Chapter 13 The War
Rosalind
The room is dark when the door opens.
I don't move.
I've been sitting on the edge of the bed for the last hour, Luca asleep in the bassinet beside me, watching the thin strip of hallway light under the door and waiting for it to change. When it does, when the door swings inward and he steps through, I look straight at his eyes.
Brown. Warm. Human.
I'm across the room before I make the decision to stand.
He catches me. Both arms close around my back and I press my face into his chest and the sound that comes out of me is embarrassing, but I can't stop it.
"Don't do that again," he says. His voice is steady but only just. "Something like that. Don't."
I grab two fists of his shirt.
"He could get you killed." The words come out wrecked and I don't care.
"I'm fine." His voice is low. "I'm right here. Don't cry."
"He was using your body, your hands, to kill people, Leo, and I couldn't—"
"Rosie."
The way he says it stops me.
He is looking at me with an expression I cannot read yet, something careful moving behind his eyes.
"He wasn't."
I pull back.
I look at him.
"What?"
He draws me back down to sit on the edge of the bed.
"The war with humans has been at a standstill for months," he says. "Both sides. Neither one can get clean enough leverage to break it, so for now it holds." He watches me take that in.
"What happened this week, the counterattack, the reason he left, that was a different pack. Another alpha. He's been absorbing smaller groups by force, expanding his territory. He wasn't going after humans. He was dealing with wolves."
"But fighting wolves —" I stop. "You're in there. If the body gets hurt —"
"No." His voice is steady. "He's stronger than you can imagine."
I sit with that for a moment. It doesn't fully settle. But it's better than before. Less like drowning, more like standing in water I can almost touch the bottom of.
My hands are still knotted in his shirt. I make myself let go.
He gets up. He comes back with the tray Nia left earlier, the one I haven't touched, and he sits beside me and holds a piece of bread out with the patient expectation of someone who already knows how this ends.
I eat it.
He watches me chew with an expression that might be called satisfied.
I swallow. I look at my hands.
"He knows," I say. "The daytime — he knows you're here at night?"
The hand holding the tray goes still, for exactly one breath. Then he sets the tray down.
"Yes," he says. "He knows."
I close my eyes.
"Then what he said this morning." I can feel my voice wanting to shake and I don't let it. "About the lab. About where they came from. About what humans did."
Silence.
"Is it true?"
His expression is the one he always wore when I asked him something he would have preferred not to answer.
"Yes," he says. "It's true. I've seen the documents. In the study."
The tears come without any drama. They simply arrive.
I think about the emergency broadcasts. The official explanations. The terminology that appeared in every government statement: outbreak, contagion, natural mutation.
I think about Leo in his uniform, on twelve-hour shifts, protecting people from something his own government had manufactured.
He pulls me in without being asked, his chin resting on the top of my head, one hand moving slowly across my back.
"It's not your fault." He tucks my head under his chin. His voice rumbles through his chest. "None of this is on you. Don't carry it."
We stay like that. Luca makes a small sound in his sleep and resettles. Outside, something moves through the trees. One of the pack, probably, doing a perimeter check.
"Sooner or later," I say into his shirt. "They hate humans, sooner or later the pack will go to war with humans." I look at him.
"We should leave. Leo. We go somewhere else. We need to find a way to lock him up during the day."
"He's stronger than anything you could come up with. We can't contain him." His words bring back the image of the handcuffs, torn apart like paper.
"Then what about you?" A new direction finds me. "Can you stop him? Can you be there, can you—"
"I can't." And he does look sorry. Genuinely, quietly sorry. "I'm not there during the day. I can't override what he does when I'm not present."
I already knew that. I still feel the door close.
"But you could."
I look up.
"You could be there," he says. He says it like he's just thought of it, like it's obvious once you notice. "You could manage this place. Control the logistics, the supply lines, who comes in and out."
"The Human Alliance has made contact for a formal request for negotiation." He takes my hand. "No one, not humans, not wolves, wants to be at war forever. Rosie, you could be the one to push for peace talks."
"Leo, I'm a person. I'm their prisoner. Why would anyone here listen to—"
"Because you're the Luna." He says it the way you'd say because the sky is blue. Plain. Settled. "Half the authority in this pack is yours by right. It's always been yours. He just never told you."
The word sits in the air between us.
Luna.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
"You'd be the one in the room when the talks happen," he says. "You'd be the check. Not me, not him—you." His hand finds my hair, smooths it back. "A human voice, but one who's walked with the pack. Someone who actually belongs in that room."
"I don't know if I can," I say.
He presses his lips to my forehead. "Eat the rest of that."
He hands me the bread again. I take it, automatic.
He settles back against the headboard and pulls me with him, and I eat in his arms while Luca breathes in his bassinet and the trees move outside and my mind turns over words like authority and right and yours.
I fall asleep before I mean to.