Chapter 35

Killian

It took me a long time to get to sleep after leaving Elena’s room. I tossed and turned and twisted in the sheets. My heart was beating so loudly in my chest that it seemed to echo throughout the whole house.

I wondered if one could catch a fever immediately on contact, and if the heat and emotional discomfort I was feeling was because of that.

Elena’s attitude was maddening, especially trying to gauge how quickly and intensely it might change from one moment to the next. I remembered how Tiffany called her unstable, and worried that it could be true.

But even when Elena jumped from polite to possessed with fury in an instant, her eyes were always clear and focused. Her words were concise, and though sometimes weapons against me, nothing about it made me question her sanity. I had seen mental instability in various forms enough to know that Elena was still in her right mind.

Just that afternoon I encountered a man who some might call a lunatic, and compared to him Elena was a zen master. Thinking about the prisoner only made me scowl more, especially considering the meeting I’d scheduled to talk about him was only a few hours away.

We needed answers out of these attackers, and I would throw all my focus into solving this mystery. Maybe it would take my mind off the mystery of my Mate in the meantime.

Elena was a the breakfast table before me the next morning, her face calm but revealing nothing. Her hair was twisted on top of her head, and the light purple dress she wore made her red eyes stand out. She lifted her head to look at me when I entered but said nothing.

“Good morning,” I endeavored as I sat down. “Were you able to get sleep the rest of the night?”

“Some.”

“That’s good,” I said, wondering if I could draw her into conversation. “I slept horribly.”

“Oh.”

She was looking over a folder of papers, the contents unknown to me. I guessed that she probably wouldn’t declassify that information if I asked. Her right elbow rested on the table next to her plate, fork poised in the air with a small piece of potato between the tines.

There wasn’t much on her plate, but the crumbs and residue told me she had filled it before she sat down. Even her appetite had changed from that of the scrawny woman I married three years ago.

“You must be feeling better than last night, you’re eating again,” I said, seeing her turn her eyes slightly to look at me. “And you have such an appreciate these days. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was like you were eating for two.”

She stared at me, the corners of her mouth turning down in a frown. She looked at her fork, and with a small shake of her head she put it down on her plate and went back to what she was reading. My faced burned with regret over my poorly thought out joke.

I focused on my own food for a few minutes, looking over my own notes for the day.

“Anything else I should know before this meeting?” she asked me. “I only learned of it this morning, but I will be ready on time.”

“Oh, and Tiffany didn’t tell you? She responded to it immediately, I thought she would share it since you were together.”

“You thought wrong,” she said quickly.

“Yes, I see that,” I replied. “Well, it doesn’t matter. You can look over the incident reports from the past visits if you’d like, acclimate yourself. I’m really hoping to come up with ideas on how to alleviate the situation. I don’t have a lot of information to share, unfortunately.”

“Right,” she said.

“We’re not sure if he’s hallucinating or possessed or just faking the whole thing, but it has the guards and medical team pretty spooked.”

“We fear what we do not understand.”

“What’s that from?”

“What?”

“That phrase.”

“…my brain.”

“Oh.”

Her faced was pinched like she smelled something bad. Eyeing me up and down, she seemed to dismiss another thought from her brain. She gathered her things and cleared her plate to the sideboard.

“I’ll see you there shortly,” I said as she was reaching the doorway.

“Yes,” she said, and then I was alone again.

Elena

My mind wandered in and out of the meeting to discuss the Rogue prisoners and what to do with them. Their leader had been having fits of some sort, and no knew why or how or what triggered them. He seemed angry and afraid, and they had to keep him in solitary confinement for the safety of himself and others.

“Could it be poison?” It was Dawson, head of security. A good man, he’d continually apologized for not being prepared when the attackers shows up to disrupt the banquet.

“Toxicology didn’t showing anything,” Maddox, head of medicine, responded. “Either it’s untraceable dose, or it’s something we’ve never seen before.

“It’s some devilry, that’s for sure,” Shade, chief of staff and elder council, raised his voice to be heard. “We may we to search outside our own Pack for information, see if our neighbors have seen anything like it.”

I kept myself quiet through most of this, keeping my face stoic while I seemed to listen intently. But inside, I was in full discussion with myself about what could be happening. There was a vague memory of odd mental health episodes in the Pack from before Killian rejected me— and now I was thinking about that again— and I wondered if it was somehow connected.

The details were too blurry, so I kept my theories to myself for the time being.

“For now,” Killian was saying, “we will continue with our strict aberration and interrogation, and try out low-dose hypotheses so as not to do more harm than good.”

There was much nodding and muttering among the group. Tiffany stood to the side of the room, her whole face puckered like she sucked on a sour candy.

“If anyone has any other ideas or insights, they should come straight to me,” the Alpha commanded. “I am making this a priority— we need to understand these Rogues so we may prevent more of them from showing on our doorstep.”

The group was dismissed and dispersed back to their various work spaces. Killian was speaking softly to Tiffany when I approached him, out of earshot of the other staff.

“I’d like to see him,” I said confidently.

“Who?” Killian asked, looking confused.

“The prisoner,” I told him. “I want to see him for myself. It will help me to understand what we’re dealing with, more so than just proposed diagnoses on a page.”

“Alright, I’ll take you down,” he appeased me.

He handed Tiffany the folder he was holding and gestured for me to walk with him. Tiffany started to follow when he stopped her.

“Go to my office and file those in with the rest,” he said about the papers in her hand. “Please.”

She looked offended that she was to be left behind, but kept herself in check and nodded in compliance. It shouldn’t have made me feel as good as it did, but I took the small win.

I hadn’t ever been in the prison before. I had never had a real reason to visit them, especially not the lower floors where more dangerous inmates were held. The place was clean and humane, but still gave me chill as went down the stairs and underground.

I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t what I saw.

The poor man was in such mania that he was constantly shifting between man and wolf, and at one point seem stuck in between. He lashed out at an invisible adversary, while growling and saying something that both frightened and inspired him.

I walked closer, almost to the bars of the door, trying to understand his mumblings.

All I could make out was a repeated word: Reckoning.