Free Web NovelChapter 40: Chapter 40
(Elena)
I’m in the yard before dawn.
Not because Senna cleared me for full training — she hasn’t, and I haven’t asked because I know the answer and I don’t want the argument on record. I’m here because I can’t sleep and because the alternative is lying in the dark doing threat calculations that go in circles and the circles are making me feel like the walls are closing in.
Movement helps. It always has.
I start with footwork. Just that — the basic patterns, the weight shifts Elena of three years ago drilled into muscle memory, before the Pack and before Viktor and before any of this. The yard is frozen and the footing requires adjustment and my body is making small compensations I’m aware of and trying not to think about directly.
Six weeks. Maybe seven.
Nothing shows. Nothing feels different in any way I can specifically point to — I’m tired more often, which could be the pregnancy or could be the fact that I’m managing a fractured Pack with a traitor in the wind and a Shadowpine attack incoming and my mate is twenty years old and I’m the only person who has any idea how to hold all of it.
I move faster.
The footwork becomes something else. I find a training dummy and I start working strikes — not hard, I’m not stupid, but present, deliberate, the kind of practice that keeps form from rusting. My shoulder rotation. My weight dropping before commitment, the habit Rhydian pointed out I drop under pressure.
I do not drop it now.
By the time the sky is turning from black to the flat grey of early morning I’m sweating despite the cold, which is something, and my head has quieted to a workable level, which is the point.
I hear footsteps on the stone path from the Pack house.
I know them. Of course I do — I know his footsteps from three buildings away now, know the particular rhythm of them, the slight irregularity when he’s moving with purpose versus moving casually.
These are casual footsteps that have just become not casual.
He’s seen me.
I don’t stop. I finish the sequence I’m in, weight shift, strike, reset, and then I put my hands down and turn around.
Rhydian is standing at the edge of the yard.
He’s dressed — he woke up looking for me, checked the bed, put clothes on, came to find me. He’s holding two cups and his hair is still from sleep and his expression is doing something I need a moment to decode.
It’s not anger.
It’s — the look he gets when he’s containing something that wants to be larger. When the instinct has arrived before the words.
"Hi," I say.
He looks at the training dummy. At me. At the dummy again.
"Hi," he says. Very carefully.
I cross to the bench and pick up my water skin. Take a drink. Give him a moment.
He crosses the yard and sets one of the cups on the bench. Steps back. Crosses his arms. He’s doing the thing where he decides whether to say what he’s actually thinking or find the diplomatic version, and I’ve watched this process enough times to know which one he lands on most often now.
"How long," he says.
"Hour, maybe."
"Since before dawn."
"Yes."
He looks at the dummy. Back at me. "Senna said—"
"Senna said limited exertion." I hold his gaze. "Footwork and form work is limited exertion."
"You were throwing strikes."
"Controlled strikes."
"Elena—"
"Rhydian." I say his name the same way he says mine. Just the weight of it. "I know my body."
"I know you know your body." He unfolds his arms. Folds them again. "That’s not—" He stops. Starts over. "The yard is frozen. The footing is bad. If you went down—"
"I didn’t go down."
"But if you—"
"I didn’t." I look at him steadily. "I know what I’m doing."
He looks at me for a long moment with that gold-eyed intensity that he’s stopped trying to modulate. He’s not flinching anymore, hasn’t been for weeks, but this is different — this is him trying to find the boundary between his fear and my autonomy and not quite locating it cleanly.
Good. It’s not a clean boundary. I know that. I’m the one living on both sides of it.
"I can’t stop training," I say. Because this is the real conversation, the one under the one about frozen ground and controlled strikes. "Shadowpine is coming. The Pack is fractured. Marcus is across the border with everything he knows about us." I hold his gaze. "I am the Alpha. I cannot be the thing that needs protecting."
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"I know."
"You’re carrying—" He stops. His jaw tightens. "You’re carrying my pup. Elena."
There it is. The actual sentence. Not the footwork or the dummy or the frozen ground — the thing underneath, the specific terror of it, the twenty-year-old boy who has been building a crib in the firelight every night for two weeks saying *you’re carrying my pup* in a voice that is doing everything it can not to crack.
I put my hand on his arm.
He goes still.
"I know," I say. Quieter. "I know what I’m carrying."
"Then—"
"I’m not stopping." My hand stays on his arm. "But I’ll modify. I’ll stay off the ice patches. I’ll keep Brennan at the yard when I train. I’ll—" I pause. "I’ll be careful."
He looks at my hand on his arm. At my face. Back at the dummy.
He breathes out.
It’s a long breath. The kind that carries something down with it on the way out.
"Come here," he says.
I look at him. "What—"
He moves before I finish the question. He bends and gets an arm under my knees and the other at my back and he lifts me in one clean movement and I make an undignified sound that is definitely not a squeak and grab his jacket.
"Rhydian—"
"I’m not carrying you because you can’t walk," he says. He’s already moving toward the Pack house. Completely calm. "I’m carrying you because I want to."
"That’s—" I’m trying to find the objection and I’m struggling because he’s warm and his grip is secure and my body, which has been up since before dawn in freezing temperatures, is making a very compelling argument for the opposite of argument. "That’s not a reason."
"It’s my reason."
"I’m the Alpha—"
"Of this entire Pack, yes." He gets to the door and somehow manages it without putting me down, which requires genuine coordination, and I notice this in spite of myself. "You can be the Alpha and also be carried to bed. Both things can be true."
"You learned that from me," I say.
"I learn everything from you." He’s in the corridor now. "Rest. You’re carrying my pup."
"You’ve said that."
"I’ll keep saying it."
I give up.
Not because I’ve lost the argument — I haven’t, the argument has several strong remaining points. I give up because he smells like sleep and the cups he brought had tea in them and he came to find me before dawn because he noticed I was gone, and the specific quality of being carried by someone who is doing it because they want to and not because they think you can’t do it yourself is—
It’s different. It’s entirely different from weakness.
I put my head against his shoulder.
He carries me through the corridor and into our room and he sets me down on the bed with a care that is completely out of proportion to the situation and genuinely not something I have words for, and he pulls the blanket up, and he sits on the edge of the mattress.
He looks at me.
"Sleep," he says.
"I have reports—"
"After."
"Brennan needs—"
"Brennan is handling it." He holds my gaze. "Sleep. One hour. Then I’ll wake you and you can run the whole Pack if you want."
I look at him.
At the dark circles under his eyes from the nights with the crib. At the worry he’s been carrying without putting it anywhere loud.
"One hour," I say.
He nods.
I close my eyes.
I feel him stay. Not leaving, not moving — just there, at the edge of the mattress, keeping watch the way he’s been keeping watch since the night everything shifted and he stopped being someone I was managing and became someone I was building something with.
I’m asleep in under five minutes.
He’s still there when I wake up.
