Chapter 121: SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED TO MY SON.

Chapter 122

I waited for Astra to growl, but she didn’t. She stirred in my chest, ears forward, and sniffed at the air the way she would at a stray that came too close to the fire.

Then she settled again, calm, and I knew with a certainty I couldn’t have explained that there wasn’t a lie anywhere in what I’d just heard.

"Thank you," I said slowly. "That can’t have been easy."

"It was awful." A wet laugh slipped out of her, and she wiped her face with her sleeve.

"I practised in the car for an hour. I was going to ring the bell like a normal person, and then I saw your headlights and my legs just went."

"You nearly went under our wheels."

"I know. I’m sorry for that too." She glanced at Ren with something close to dread. "And I’m sorry to you, Ren. For the contract, and for how I behaved when you ended it. You were right to. I’d have done the same, in your place."

Ren said nothing. His jaw worked once, and then he gave her a single stiff nod, which from him, I knew, was the equivalent of a handshake and a cup of tea.

"I heard about the wedding," Victoria went on, a little shyly. "Not Neve’s, I mean, yours and Lumi’s. Well, I heard you were together. It’s all anyone’s talking about." She smiled, and it was small and uncertain but real. "I’m really happy for you both. I mean it. You look..."

She trailed off, shook her head, and finished with a wobbly little shrug. "You look like you should have been together the whole time."

My throat tightened unexpectedly, and I nodded, smiling, there wasn’t any need correcting her that there was no wedding between I and Ren. Not yet.

That was when I saw her left hand. It was a thin silver band with one small stone, no bigger than a grain of rice, and it sat on her finger a little crooked, as though she hadn’t yet got used to wearing it.

She caught me looking and curled her fingers over it, blushing furiously, then uncurled them again with a kind of defiant pride.

"Three weeks ago," she said. "He asked me in a launderette."

"A launderette?"

"I was sitting on the dryer eating crisps, and I’d shrunk one of his jumpers. He laughed and said it didn’t matter, and then he just... asked." She looked back at the tall man hovering behind her, and her whole face changed.

It softened like wax near a flame, the sharp lines easing away, and she looked at him as if there were nothing else in the world.

"Eli, come here. Come and say hello properly." Eli came forward with an awkward half-smile, wiping his palm on his trousers before he offered it to me.

He wore a faded work jacket that had seen better years, and his shoes were old, and his hands had the rough look of a man who lifted things for a living.

There was nothing about him anyone would call impressive, not a watch or a chain or a flash of money, yet when Victoria slipped her hand into his, he folded his fingers around hers so gently that I felt it in my chest.

"Eli Hart," he said. "It’s a pleasure, ma’am. I’m sorry about the road."

"It’s Lumi," I said, shaking his hand. "And honestly, it’s fine."

I tried to match the girl in the daycare car park with the woman standing here, bare-faced and plainly dressed, leaning into a man in a worn jacket as if he were the warmest thing she’d ever touched, and I couldn’t make them fit.

She had been the kind of person who ordered the world around her like a menu. Now she was holding a stranger’s hand under a broken streetlight and trembling. And the surprisingly part, it wasn’t from fear but from a deep sense of love.

"My father cut me off," she said, as if she’d read my mind. "When the contract fell through. Everything went, the car, the flat, the cards, and for about a month I did nothing but cry in a motel." She gave a shaky smile.

"Then I got a job at a bakery that I was terrible at it. Eli would always come in every morning and bought a roll he didn’t even want so I wouldn’t get sacked."

"It was a good roll," Eli muttered, pink to the ears.

"It was stale."

"Good stale." She let out a shaky laugh, hitting his shoulder as she did.

I recognised the sound immediately because it was the same sound I made when Ren said something ridiculous, and in that second I decided I liked her.

"May I?" she asked, lifting her arms uncertainly. "Only if you want."

I stepped forward and hugged her. She was thinner than I expected, and she smelled of cheap soap and laundry powder.

She held on a moment longer than a stranger would, as if she was afraid I’d change my mind. When she pulled back, her eyes were shining, and she squeezed my hands twice.

"Be happy," she whispered. "Both of you. Please."

"You too."

They went back to the little hatchback hand in hand, with Eli opening the passenger door for her and checking twice that her palms had stopped bleeding.

I watched the red tail-lights shrink down the road until the dark swallowed them. I felt oddly light.

....

The kitchen was empty when we got home, with one low lamp burning over the stove and a pot of soup left on the back burner with a note stuck to the lid in Neve’s looping handwriting.

EAT IT. Don’t make me come down. N.

Underneath, in Julian’s messier scrawl, someone had drawn a small and extremely tasteful wolf.

Ren dropped the keys in the bowl and leaned against the counter, rubbing the back of his neck, and I perched on a stool. His shoulders were still tight, and I could tell the adrenaline hadn’t quite left him.

"She’s changed," I said.

"Hm."

"I mean it, Ren. She’s completely different. I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it."

"It’s her business." He said it evenly, not unkindly, while pulling a pair of mugs from the cupboard. "I’m not interested in her business."

"You could be a little interested." I teased him playfully.

"I could not." I frown a little.

"You nodded at her."

"That was manners."

"That was growth" I said, grinning, and he gave me a look over his shoulder that was half exasperated and half fond.

"Come on. She apologised in the middle of a road with wounds on her hands."

"That was stupid, she could have gotten herself killed."

"But she didn’t. I think that was brave."

He was quiet while he ladled soup into the mugs, and I thought he’d let it drop. Then he set one in front of me, wrapped my hands around it, and said gruffly, "It was brave."

"There you go."

"I’m glad she’s grown up, Lumi. I mean it. I never wished her any harm, I just couldn’t be what she needed." He leaned his elbows on the counter across from me. "And he’s a good man, Eli. I’d say so to anyone."

I blinked. "You know him?"

"He worked for me." He shrugged one shoulder, entirely casual. "Loading dock, then logistics. Started three years ago, and he’s never been late once. When his mum was ill, he worked doubles for a year so he wouldn’t have to ask anyone for help."

"Ohhh. So that was why he called you sir."

"That’s why." I stared into my soup, trying to work the whole revelation through.

The heiress who’d once thrown coffee-stained tantrums in a mall, who had a family that owned half a city, had walked away from the whole glittering lot and followed a man who stacked boxes for her ex.

"Hang on," Ren said slowly, and I could see him arriving at the same place. "So Victoria, who wouldn’t look at a man unless his surname was on a building, has just agreed to follow someone who works for someone."

"Who works for you," I said.

"Who works for me." He shook his head, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth despite himself. "She’s gone from the top of the food chain to the launderette."

"That’s the power of love."

"That’s the power of a good stale roll." I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my mug.

Ren laughed too, a warm, low laugh that filled up the whole kitchen.

For a moment it felt like nothing in the world could touch us, and I reached across the counter, caught his hand, and pressed my mouth to his knuckles.

"Nine," I said.

"I lost count."

"I didn’t." His phone buzzed against the counter.

Ren glanced at the screen, saw the name, and picked it up with one hand, still smiling, still holding mine with the other.

"Darren." I watched him listen.

It was so gradual that for a few seconds I didn’t understand what I was seeing. The smile slid from his face first, and then the colour went, draining from his cheeks until he looked like a stranger carved out of grey stone.

His hand tightened around mine so hard that it hurt, but I didn’t pull away, because every muscle in his arm had gone rigid and his eyes had stopped seeing me.

"Say that again," he said, in a voice I had never heard before.

I couldn’t make out the words coming through the speaker, only a low, urgent murmur, and then the bond between us snapped taut like a wire pulled straight.

It hit me all at once, without any warning. It wasn’t Ren’s fear, though that was there, huge, black and spilling into me.

It was underneath it, a thin and terrible whisper of something I’d have known anywhere in the world, the way you know your own heartbeat.

Theo.

The soup mug slid out of my fingers and shattered on the tiles.

I didn’t hear anything except my own blood roaring in my ears, and Astra rising up inside me with a howl so desperate that it shook me to the bone.

Something had happened to my son.

Something had happened to Theo.