Chapter 107: IGNORANT
KEISHA’S POV
The first man came at Callum fast.
Callum moved faster than he did.
It didn’t take much to punch him across the face, leaving him stumbling as the man’s momentum used against him and then the man was on the ground and he hadn’t even fully processed falling before it was over.
The second came from the side.
Same result but this one was faster.
The third one looked at the first two on the ground and then at Callum. I watched him make the calculation, watched him decide to come anyway and watched that decision go exactly as badly as the first two had.
Three men.
Maybe five seconds total.
Eliora was staring and the smile was completely gone.
One of Callum’s guards appeared from the corridor behind us and looked at the three men on the ground and then at Callum and said— "Alpha." The word came out louder than intended in the quiet of the loading space and I watched Eliora’s face as it landed.
Alpha.
She hadn’t known.
The colour drained out of her face so fast it was almost audible. She took one step back and hit the wall behind her and stood there with both hands pressed against it like she needed something solid.
"They came to my pack." She said. Her voice had gone very small. "I didn’t know — I didn’t know who you—"
"Tell me why." Callum ordered in the same quiet voice he had used from the beginning that was unchanged. "Nadia. Why her?"
Eliora’s mouth opened and closed.
"Why." He asked again, pressing harder.
She slid down the wall and landed on her knees and I wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or if her legs had simply stopped cooperating. "She got everything." She said. The words coming out rough and stripped down to something real under the panic. "I was there that day too. I worked for it. I sat at that desk and I did everything they asked and nobody looked at me and then she walked in with no experience and no credentials and they handed her a work like I wasn’t even there." Her hands were shaking. "Like I was furniture."
"So you drugged her." Callum frowned.
Eliora pressed her lips together.
"You drugged my daughter." He repeated.
The words landed in the space between them and Eliora flinched like they had a physical weight.
"And your credentials." I said. "The resume. All fake."
She looked at me and something moved through her face that wasn’t remorse. "I needed the job." She said. "I wasn’t going to get it any other way. Not with the records." She shook her head at me, trying to make me understand. "Everyone looks at the records and closes the door before I can even—"
"Because you assaulted two people." I said.
"Who deserved it." She said immediately, keeping her voice flat. And then she seemed to hear herself and looked at the floor.
I looked at her on her knees on the floor of a loading area in a building behind a club and thought about how terrible this evening could have gone.
The three men on the ground were starting to stir.
Callum looked at them and then at his guards. "Get them up." He said. "And her." He nodded at Eliora. "Dungeon."
"No—" Eliora started, scrambling to her feet. "Wait, please—"
"You put something in my daughter’s drink." Callum said. "You fabricated credentials to gain access to this pack under false pretences. You hired men to harm pack members." He looked at her directly. "Dungeon."
The guards moved.
Eliora was taken, still talking, still explaining, her voice getting higher and further away down the corridor and then gone.
The loading area went quiet.
I stood in it and felt this draining feeling that came after fear, all the adrenaline with nowhere to go now that it was over, and pressed my hand briefly against the wall.
Callum looked at me. "Are you hurt?"
"No." I said.
He looked at me for a moment longer. Then— "Hospital."
I wanted to say no, but Diana stirred in my head. "Go."
Right.
We moved.
The hospital was fifteen minutes out and I sat in the back of the car beside Callum and the night moved past the windows and neither of us said anything.
Dane was outside the room when we arrived with his jacket off. The look he got when he had been sitting with something and didn’t like sitting with things.
"Stable." He said before we reached him. "Her sreathing is normal. Whatever she was given is strong but the doctor says no lasting damage." He paused. "She’ll be out for a few hours."
I exhaled slowly as Callum went into the room.
I stood in the doorway and watched him go to Nadia’s bedside and stand there and look at her and his face did something I wasn’t supposed to see and I looked at the corridor wall and gave him the moment.
Dane appeared beside me.
"You okay?" " He whispered?
"Yes." I said.
He looked at me sideways.
"I’m okay." I said. "I promise."
He nodded once, leaned against the wall beside me and we stood in the corridor outside the room and waited and the hospital moved around us with its ordinary sounds and people.
Nadia woke at half past two.
Her eyes opened slowly and she looked at the ceiling and then at me in the chair beside her and then past me at Callum standing near the window with his arms folded and his face doing nothing at all.
"Hi." She muttered, voice rough.
"Hi." I said.
"Are you angry?" She whispered to Callum.
He said nothing.
"I’m sorry." She said. "I should have listened. Keisha told me and I didn’t and I—"
"Rest." He ordered forgetting that.
She looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone who missed him a lot.
The doctor cleared her an hour later and we gathered our things and moved toward the hospital exit together, Nadia between me and Callum with Dane just behind.
I was watching the ground when something at the edge of my vision made me look up.
Across the road.
A figure standing completely still while everyone else moved, and looking directly at us.
My breath stopped in my throat.
Orin.
He had the same build. Same face. Looking at me the way he had looked at me across that apartment before everything went wrong.
"Callum." I whispered.
"I see him." He said, his gaze steady looking.
A group of people crossed between us and the road and when they cleared the pavement was empty. Just the moving street and the ordinary night and nobody standing still anywhere.
I stared at the empty pavement.
"Did I imagine that?" I asked, my voice tiny and mysterious.
Callum was quiet for a moment.
"No." He said. His voice was very even. "You didn’t."