Chapter 191: One of those nights

BRADLEY

“I don’t know yet.”

“Mm.”

She made the sound that meant she had decided not to push. I was grateful for it, because if she had asked another question, I might have had to explain why I couldn’t come home, and there was no explanation I could give her that wouldn’t change the way she heard my voice.

“Listen,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“A lot has been happening down here.” I glanced towards the window, where the moon hung above the estate, indifferent to everything unfolding beneath it. “More than usual. It’s made me think about things I don’t normally stop to consider.”

She said nothing, but I knew she was listening.

“I have a good life,” I continued. “You know that, don’t you? A good one. The house, the garden, the girls running around with their books and muddy shoes. Your mother’s chair that doesn’t match anything else in the sitting room, and which you refuse to get rid of. And now the crooked gate, apparently.”

A soft laugh came through the phone.

I smiled, though it didn’t last.

“I spend most of my life in rooms where nothing is ever settled, and nobody says what they really mean. Then I come home, and there’s food on the table, someone calling me from upstairs, and you sitting by that window with a book in your lap.” My voice lowered before I could stop it. “I’ve spent years taking all of that for granted. I don’t think I’ve ever properly told you what it means to me.”

“Are you all right?” she asked again.

This time, the question was different. She wasn’t asking whether I was hurt or whether something had gone wrong at the estate. She was asking what had brought me to the point of saying things I usually left until another day.

“I’m fine,” I said, though the words caught in my throat. “I just wanted you to know.”

“You could tell me when you’re home, you know.”

“I could.”

“But you don’t.” Her voice held no accusation, which somehow made it harder to hear. “When you’re home, you bury yourself in work. You read reports over dinner, drink your coffee, and keep looking at the clock as if someone is going to come and drag you away if you sit still for too long.”

I closed my eyes.

“That’s true.”

“I know why you do it,” she said gently. “Or at least, I think I do. But sometimes I wish you would let yourself be here with us while you’re here.”

For a moment, I couldn’t find an answer. She wasn’t asking me to explain my work or tell her what had happened that night. She was asking for something much simpler, something I had spent years convincing myself I would have time to give her later.

“I’ll try,” I said.

“I’d like that.”

The silence that followed was comfortable, but I could feel the words gathering behind my teeth, pressing against everything I had spent my life learning not to say.

“I love you,” I told her.

The words came out rougher than I meant them to. I had said them thousands of times before, in passing, before leaving for work or after coming home late. I had never understood how much they could weigh until I found myself wondering whether I would get another chance to say them.

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, simply, “I love you too.”

And that was what undid me.

Not the order. Not the feather. Not even the knowledge of what Cornelius expected me to do.

It was standing in a dark corridor with a dead man’s box on the windowsill and his knife against my ankle, listening to the woman I loved speak to me as though I were still the man who belonged at home.

My eyes burned. I pressed the phone harder against my ear, as if holding it closer could somehow bring me nearer to her. When the first tear slipped free and tracked down towards my jaw, I was suddenly, absurdly grateful that she couldn’t see me.

I pulled the phone away from my face and pressed mute.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

The words were for no one and everyone. For the little girl asleep with her bear book and her sister, for the boy who had spent an afternoon fixing a crooked gate, for the woman sitting in her mother’s chair, waiting for me to come home. And for the man in the ground who had left me with a choice I could not make without hurting someone.

I let the silence hold the words for three seconds. Four.

Long enough to steady my breathing, wipe my face, and put the pieces of myself back where they belonged.

Then I unmuted the phone.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight.”

“Kiss the kids for me.”

“I will. And come home when you can.”

“I’ll try.”

Before she could hang up, she spoke again.

“When you come home, I’ll make the lamb. The way my mother taught me, slowly, in the pot with rosemary and the roots from the garden. I’ll go to Marta’s in the morning for the dark bread, so it’ll still be warm when you get in.”

Her mother’s recipe. The meal she made whenever she sensed something in me needed mending, and the one thing she had never once demanded an explanation for before setting about it.

“You don’t have to do all that,” I said.

“I know.” There was a smile in her voice. “That’s why I will.”

She laughed softly, careful not to wake the girls, and I could picture her in her chair by the window, one hand over her mouth out of habit.

Then she said, “Goodnight, love.”

She hung up first. She always did. She once said she liked to be the one to end it, so the last thing I heard was her, not the click.

I stood there a while longer, phone in hand, the box on the sill.

Then I picked it up, adjusted it against my hip, and walked on.

The caste system does not only hurt those at the bottom of it. While the suffering of Omegas is more visible and often far more brutal, the system also traps those on the upper rungs in expectations, obligations, and loyalties that can cost them dearly.

Bradley is about to put his family’s safety at risk for Lysander, a king who has not even taken his seat on the throne yet. But is this truly about loyalty to his new Alpha King, or is Bradley trying to make up for failing his former, now deceased Alpha King? He was not there to protect the man he had sworn to serve, and perhaps he has been carrying that guilt ever since. Now, he seems determined to pour all that guilt into protecting Lysander, even though he knows Lysander is different from the king who came before him. Lysander might not even want this kind of sacrifice from him.

And that brings me to a question I want to ask you: Would you consider Bradley selfish for risking his family’s safety to atone for a mistake that was never his or Lysander’s to bear? Is his willingness to sacrifice everything an act of loyalty, or is he placing his own need for redemption above the people who depend on him?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts, because sometimes even the noblest intentions can hurt the very people we are trying to protect.