watched her get into that car." Her voice was controlled but the control was working harder than it usually had to. "I’ve known you for long, and I know you’re her friend. You claim that you cared about what happened to her."
"I do care about her," I said. "It’s true."
"Then explain to me," she said, "how a friend watches someone they care about climb into a racing car against professional male drivers and says nothing. Does nothing." She paused. "What kind of friend is that?"
I held her gaze.
"The kind," I said carefully, "who understood that trying to stop her would have been both useless and wrong."
She looked at me.
"Useless," I said, "because she had already planned it and prepared for it and by the time I knew she was registered she had a car and documentation and an alias and there was nothing I could do that she couldn’t route around." I paused. "And wrong because she had reasons that mattered. Serious ones. Not impulse or stubbornness. Real reasons that she has been carrying for a long time and that deserve to be taken seriously by the people around her."
Seraphine was very still.
"I know what she means to you," I said. "I know what it felt like to watch that and I know what it would have felt like for you if the outcome had been different." I kept my voice even. "But I want to tell you what I saw today. Not what the crowd saw or what the news will say. What I actually saw."
She said nothing. But she didn’t look away.
"I saw someone who was completely in control," I said. "Not just driving well. In control. Calm inside a car at speeds that would make most trained competitors anxious, making decisions faster and more accurately than the men she was competing against, reading the track and the race with a precision that I don’t think anyone in that compound expected." I paused. "She won, Nana. Not narrowly but completely. She made it look like the result was decided before the signal fired." I looked at her.
"That is not someone who was in over her head. That is someone who had prepared and who knew exactly what she was doing."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Something in Seraphine’s expression shifted. The controlled composure held but the thing underneath it moved.
"She told me once," she said quietly, "when she was about fourteen and her father had taken her somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, that I had nothing to worry about." The corner of her mouth moved very slightly. "She said it in exactly the same tone she says everything."
"She comes by it honestly," I said.
Seraphine looked at me for a moment longer.
Then she sat back slightly in her chair, the specific small movement of someone releasing a tension they have been holding in their shoulders.
"Thirty minutes, that’s all you have to speak to her.” she said.
I stood. "Thank you."
"Pierre." I stopped at the door. Her voice was quieter now and the harshness had gone out of it entirely. What was left underneath was just an old woman who had already lost most of her family and was sitting in a room trying to hold onto what remained. "Tell her I’m not angry with her." She paused. "Tell her I was frightened. She should know the difference."
"I’ll tell her," I said.
Rowena was sitting on the edge of her bed when I came in and she looked exactly as I expected her to look, which was composed and alert and already thinking three steps ahead of the current situation.
I sat in the chair by the window.
“How did you get in?” She asked with a smile and I smiled back.
“Had a talk with your Nana. She says she’s not angry," I said. "She says she was frightened and she wants you to know those are different things."
Something moved across Rowena’s face. Brief and real and then filed away.
"Alaric," I said. "He found out when everyone else did. He was furious." I looked at her. "Not the kind of that tries to stop something. The other kind. He was actually angry you risked your life to join that competition, but he was calm." I paused. "He didn’t try to pull you from the competition. He showed up and said you had the right to compete and then he stood there and watched and when it was over he left without saying anything to anyone." I held her gaze.
"Draw your own conclusions."
She was quiet.
"The trip," I said.
She looked at me directly.
"After the competition," I said. "The place where your father and brothers died. You still want to go?”
"Yes," she said. Immediately without hesitation and no softness around the edges of it. Just yes.
I looked at the door. I honestly didn’t want her to go. It would be endangering herself, but Rowena wasn’t exactly the type to listen to anyone.
I breathed out slowly.
"Alright," I said. "I’ll get you out."
Something in her face settled. Not relief exactly, more like the look of someone who has been waiting for a foundation to appear under something they were going to do regardless.
"Thank you," she said, her smile shinning brighter than the sun. She was so beautiful. Her lips, eyes, brows, nose. I was fucked for real and I hurriedly averted my gaze before stupid thoughts entered my head.
"Don’t thank me yet," I said. "When your grandmother finds out I helped you leave she is going to have a great deal to say and I am going to be on the receiving end of it." I looked at her again. "When that happens I need you to tell her that I am a person of good character who made a reasonable decision in a difficult situation."
She looked at me for a moment.
"You are a person of good character who made a reasonable decision in a difficult situation," she said.
"Say it with more feeling when she’s actually in the room," I said.
Something close to a smile moved across her face again, I felt my heartbeat accelerate. “In two days," I said. "After your next round. I’ll have everything arranged."
She nodded. “Thank you.”
