4. The Shattered Sanctuary #2
I remembered the groom at the Miller wedding three years ago.
He’d been a nervous accountant who’d been jilted at the altar when his best man and his fiancée had run off together an hour before the ceremony.
I had fixed it. I’d rearranged the seating and soothed the bride’s mother with champagne and carefully calibrated lies.
I’d turned a disaster into a ‘modern intimate gathering’ that everyone had praised as deliberately unconventional.
I could fix human chaos. I could rebuild and redirect and salvage meaning from wreckage. But this? This was a hurricane bearing down on a house of cards, and no amount of clever planning could stop it. There was nothing I could do.
“Then we go over his head,” Robert offered, resolve sharpening the lines on his face. “We call your mother.”
I instantly recoiled. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Andie, be reasonable.” Robert stepped around the island.
He held his hands out, like he was approaching a wounded animal.
“Helena is the only one with the political weight to stop a House Zeus Alpha. She’s the Matriarch of House Hera.
Whatever you think of her methods, she has the authority to intervene in these situations. She can—”
“She was there, Dad!”
The words exploded out of me, raw and jagged, tearing my throat. Robert stopped mid-step. The dish towel he’d been holding fell from his hands. It landed on the floor with a soft whisper of cotton against tile.
“What?”
“She was there. At the wedding. And she was on his side.”
The memory made me want to vomit. For a moment there, when she’d joined us, relief had washed through me. My mother was here. My mother would fix this. My mother would make him leave.
I’d been an idiot to trust her, even slightly. She’d picked him. She’d only wanted to smooth things over. To make sure House Hera’s interests were protected, even if it meant sacrificing her daughter.
Elias’s head snapped up. Flint replaced the usual warmth in his gaze. “Helena and Stormwright? That’s… not a standard alliance.”
“They don’t have alliances, Pop. They have agendas. And apparently, right now, I’m the main product on the market.”
I closed my eyes, and for a second, I wasn’t in my father’s kitchen anymore.
I was back in the marble halls of House Hera, ten years ago.
Twelve years old, small and frightened and trying to understand the world I’d been born into.
Peeking through the cracked door of my mother’s study, watching something I wasn’t supposed to see.
A young couple—an Omega and a Beta—kneeling on the plush Persian rug, sobbing, clinging to each other like drowning victims in a storm. Beautiful people, well-dressed, clearly from good families. But their faces were twisted with anguish, their words breaking as they pleaded.
“Please, Matriarch, there has to be another way. We love each other. We—”
“Love is not always enough.” My mother’s tone had been kind but implacable. “The bond is making you ill. It’s incompatible with your physiologies. You know this.”
“We’ll find a treatment. We’ll manage the symptoms. Please, don’t—”
But she had. She’d leaned over them, her hands beginning to glow with that sickly, pale purple light. The signature of House Hera’s bond manipulation powers. And she’d simply… touched them.
I remembered the sound. Not the scream—people scream all the time—but the sound of the break.
A wet, spiritual tearing sound, like fabric being ripped apart.
Like a soul being shredded. The couple had collapsed, their bodies convulsing, vomit and blood and tears mixing on that beautiful rug.
They’d screamed until their throats gave out, until all that remained was a horrible, hollow keening.
And my mother had simply wiped her hands on a silk handkerchief and called for tea.
I’d asked her about it later, unable to help myself. “Why did you hurt them if they loved each other?”
Cold, beautiful eyes meeting mine. “Sometimes love is the cruelest cage of all, Andromeda. Sometimes freedom requires pain.”
That was the woman Robert wanted me to call. That was the woman who was supposed to protect me.
I leaned against the counter, my knees suddenly watery. The adrenaline was fading now, leaving behind a cold, shaking exhaustion. My hands trembled against the granite. I pressed them flat, trying to stop the shaking through sheer force of will.
“You’re vibrating, Andie,” Elias said.
“I’m fine, Pop. I just need to figure out the next move. I need a strategy, a plan of attack. If I can—”
“You need to stop moving.” Elias stood, the mechanical whine of his prosthetic leg cutting through the quiet.
The sound was familiar, comforting, the soundtrack of my teenage years.
He walked over to me, not too close, respecting the perimeter I had subconsciously built around myself.
“Just for a minute. You haven’t blinked in thirty seconds.
Your pupils are blown wide. You’re in fight-or-flight mode, and you’ve been there for hours. ”
“He’s right.” Robert seized on the diagnosis with visible relief.
He was grateful to have a problem he could name, a symptom he could treat.
“You’re reacting to the trauma. You’re burning out, honey.
The adrenaline crash. Your body is trying to process too much stress, and it’s going into overdrive. ”
“I am not burning out. I am being targeted. There’s a difference.”
“But you don’t have to be a target right now.
” Robert’s words gained speed. He was eager to fix, eager to heal, eager to make this right the way he’d made everything right when I was younger.
“Remember the anniversary trip we were planning? We were talking about booking that cabin up north. The one near the stables where you learned to ride.”
Elias nodded slowly. “The reception is dead up there. No cell towers within twenty miles. No news. No social media. No way for anyone to find you. Just the trails. The mountains. The quiet.”
“Exactly!” Robert clapped his hands together, the sound sharp and too loud.
“We pack the car tonight. We leave tomorrow morning, before dawn. Just the three of us. We go off the grid for two weeks, maybe three. We’ll ride the trails.
We’ll just let this blow over. Let him find some other shiny object to chase. ”
I stared at them.