Chapter 338 Was that Grove too?
Aria’s POV
The call came just after midnight.
I was sitting on the kitchen floor of the house, back against the cabinets, phone clutched in both hands like it might ring itself. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t eaten.
Every time I closed my eyes I saw the smoke curling up over the ridge road on the news feed, and I heard my own heartbeat stutter against a bond that had gone terrifyingly thin.
When the screen finally lit up with an unknown number, I answered before it finished the first ring.
"He’s alive," said a low, dry voice. Ronan. I’d only met him once, but I’d never forget that voice. "Barely. But alive. He’s stable enough now that I’m willing to say the word out loud."
I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth so I wouldn’t make a sound. My whole body was shaking.
"Where," I managed. "Where is he."
"My territory. Private clinic. I’ll send a private jet." A pause."Aria. He contacted me before he left that morning. He knew something was wrong. He didn’t know it would end like this."
My eyes burned.
Ronan’s voice hardened. "Whatever else you want to scream at him later, do it when he’s awake. Right now, you need to get here."
"Thank you." My voice cracked straight down the middle. "Ronan, I—thank you. I don’t have another word big enough."
"Then don’t waste it. Just get here."
---
We landed just before dawn. The moment I stepped off the private jet, a car was already waiting.
The drive blurred into dark roads and streaks of headlights. By the time we reached the clinic, the sharp tang of blood and antiseptic hit me the second the doors slid open.
Ronan was waiting in the hallway, sleeves rolled up, dried blood still under his nails. That infuriating half-smile was nowhere in sight.
"This way," he said.
Damian looked wrong lying that still.
That was the only word my brain could find. Wrong. He was too big for the narrow bed, too much of a storm to be reduced to tubes and monitors and the slow mechanical hiss of a machine breathing for him.
His face was gray. His hands, hands that had held mine like I was the only solid thing in his world, lay slack and open on the sheets.
I crossed the room and took one of them in both of mine. Still warm. God, still warm.
"How bad," I whispered, though I already knew from the doctor’s face hovering near the door.
The doctor spoke carefully, the way people do when the truth is a blade. Severe cranial trauma. Massive internal bleeding. They’d stopped both. He’d survive.
"But?" I said. Because there was always a but.
"But he may not wake, Luna." The doctor lowered his eyes. "The damage to the brain—we can’t predict. He could open his eyes tomorrow. He could stay exactly like this. For years. For the rest of his life."
The rest of his life.
The words hit somewhere the blast should have hit me instead. The room tilted sideways. The last thing I heard was Ronan barking my name, and then the floor came up to meet me and everything went black.
---
I woke on a couch in a room I didn’t recognize, a blanket over me that smelled of cedar and someone else’s cigarettes.
Ronan sat across from me, elbows on his knees, watching me with those flat gray eyes that gave away nothing.
"You went down like a felled tree," he said. "Good news, you’ve got his stubbornness. You came right back up swinging in your sleep. Called somebody a liar."
I dragged myself upright. My mouth tasted like ash. "How long was I out?"
"An hour. He hasn’t changed. He won’t, not tonight." He studied me a moment, then leaned back. "There’s something you should know. When my people pulled Damian out of that culvert, we didn’t just kill the men who ambushed him. We took one alive. A rogue." A beat. "I think you’ll want to hear what he has to say. From his own mouth."
My blood went cold and still. "Take me to him."
---
Ronan’s holding cells were underground, all bare concrete and buzzing fluorescent light and the kind of silence that had teeth. The air smelled of iron and fear. I understood, walking down that corridor, exactly why men whispered his name. Whatever he’d done down here, he’d done it thoroughly.
The rogue was chained to a chair in the last cell. He was a wreck of a man, one eye swollen shut, lips split, knuckles raw. But the second the door opened and he saw me, he started talking like the words were burning a hole in him.
"I’ll talk," he blurted. "I’ll talk, I swear to God, just—keep him away from me. Please. I’ll tell you everything."
I stopped in the doorway. I made my voice steady even though my hands were fisted so hard my nails bit skin.
"Then start talking."
He swallowed. "We’re Grove. Underground crew. Rogues, mercs, whoever pays. We don’t fly a pack banner, we don’t answer to any crown. We take contracts." His eyes darted to Ronan and skittered away. "The Alpha King. Both times he got hit—that was us. Both jobs. Same client."
"Who," I said. One word. It came out flat as a blade laid on a table.
"A woman. Money moved through three cutouts but the name at the top was always the same." He wet his cracked lips. "Sylvia. Sylvia Smith."
The name landed in the pit of my stomach and detonated slow.
Of course. Of course it was her.
"But here’s the thing." The rogue leaned forward as far as the chains let him, desperate now, like the truth was the only currency that might buy him another hour. "The car job. That wasn’t about him. The King was collateral. He wasn’t the target." His gaze locked on mine and held. "You were. The contract was for you. He just got in the way."
The room went very quiet. Even the fluorescent buzz seemed to hold its breath.
Me. She’d tried to blow me off a road and put the most powerful wolf on the continent in a coma by accident, because I’d happened to sit beside him. He was lying in that bed, breathing through a machine, because someone had decided I shouldn’t be allowed to live.
Something in me went hard and clear and cold, colder than I’d ever felt.
I took one step into that cell. When I spoke, my voice didn’t shake at all.
"My father." I heard the words leave me like they belonged to someone stronger. "Vincent Smith’s death. " My eyes never left the rogue’s ruined face. "Tell me. Was that Grove too? "