chapter 63
The bedroom door closed with a firm, final sound that seemed to linger in the air long after Dante's hand left the handle. It wasn't slammed, but it wasn't gentle either. It was the sound of a conversation that neither of us wanted to have, but both knew was inevitable.
I remained near the foot of the bed in my wheelchair, still in the same clothes from lunch, my cheeks tight from dried tears and a heavy, suffocating pressure sitting in my chest.
Dante stood by the door for a moment, watching me in that way I had come to hate when I was upset, like he was waiting for me to break first.
When I finally snapped at him, the words came out sharper than I intended, and his response was immediate. He told me not to act like he was the enemy. But to me, in that moment, it felt exactly like he was standing on the opposite side of something.
He told me his mother had been left crying in the garden after I left. The guilt was instant and twisting. I hadn't known she was crying. I hadn't meant to hurt her. But his frustration didn't fade. He said I didn't have to speak to her the way I did, and that was when the argument truly began.
It spiraled quickly, as our arguments always did when it came to my past.
My childhood, my grandparents, the memories I had spent my entire life trying to bury.
He reminded me that I had been the one to tell them those pieces, about my grandmother, about my district, about the Alpha, about the strange man who used to visit me when I was little.
He said I couldn't share parts of my life and then explode when they asked questions about it.
It felt like a slap. As if my trauma was a story I had offered up for dissection. I tried to explain that it felt like they were pulling my childhood apart like a mystery to be solved, and he tried to explain that they were only trying to understand. Neither of us was really listening anymore.
The conversation turned from defensive to truly hurtful in a matter of seconds.
He admitted he was tired. Not just tired in the moment, but tired of everything.
The guards, the investigations, my past, and then, the word that changed the temperature of the entire room, my accident.
The same accident caused by me being in his life.
My mind latched onto it. My body went cold as I looked down at my legs, the legs that had not worked properly since that day that had divided my life into before and after.
I asked him if what he really meant was that it was difficult to have a paralyzed mate, if my paralysis was just another problem he had to deal with.
He was horrified that I would think that, his face going pale, his voice thundering through the room for me to stop. But the damage was already done.
In the midst of tears, I said the one thing that could quiet both of us. I missed my grandparents. I said they would have known what to say to make me feel better. My voice broke as I wondered aloud if they were okay, if they knew where I was, if they even knew I was alive.
That was when I saw it. A flicker in Dante's expression, a hesitation that he couldn't hide fast enough. He turned away, but my heart was already racing. I knew him too well. He was keeping something from me, something significant about the investigation into my past.
When I pressed him, he finally sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor like the weight of the secret was too much to carry while looking at me.
He confessed that he had asked the investigators to look into my grandparents, not to invade my privacy, but because he was trying to protect me.
And then he said the words that stopped my entire world.
They had secured them and brought them to a safe house after I was brought here.
For a brief, foolish second, relief flooded through me so intensely I could barely breathe. I asked if they were here, if they were okay. He answered me in a voice barely above a whisper, his own eyes filling with tears.
My grandmother was alive and in a safe house.
A sob escaped me, raw and painful and full of hope. But that hope died with his next word.
But.
My grandfather, the man who raised me, who held my hand when I was terrified, who taught me that home wasn't a place but a person who stays, was gone. He had died.
The world didn't just go quiet, it disappeared.
The air left my lungs. One sentence repeated over and over in my head until it was the only thing that existed.
He died. While I was here. While I was laughing and eating and learning to live again, surrounded by people who loved me, my grandfather had died alone, and no one had told me.
When I asked when it happened, Dante couldn't answer at first. And in his silence, I understood the true cruelty of it. He had died while I was here, while I was still trying to find my way back to myself, and the information had been kept from me.
The broken sound that tore from my throat didn't even sound human. Dante moved toward me, but I pushed my wheelchair back, needing distance from the person who had become both my greatest comfort and, in that moment, the source of my deepest pain.
He kept saying he was sorry, that he had only found out recently, that he was trying to find the right way to tell me. But all I could hear was the fact that he knew. He knew and I didn't. He knew when and how, he just wasn't ever going to tell me.
We stared at each other across the small space of the bedroom, both of us in tears, both of us knowing with absolute certainty that something fundamental had just fractured between us.
There are moments in life when love is not enough to protect you from the damage the person you trust most can cause, even when they never intended to hold the knife in the first place.
"You are never going to care for me the way a werewolf cares for their own." And just like that I pushed my wheelchair and heavy heart out of the bedroom.