Chapter 149: FIRST, FREYA
ALPHA CORVIN
TWO HOURS AGO
The cell was colder than the rest of the lower level prison and I stood outside it and did not go in.
Freya loves the cold. I had told Marco when he placed her here.
Freya was at the far wall when I came down the corridor and she turned when she heard me, and for a moment I forgot what I had come down here to say.
A year. A whole year of believing she was ash and bone in a burned-out building, of carrying that around behind everything I did, and she was standing in front of me now with longer hair and new scars on her arms and she had not aged a single day.
She was still the most beautiful thing I had ever put my eyes on.
"You look—" I started.
"Different." She cut in before I could finish.
"Beautiful."
She smiled.
It was the same smile. The one she gave out rarely and on her own terms, the one that lit her whole face when she decided someone had earned it, and it hit me in the chest exactly the way it always had and I held myself still against it.
"Why am I here, Corvin?" She tilted her head, studying me.
Always straight to the point, always asking the hard questions first.
She had not changed a bit and it was something I admired about her.
I came a step closer to the bars. "I’m sorry I had to put you in a cell. It’s temporary. The twins don’t know yet that you’re here."
She went very still. "They don’t know I’m alive."
I held her gaze and let the silence stretch before I answered.
"They know. They just don’t know you’re here."
She crossed to the bars, slow, and stopped close enough that I could see the brown of her eyes in the low light. They had not changed either. She fixed them on me and I felt the pull of her the way I had felt it the first night I met her.
"What I want to know," she said, wrapping one hand around the iron, "is why you sent Marco for me. You could have left me in the cabin."
I moved closer to the cell and then made myself stop.
I knew what proximity to her did to me. I knew what my wolf did when she was within reach, the way he came up against the inside of my chest and pushed, the way he had been pushing since the second I caught her scent on the full moon. I kept the distance deliberately. It was the only intelligent thing I had done all day.
"So you would rather I left you in that cabin." I kept my voice level. "Now that I know you’re alive."
"Yes." It came out of her in a whisper. "I would rather you had. Because now you’re bringing me back to be a witness at your mating ceremony. Why would you want that."
I said nothing, holding her eyes, because I did not have a clean answer.
"Freya. I want to ask you something."
"You haven’t answered me yet." She did not move from the bars.
"What."
"Why would you bring me here to watch you mate someone else." Her voice stayed level, her knuckles tightening slightly on the iron. "Or do you want me to be your mistress again. Is that it."
I had no answer for that one either, because I had not thought about it. That was the truth I did not want to look at directly. The moment I knew she was alive every other part of my mind had gone quiet, and I had reached for her the way a drowning man reached for anything solid, and I had not once stopped to think about what reaching for her would do to her.
I was repeating myself. The same pattern. The exact same one.
"I’ll answer you," I told her. "As soon as you answer this one thing for me."
She searched my face. "What is it you want to know?"
"Why did you stay away for a year?" My voice dropped lower than I meant it to. "You knew I was in pain. You knew I was mourning you. Why."
She held my eyes a moment longer, then turned her back to me and faced the far wall.
"It wasn’t that simple." Her shoulders rose and fell once. "A lot was happening. And I didn’t want to come back, not at first. When I got out of that fire it was a miracle. I shouldn’t have survived it. And I wanted to heal. Not just the burns. The rest of it."
She stopped.
"The things I went through in there, Corvin." Her voice thinned. "The children. I could hear them burning and the mothers screaming and I couldn’t do anything. I was powerless. And Victor—" She broke off, her arms coming around herself. "Victor would rather have watched me die than let me go. That’s the kind of man he is. That’s the kind of man you handed me to in a battle alone while dealing with the grief of Zoya."
I gripped the iron bar without deciding to.
"And when I thought about coming back," she went on, "I thought about what was waiting for me here. Everyone blamed me for Zoya. Ryker wanted me dead. Rowan and Lila could barely look at me. And you—"
She turned around.
A line of wet tracked down one cheek and she left it there, not lifting a hand to it.
"You never said it." Her voice cracked at the edge. "But part of you blamed me too. For Zoya. She wouldn’t have lost her mind the way she did if I had never walked into your life. You’ve always thought about it."
"That isn’t true." It came out fast and rough and I stepped in toward the bars without meaning to. "I never blamed you. That’s why I never let the twins know it was you who—"
I caught myself.
The sentence had gone somewhere I had not intended to take it.
I cleared my throat and brought it back clean. "I took the blame for what happened. I let them put it on me. Because you came first. You have always come first."
