Apocalypse Alpha Part2 The Pretender (The Red Flags #2)

Chapter 9 The Gold Chain

Rosalind

The bed beside me is empty.

I know before I fully surface from sleep. The warmth is gone, the weight that had been there in the dark hours, the arm across my shoulders, the slow measured breath against my hair.

My hand moves across the sheet before my eyes open, confirming what my body already knows.

Gone.

I turn my head anyway.

Nia sits in the rocking chair by the window, cradling a bundle against her chest. Her face is almost entirely human now, the bone structure smoothed back to something a stranger might pass on a street without flinching.

She looks up when I stir.

"He's hungry," she says, and rises to bring him to me.

I sit up slowly, everything aching in ways I have no language for yet.

She settles Luca into my arms and I arrange him the way she shows me, and he latches with the efficient urgency of something that has already learned what it needs. I look down at his face.

He has Leo's eyes.

The same shape, the same depth, the same color that isn't quite brown and isn't quite green. I stare at them and my chest does something complicated and wordless.

Last night was real. Wasn't it.

I keep arriving at the question and then sliding off it.

The voice. The hand gripping mine. It's me, Rosie, push, don't you stop.

I heard it. I felt it. I came back to the surface because of it. But that was the dark, and the dark does strange things at the edge of consciousness, and I have learned in this house that nothing is safe to believe without testing first.

Luca's hand wraps around my finger, tight and definite.

I look at his eyes and try to find an answer there.

I don't.

He falls asleep against me, milk-drunk and absolute.

Nia lifts him away with practiced hands and tucks him back into the small crib, and I sit for a moment in the new quiet of not holding him, feeling the strange lightness of my own arms.

I need air.

The window is closer than the door. I push myself upright, one hand on the bedframe, testing whether my legs will cooperate. They do, grudgingly. I take three slow steps toward the glass.

Nia materializes at my shoulder with a blanket before I get there.

"The food is ready," she says. "You should eat."

Her voice is smooth. Easy. No halting, no careful searching for words. She looks like a human now. An ordinary woman, standing in morning light, holding a blanket with both hands.

I take the blanket.

They are becoming better at this. At wearing the shape of something harmless. I don't know if that is more frightening than the alternative, or less, or if the question even has an answer I can live inside.

I am too tired to follow the thought to its end.

I reach the window.

The courtyard below is bright in the midmorning sun.

Four wolves in human form are gathered near the gate, and among them, moving toward the road with the unhurried certainty of something that has never needed to check whether it is being followed, is him.

He stops.

Without turning, without any visible cue, he stops walking. And then he turns his head and looks up.

The eyes that find mine through the glass are the same eyes I looked into last night. Same face. Same hands. But the thing looking out from behind them is not the same.

There is no warmth there. No recognition.

He looks at me the way you look at a piece of furniture, noting its position, filing it as irrelevant, moving on. A flat, cold survey that lasts perhaps two seconds before he turns away and continues walking.

My back finds the wall before I decide to move.

I stand there until I hear the gate, and then I sit down on the edge of the bed and look at my hands for a while.

***

I eat because Nia puts food in front of me and waits. I drink the tea because it is warm and my body wants warmth more than it wants anything else right now. Then I sleep again, not by choice. The body closes down, settling its debts.

When I wake the second time, the window is dark and the lamp on the nightstand is on, casting its small amber circle.

Something presses to my cheek. Light, careful, repeated.

I open my eyes.

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning over me, his expression so openly tender that my throat closes before I can speak.

Those eyes, the same ones that looked through the window this morning like I was nothing, are full of something entirely different now. Something that hurts to look at directly.

"You've been asleep all day," he says. "Come on. Up."

His arm slides behind my back, sure and unhurried, and he lifts me to sitting the way he always did on slow Sunday mornings when I hadn't slept well and he decided, unilaterally, that I was getting up anyway.

He pulls me against his side. Reaches for the water glass.

Holds it to my lips, checks the temperature first with his wrist, always the wrist, never the finger, a habit I made fun of once, and waits while I drink.

My hands are in my lap. I am counting things.

The wrist check. The angle of the arm. The weight and warmth of his shoulder under my cheek. All of it familiar, all of it correct, all of it exactly as it should be.

Which means nothing. Which means I have to be sure.

I set my hand against his chest and feel his heartbeat under my palm.

Then I look up at him.

"Leo." My voice is still rough. "Our wedding rings." I keep my eyes on his and choose my words carefully. "The silver ones. Did you lose them in the explosion?"

Something moves across his face.

It is very small and very fast and if I were not watching for exactly this I would miss it entirely: a flicker, a fractional pause in the steadiness of his expression, there and gone in under a second. Not guilt. More like — adjustment. Recalibration.

Then he laughs.

It is low and warm and it has the particular shape of the laugh he saves for when I say something he finds endearing in spite of himself. He reaches up and flicks a finger lightly against the tip of my nose.

"Rosie." His voice carries that careful fond patience. "You're remembering wrong. Our rings were gold." He shifts, pulling me slightly closer.

"I made them by myself, remember? I had my mother's chain melted down. The goldsmith in town thought I was insane, they took almost three months."

The room is very quiet.

His voice dims slightly, and he presses his lips to my forehead, holding them there.

"I'm sorry. The explosion— it's gone. I'll find a way to make another one."

I can't get a full breath.

The ring was gold. I know that.

The weight of it, the slightly imperfect edge where the setting met the band because he had insisted on doing most of it himself. The chain. His mother's chain, thin and worn, that he had kept in a box in his nightstand since before I knew him.

He showed it to me the night he proposed and told me what he wanted to do with it, and I said yes before he even finished the sentence.

No one knows that. Not his family. They knew about the chain, but not what he did with it. Not the goldsmith, who was given only the metal and told nothing else. Not anyone.

Only us.

The tears come without any warning. They just arrive, spilling over before I can decide what to do with them, soaking silently into his shirt. I press my face into his shoulder and hold on.

The man who looked at me this morning from the courtyard, those flat, empty, terrifying eyes, would never do this. Would never know how. Would never bother.

He has a pack of wolves who fear him and a territory he took by force and he has demonstrated, repeatedly, that human emotion is a thing he observes from a distance with something close to contempt.

He has no reason to construct an elaborate deception for one exhausted woman in an upstairs bedroom.

But Leo would know about the chain.

Leo is the only one who could know.

I feel the arm around me tighten, and I let myself be held.

Whatever impossible, inexplicable thing has happened to us, the soul holding me right now is his.

I am certain of it. I am certain the way I am certain of Luca's eyes, certain of the wrist check, certain of the goldsmith and the chain.

The logic is complete. The evidence is airtight.

I close my eyes.

In the morning, that cold gaze will look through me again like I am part of the furniture, and I will survive that, because I have survived everything else. But the nights are ours.

His heartbeat is steady under my hand.

I hold onto it.