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The revenge is over. Peter is dead. And Scarlett Black is left alone with what she is - and everything she's done. Becoming something better is harder than destroying everything. It doesn't come with forgiveness, or second chances, or clean slates. It comes one choice at a time, in front of people who have every reason not to trust her. Stiles Stilinski is one of them. That's the problem.
《 Previous - Next 》
Chapter 12
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The map of Beacon Hills was spread across the desk in three overlapping sections because the town was too wide for a single sheet, and she had marked it in pencil. She always used a pencil when she studied her plans. Pens would only make a mess on her map, while with the pencil she could revise it everytime she pleased.
Vanessa had marks for the Hale house, the preserve boundaries, the roads that cut through the woods and the ones that ended at its edge. She had the police station circled from three nights ago, and the stretch of woods east of it where she'd found him, and a radius around both that represented a reasonable operating territory for someone who was moving and trying not to be found.
Beacon Hills wasn't even that big, that was what was driving her insane.
She'd been staring at it for forty minutes, moving the lamp slightly to the left, she needed it to be on the her left at that hour. The peripheral was the first thing to go when the light was wrong, and she needed the peripheral. She'd learned to compensate. She'd built her entire fighting style around compensation, around going in close enough that the gap between what her right eye caught and what it missed became irrelevant. But when she planned her concentration had to be total, and her right eye would become a problem at that hour.
She moved the lamp again. Studied the eastern preserve boundary. Vanessa thought about the night in the woods again, the night she had met Derek Hale. She thought of how he'd moved, the ground he'd chosen, the places where he'd redirected rather than retreating straight back. He knew those woods. He knew them the way someone knew a place they'd grown up in, which meant he moved through them with a structural advantage, and yet she put up a fight, and she could have won. Her jaw set in anger.
She needed to find where he was going to ground. He surely was hiding somewhere expecially if he had a new Beta now. And Isaac Lahey was even searched by the police.
But she had nothing. Three days of watching, and Vanessa had still fucking nothing.
Her fist came down on the desk.
The lamp rattled. The map shifted slightly. She held the position for a moment — knuckles against wood, the small precise pain of it — and then straightened.
"Calm down, dear niece."
She hadn't heard him come in. That itself was information — she'd been more inside her own head than she'd realized. She kept her eyes on the map. "He can't have disappeared into thin air. What the hell is he doing?"
"After your fight, he must understand to be extra careful." Gerard's voice had the warm patience of someone who had never experienced genuine urgency and considered this a virtue. "Don't you think?"
She didn't answer immediately. There were several things she could have said, most of them true, and she ran through them and discarded them one by one, a huntress should always be controlled and calm, or stupid things would follow.
But she was angry, genuinely angry, not the clean functional anger she used before a hunt but something more complicated underneath it. That the anger was as much at Chris as at Derek Hale. She could have win that fight, she could have killed Derek like she was supposed to do. But she didn't, and not beacuse of her mistakes.
"I think I'm better than that," she said.
Gerard laughed. It was the laugh she knew best — genuine, warm, the specific pleasure of a man watching something he'd built function correctly. "You are exactly like Kate when she was your age."
She had heard this her whole life. She had never grown tired of it.
Kate at seventeen had been building a reputation that the older hunters still talked about when they thought she wasn't listening. Kate at seventeen had taken a shot in the field that had become a teaching example — the angle of it, the conditions, the specific decision-making that had preceded it. She had grown up hearing Kate's name attached to the standard she was supposed to meet, and she had never once found that standard too high. It was the only inheritance that mattered. And she believed that she was doing a pretty good job to stand up to the expectations.
"How is Chris so different from her?" She heard the question come out and knew she'd been holding it for several days. "Why is he so different from my father?"
There was silence for a moment. Then she heard Gerard move shifting his weight from next to her. "Chris has always had different ideas," he said, and his voice had the specific solemnly. "But he is an Argent." She pressed her lips together and nodded at the map. She had wittnessed it.
"And he's coming back to his senses."
Her granfather's words made her turn with a frown, "Is he?" she asked skeptically.
Gerard let out a little chuckle, "Probably you've been too busy with your searching." He looked at her with a pause that had intention in it. "But Allison is not back yet tonight."
Vanessa's eyes moved to the clock on her drawer. It read eleven forty-seven.
Eleven forty-seven. And Allison, who was watched by two parents who had never once let her come home later than ten without a call, was not back. It didn't took Vanessa much to understand what Victoria and Chris had organized.
"The kidnapping," she stated calmly.
It was one of the first exercises all hunters had to do. Vanessa remembered hers; the dark after the bag had come down over her head, the way she'd had to immediately stop the panic from becoming anything useful to the people who had taken her. She remembered the rope, and the chair, and the voice in the darkness that had asked her questions she hadn't been meant to answer, only to listen to. She remembered working the knot for an hour and forty minutes before it gave, and the voice from outside the door afterward saying that's good. She remembered that she hadn't cried, which was the part she was proudest of.
Allison was sitting in a dark room somewhere right now, working a knot or a chain trying to free herself. And she was probably scared. And the question was whether she was going to let the fear work for her or against her, and that answer was going to tell the Argents everything they needed to know about what Allison was made of.
Like her previous hunts had tell them about what Vanessa was truly made of.
"That was Victoria's order, not Chris," Vanessa said turning the map once again.
The hierarchy was clear. Among the Argents, men were soldiers and women were leaders. They made the decisions that mattered, the ones about who lived and who died and what the code permitted and what it didn't. Victoria had already made hers regarding Isaac Lahey: if they found him at the next full moon, they would have to kill him. It was the oldest equation in the world when it came to werewolves — he was out of control, he killed his father, he was Derek Hale's Beta and because of that he couldn't be trusted. She agreed with the logic. She agreed with Victoria's decisiveness.
Her granfather chuckled again. "I knew you would have like her."
But Vanessa didn't say that.
"I need you to go get Allison," Gerard said, after a moment of silence.
She turned toward him with the dry sound of someone who has been asked to do something beneath their current operational focus. "I'm not a babysitter, grandpa."
"No, you're not." He tilted his head — the specific tilt that meant a question was coming that he already knew the answer to. "But tell me. Have you noticed something strange about Allison?"
She had. She'd been noticing it since the first night — the pattern of absences, the particular quality of Allison's exits from the house. The night Lydia Martin had been found, Allison had been out. The full moon night, she'd been out. Was it enough to think bad about her? Probably not, but that didn't make her innocent either...
It was indeed very strange that everytime something happened Allison wasn't at home. Too much to be a coincidence.
"You don't trust her," she said, watching his face.
"Why? Do you?" The question was light and pleasant, already expecting her answer.
"I don't trust anyone," she said with a little smirk.
He smiled. "Go to the Hale house. And keep an eye on her."
He turned and walked out, and she stood in the room with the map and the lamp and the pencil marks that weren't giving her anything yet, and she thought about what he'd meant; keep an eye on Allison, understand what she's doing and know where her loyalties are before it becomes relevant.
She was already thinking about it when she reached for her jacket.
The night was cold and clear, the kind of October night that made sound carry further than it should. She moved the motorcycle out of the driveway quietly and didn't start the engine until she was far enough from the house that it didn't matter. The last thing she needed was to disturb whatever was happening inside.
It was the fist time she went there.
The damage was more extensive than she'd expected. She'd seen burned buildings before — the aftermath of them, the specific way fire moved through a structure and left its record — but this had been something else. An entire section of the upper floor had come down, the exterior wall collapsed inward, the roofline broken in two places. Whatever had burned here had burned hot and burned long, and nobody had touched it since. She looked at it with the flat attention of someone cataloguing terrain and felt the thought arrive before she could stop it.
This is where Kate died.
Vanessa stood there for a moment observing the wood of the house. She didn't know the details of her aunt death because the details weren't going to change the fact that it had happened.
But she found herself wondering, briefly, what had brought Kate here. The house had been abandoned for six years. Derek Hale had come back to Beacon Hills and Kate had been here, in this building, at the end. Had she been hunting him? Had she tracked him here and lost the fight?
It was difficult to believe. Kate had been exceptional. But no hunter was untouchable — she knew that, had known it since she was seven years old and had understood what it meant that her father wasn't coming back. You could be the best and still lose. You could do everything right and still end up in the wrong place at the wrong moment with the wrong creature in front of you. Kate had known that too and maybe one day Vanessa would know it herself.
Then taking a breath she decided to push all of that away with the rest of them and started moving toward the house. But she was twenty meters out when she felt it.
The air had something in it that she couldn't name precisely but that she'd felt before, on hunts, in moments before something went wrong. She slowed. She drew two blades from her waist and held them loose, and stood still and let her senses do the work trying to understand if someone, or something, was there with her. But she heard the breeze, and the trees above her.
But then she heard the gurgling.
She turned. To the left of the house, in the shadow along the outer wall, there was a motorcycle she hadn't seen on the approach. She looked at it. Allison didn't ride a motorcycle — she should have ridden a car. But there was none.
Vanessa moved toward it, blades still drawn, reading the ground as she went. She had to focuse her sight in the dark, but when she got closer she saw the shape on the ground before she reached the motorcycle.
Someone was on their back in the grass, arms loose at their sides, face turned toward the sky. She came around the front wheel and saw the blood — the amount of it, covering his chest and spreading dark into the grass around him — and she saw his face, and she stopped.
Bennett.
She went down on one knee beside him. Her eyes moved across the damage with the trained attention she'd built over years of looking at things she needed to understand — the wounds on his chest, the depth of them, the specific pattern of something that wasn't claws and wasn't a blade and wasn't anything she recognized immediately. His shirt was soaked through. The blood was still moving, which meant he was still alive, which meant she had seconds to do something useful and she needed to know what that something was.
She reached for her phone, but then she noticed that he was looking at her. He knew she was there. She watched him try to pull in a breath and watched it not work the way he needed it to, the chest not cooperating, and she understood that the phone call wasn't going to change what was already happening.
She stayed on one knee in the grass. She looked at him. She made herself look at him the way she made herself look at everything that was hard — directly, without flinching, without finding somewhere else to put her eyes. It was the only thing she had to give him and it cost her nothing and so she gave it.
His eyes found her face and stayed there, and she held his gaze, and she did not move.
She had been seven years old the first time she'd understood that sometimes you arrived too late. That sometimes the thing had already happened and all that was left was to stand in the room with it. She had learned that day that looking away didn't change anything. It only meant you were alone with it afterward.
His chest moved once more, and then it didn't.
Vanessa reached out and closed his eyes.
It took her a moment, fighting the her hands from shaking and her breath from laboring. Composure and focus was what every hunter had to keep, always no matter what.
Bennett had lost his fight, and she knew that that was what could happen to all of them. She knew, and she had to remember that. He was a hunter before everything and had faught like all of them had to do.
The question was ringing in her head though... why did Derek Hale killed Bennett? It could not have been anyone else. Who could?
And once again she found herself looking at what had been done to him — at the wounds, the pattern of them. She had never seen werewolves attaching the chest of a human. The wounds went from up to down on his front, but she realized that she had never seen such wounds.
With that realization Vanessa realized that her breath had calmed down, and her lips had stopped from quiver, and without looking away from Bennett's wounds, she reached to the phone in her pocket.
She dialed and put her phone against her ear. It ringed three, then four times, but then she heard him pick it up.
"Gerard," she said, before he could say anyting. "We have a problem."
Her voice was even. Her jaw was set. There was something more behind that death, and that meant that they had now more than one problem, not only Derek Hale.
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 34
She woke to the sound of voices and the strange discovery that her body had stopped hurting.
Not entirely — there was still a dull weight in her limbs, and her mouth felt dry and wrong — but the burning that had been climbing her legs all day was gone, and when she moved her arms the air felt like air instead of something she had to push through. She lay still for a moment, not trusting it, and then she sat up and her head stayed where it was supposed to be.
"Here she is," John said, and she looked up to find him crossing the room toward her. He was walking differently than he had been — steadier, carrying himself with less effort, the careful movements of someone testing a body that had stopped fighting them. "You took your own sweet time, sweetie."
"What are you doing up?" she asked.
"Same thing you're about to do." He stopped in front of her and looked at her with that expression she had never quite learned to read. "You feel it too, yeah? How it's different."
She did. She didn't know how to explain it, but something had shifted while she slept — the fever, the weight of the sickness, whatever had been pulling her under — it was still there at the edges but it had lost its grip. "I don't understand how that's possible," she said, more to herself than to him.
"Lily." Octavia's voice came from behind her, and she turned to see the girl coming toward her with a cup of water. "Oh, you're up."
"And you came back," Lily said. "What did Lincoln say?"
Octavia had explained it quickly. Lincoln had told her there was no cure for the fever, but that this particular one was not designed to last. The Grounders had sent Murphy because they were planning to attack the following day. The disease was a weapon meant to weaken the camp overnight, not to kill everyone in it. Not a long illness. A sharp one.
"That's why I feel better?" Lily asked, turning it over in her head. She reached out and pressed her fingers to Murphy's forehead before he could say anything.
"Alright..." he muttered as she touched him.
"No fever." She dropped her hand and looked around the room. In the dim light she could see people sleeping, some of them breathing more easily than they had been before she went under. Some of them still looked bad. Some of them were very still. "Did anyone else—"
"Die?" Murphy guessed.
"Yeah," Octavia said, her voice quiet. "And some more showed symptoms while you were out."
Lily got up from the hammock. Her legs held. "But they're attacking in the morning."
"Bellamy is handling it," Octavia said. "He'll figure something out."
She believed that. Whatever she and Bellamy were right now — whatever had cracked between them over Murphy, over the fever, over all of it — she had never doubted that he would find a way. She just hoped whatever he was planning didn't put him directly in front of an arrow.
"He asked about you," Octavia said, holding out the cup of water.
Lily looked up at her, and she fought the instinct to let her eyes go wide, because she hadn't expected that. She had thought — genuinely thought, lying in that hammock while the hours blurred — that after everything, after two people dying and his sister nearly sick, he would have filed her somewhere past concern. That the anger would have been the whole of it.
"He wanted to know how you were feeling," Octavia said, watching her. A small, knowing expression settled on her face. "Is something going on between you two? Because he looked very ready to come in here when he heard you'd collapsed."
Lily took the cup and drank from it, because it gave her something to do with her face. She felt warmth move through her chest, something quieter and more complicated than happiness, something she didn't know what to do with yet. She had been so sure she had lost it. That the anger had finished it off cleanly. And instead he had stood outside and asked how she was, and that was— that was enough. That was more than enough.
"As much as I love chitchatting," John said from behind her, "there's work to do."
She turned to look at him, frowning slightly. "You're helping?"
"Why so surprised?" He was already moving toward the nearest row of hammocks, picking up one of the cups from the table as he went. "They have to stay hydrated, right?"
Her lips curved up before she could stop them. "Right." She glanced at Octavia, who looked faintly amused, and then they both turned to go back to work.
"Where's Clarke?" Lily asked.
"Sleeping," Octavia said. "She passed out not long after you."
Lily looked across the room to the hammock Murphy had been using — Clarke was there now, her face slack and still, her breathing slow. Lily crossed to her and pressed the back of her hand to Clarke's forehead. Still warm, but not the burning it had been. Not worse.
"I was trying to keep her temperature down," Octavia said, a wet cloth in her hand.
"Keep doing that," Lily said, and Octavia moved to do it. Lily looked at her carefully — at her colour, at the steadiness of her hands, at the absence of the signs she had been watching for all day. No bleeding. No pallor beyond ordinary tiredness. No trembling.
"Are you feeling alright?" she asked.
"Yeah," Octavia said. "Apparently some of us are immune."
It was good news. It was genuinely good news, and Lily held onto it — if there were people who couldn't catch it, then there were people who could move through the room freely, who could carry water and change cloth without risk, who could hold the line while the sick ones fought their way back. It didn't change the ones they had already lost. Nothing changed that.
She wished she had real medicines. The thought came and went — she had been thinking it all day, this particular quiet grief for the equipment she didn't have, the compounds she couldn't synthesize, the things that might actually have shortened this rather than just softened it. She let it pass and reached for the yarrow.
Then someone coughed badly enough that the whole room shifted, and when she turned she saw Connor.
He was down on his side, his body shaking with the effort of it, and Octavia was already calling across the room.
"Murphy. Clarke said to roll him over when it happens."
"I'm on it." He was already moving, crossing the floor with more steadiness than she would have expected from him twenty-four hours ago, crouching beside Connor and getting his hands under the boy's shoulder. "Come on, come on, roll on your side." Connor resisted for a moment, and then didn't. "It's okay," Murphy was saying, lower than his usual voice, "I got you. Try to breathe. Hey — listen to me. You and me are good, all right? Just breathe."
Lily stood very still for a moment, watching him.
Connor had been the one who put the rope around his neck. Connor had been the one screaming loudest for it, his face twisted with the kind of anger that had stopped seeing a person and started seeing something it was allowed to hate. And now Murphy had his hand on Connor's back and was talking him through it in that low, steady voice, and she felt something move in her chest that she didn't try to name.
She hadn't thought he would do that. She hadn't let herself think it, because she hadn't been sure it was possible. And here it was.
She crossed to them and crouched, holding out a cup. "I've brought more water. You sure you've got him?"
Murphy took the cup without looking up. "I got this. Don't worry."
She touched his shoulder briefly as she stood and moved to the girl lying next to Connor, and she heard Murphy's voice behind her, and Connor's ragged breathing, and then Connor's voice, thin and exhausted and confused.
"I put that rope around your neck," he said. "Why are you helping me?"
There was silence for a moment, but then John answered, "Bygones."
Lily didn't hide the small smile that came, then she kept moving.
For the next hour she worked through the room — water to the ones who could drink, cloth to the ones who were burning, her voice to the ones who were frightened enough to need it. She turned people who were coughing and held them when it became the bad kind and talked them back when it passed. She checked on Clarke twice, who slept on, her temperature falling toward something survivable.
As she looked around, to the new faces that have entered since she had fallen asleep, Lily was glad that she didn't spot Jasper and Monty among them.
Then she heard a groan from the entrance, and something in the sound of it went through her before she had finished processing it, her body already turning, already moving.
Bellamy.
He was being half-carried inside by two of his boys, his arms over their shoulders, his feet finding the floor unevenly. His face was pale, sweat was forming on his forehead and there was blood on his upper lip and down his chin, probably coming from his nose. She was beside him before she knew she had crossed the room.
"Oh my God," she said, and her hands went to his face without asking permission. "Bell."
His eyes found her, and something in them shifted — something that had been braced relaxing very slightly. "Lily," he said.
Her eyes filled with tears. "It's going to be alright, I promise," she said, and she meant it, she would make it true. Behind her she heard Octavia's voice.
"Oh, no. Bell." Quick footsteps. "Clear some space. Lay him down."
Lily kept her hands on his face, her forehead nearly touching his cheek, steadying him while the two boys moved to do what Octavia said. His weight shifted toward her and she took it.
"You alright?" he asked her.
She let out a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob, and she was grateful he couldn't tell the difference. She didn't want him to see how frightened she was. "Are you asking me?" she said, and they looked at each other, and she felt him lean into her hands just slightly.
"Here, Lily," Octavia said from beside her.
But before they could move him, Bellamy started coughing.
"Bell—" She was already guiding him down, Octavia on his other side, both of them lowering him as fast as they safely could. He coughed and coughed, his whole body working with it, the sound wet and wrong, and she got her hand under his shoulder and her other hand in his hair. "On the side," Octavia said, and Lily was already doing it, tilting him so the blood in his mouth could come out instead of staying in, and she heard herself talking to him in a low steady voice, "It's alright, I've got you, you're alright," and she couldn't have said when she had started.
When the coughing finally stopped he lay gasping, his chest heaving, his eyes unfocused for a moment before he came back to himself. Octavia was already cleaning his mouth with a cloth, her eyes bright with tears she was not letting fall.
"Hey, big brother," she said.
He looked at her, and then at Lily, and then his eyes filled with tears.
"I'm scared," he admitted in a tired whisper.
She had never heard him say that. Not like this — not plainly, without anything over it, without armour. It was the most unguarded thing she had ever heard him say and it hit her somewhere behind her ribs and stayed there.
"I won't let anything happen to you, I promise," Octavia said, and her voice only cracked a little.
He looked at her for a moment. "That's what I said to you. The day you were born."
"I know," Octavia said softly. "You told me about a thousand times." She looked up at Lily. "You stay with him while I get water?"
Lily nodded, not trusting her voice. She kept her hand in his hair.
"Hi," he said tiredly, when Octavia had gone. His eyes were still wet.
"Hi," she said, and it came out soft and unsteady. "You're going to be up in no time. I'll make sure of it." She reached for his hand and he took it, his fingers closing around hers. She felt the tears slide down her own cheeks and didn't try to stop them. "I'm sorry, Bell," she whispered.
He shook his head slowly. "No." His voice was quiet and there was no harshness in it at all. "I know you'd do it again. That's who you are." His hand tightened around hers, and she smiled despite the tears, the two of them looking at each other in the dim light. "I'm glad you're alright," he said.
She almost lost it completely then. She had watched people die from this fever. She had watched them shake and go still, and she had held some of them when it happened, and she could not — she was not going to let him be one of them. "Try to rest," she said, steadying her voice as much as she could. "I'll be right here if you need anything."
He nodded, and his eyes closed, and she sat with her hand in his until his breathing slowed and evened out into sleep. It didn't take long. She knew that kind of exhaustion from the inside now. She watched the rise and fall of his chest until she was sure it was steady, and then, with a last touch to his hair, she let go of his hand and went back to work.
For the next two hours she moved through the room with Octavia and Murphy beside her. She brewed another batch of yarrow tea when the first ran out and pressed cups on everyone conscious enough to hold one. She turned people who were coughing and changed cloths and brought water until her arms ached with it. Every so often she passed where Bellamy lay and looked — breathing even, face still, the rise and fall of his chest steady. Each time it was steady and relieved Lily kept working.
She was passing Clarke's hammock when she noticed the girl stirring. She put her hand out to slow her down.
"Hey. Not too quickly." She said as Clarke blinked her eyes, "How are you feeling?"
"Like I've been hit by a tree," she said letting out a breath.
"I know what you mean." Lily pressed her hand to Clarke's forehead. The fever had dropped. Not gone, but cooler than before, heading somewhere survivable. "You should lie down a while longer."
"How are things going?" Clarke asked after a moment.
Lily's eyes moved across the room to Bellamy. "More people got sick while we were both out. And some had died too." She kept her voice steady, she needed to stay focused. "But don't worry about that right now. Rest some more. Octavia and Murphy are handle everything very well." She nodded toward the two of them moving through the rows, crouching when someone needed them.
"Yeah." Lily nodded. "And he's very committed to it."
"Do you trust him?" Clarke asked. Her voice was still tired, stripped down to its plainest version.
Lily thought about it honestly for a moment. "I don't think it's a matter of trust," she said. "He could have not cared at all. But he's helping." She briefly looked to where John was, then she turned to Clarke again. "I don't know what to call it. But I think it means something."
Clarke looked at her for a moment, probably thinking about what Lily had told her, but she didn't answer.
"Now rest," Lily said. "Peter brought more yarrow — I'm going to make another batch of tea."
She turned and looked at John across the room, and let herself think about what she had just said to Clarke. She knew that Marcus Kane would have sent him away the moment his usefulness ended — would have called it order, called it safety, dressed it in the language of what was necessary for the greater good. The same language the Ark had always used for the things it did to people. And sending Murphy away was that, in another shape. A slow execution instead of a quick one. A few days alone before the Grounders found him again, and she didn't think he'd survive a third time. She had never believed in those punishments. She still didn't, and she didn't think she ever would, no matter how much the world down here tried to make them seem like the only available answer.
She went back to the herbs and the water, and the work filled her hands, and after a while it filled her mind too, and she stopped thinking and just worked, and at some point the room went quiet around her and she didn't notice, and at some point after that she stopped noticing anything at all.
She woke to a hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently.
"Lily."
She jolted upright, and turned, and found Bellamy standing over her.
"Bell." She was up and her hands were on his arms before she had fully arrived in the moment. "You shouldn't be up."
"I feel better," he said.
She looked at him. His colour was still wrong, still carrying the grey of someone who had given more than they should. There was blood at his upper lip again, dried while he slept. And then she saw a drop of fresh blood coming form his nose. Lily reached for one of the cloth strips Murphy had torn from an old blanket and held it out, and he took it and pressed it to his nose.
"Why are you up?" she asked observing him. He was supposed to rest.
"Clarke's gathering everyone inside," he said glancing at the exit of the dropship. "It's almost dawn. The Grounders are coming, and we're safer in here."
"Octavia said you had a plan."
"Finn and Jasper are handling it." She could already hear it in his voice — the leader coming back, that forward-facing steadiness that refused to wait for permission even now, even half-recovered and bleeding. "But you never know."
"You're not going to rest, are you?" she said, even if it didn't sound much of a question.
He let out a breath instead of answering, and she had her answer. She turned to the yarrow tea and poured a cup and held it out. "Don't just drink water. Drink this too. It'll help with the bleeding."
He took it, and she expected him to move away, but he didn't. He looked at her.
"I thought you'd be angry," he said.
She looked up at him. "It wouldn't stop you," she said quietly. "That's who you are." Something passed between them — not quite a smile, not quite the resolution of anything, but something that held both and chose not to end in the hard place. "But if you feel tired," she added, "please, sit down. All right?"
He nodded, "All right." Then he reached over and moved a strand of hair from her face, slow and careful, his eyes observing her face closely. And then, without say anything else, he turned toward the entrance to go back to his work.
She stood still for a moment, her hand rising without thinking to the place where his had been.
It wasn't long before the first people began coming in — cloths pressed over their mouths and noses, eyes moving fast through the room, making space for the ones behind them. But then suddenly the sound came.
It moved through the ground before it moved through the air, deep and percussive, felt in the soles of her feet before she heard it.
Lily walked out of the dropship, shielding her eyes form the light as she step out. And she found the whole camp funnelling toward the dropship, Bellamy and Clarke at the entrance directing the flow, the sky above the trees going pale at the very edges with the first light of dawn.
But on the east, the treeline was lighten up — a dark column of smoke rising fast and thick above the canopy, grey shot through with orange, still burning. And everyone was looking at it.
"They did it," she heard Bellamy say.
She looked at his face as he watched the smoke climb, and she thought about Finn and Jasper somewhere out there in the trees with whatever plan they had found, and the smoke kept rising, steady and unhurried, into the pale sky.
They were safe. For now, at least, they were safe.
***********
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The revenge is over. Peter is dead. And Scarlett Black is left alone with what she is - and everything she's done. Becoming something better is harder than destroying everything. It doesn't come with forgiveness, or second chances, or clean slates. It comes one choice at a time, in front of people who have every reason not to trust her. Stiles Stilinski is one of them. That's the problem.
《 Previous - Next 》
Chapter 11
The chains were harder to arrange than Evelyn'd expected.
She'd seen them in Stiles's hands when he'd arrived at the Lahey house and she'd taken them from him with more confidence than she currently felt, because the reality of looping heavy chain through the interior handles of a freezer that smelled like fear and old metal was considerably less straightforward than it had looked. She worked through it methodically, testing each link, making sure the tension was right, while behind her Scott sat on the concrete floor with his back against the wall and breathed.
Long, deliberate breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the specific rhythm of someone manually managing something that wanted to stop being managed.
She didn't look at him directly. She didn't want for him to feel any kind of pressure. He needed to stay focused.
So she looked at the chains and she worked and she let him breathe.
"You should go, Eve." Scott said through his breathings.
"No, I don't think so." She pulled the last loop through and tested it. Solid. "Almost done."
"I mean it." He insisted.
That made her nod. "I know you do." She didn't turn around. "Still no."
She heard him exhale — not frustration, just the weight of the situation settling further onto him. He didn't argue further, which was how she knew he was grateful, because Scott argued when he wasn't.
She finished with the chains and straightened and looked at the freezer. It was terrible. It was the right solution and it was terrible, and she made herself look at it with the part of her brain was supposed to be an Emissary and therefore had been training to assess rather than react.
I really wouldn't be a great Emissary, she said to herself, before taking a breath to calm herself and look again at the chain. As she did Evelyn decided it would hold if Scott could maintain even partial control once he was inside. If he couldn't maintain partial control then nothing in this basement was going to be sufficient.
She needed mountain ash.
She sould really start to consider to always bring with her a jar of mountain ash.
Then suddenly Evelyn heard a sound from upstairs. She turned andScott had heard it too — his head was up, alert, the yellow flaring briefly in his eyes before he got it back.
Derek, she thought.
She suddenly found herself hoping it was him. That he, Stiles and Scarlett had managed to save Isaac and now he was back to help her with Scott. It could be only him.
But then she felt a pag of worry as she thought that they had been walking inside that house at night with flashlights. What if someone had seen it and now they called the police? How was she supposed to explain why they were in a crime scene? How was she supposed to keep Scott from showing his werewolf side at the police officers?
She could feel the panic raising.
"Scott?"But it was Allison's voice the one that came from the entrance of the house, slightly uncertain, moving through the quiet of the first floor.
Evelyn and Scott looked at each other. She read his face — surprise, and underneath it something that rearranged his whole expression, the specific way he looked when Allison was somewhere nearby, which she had observed enough times to know by now and which was genuinely one of the more affecting things about Scott McCall.
He couldn't answer without risking the breathing.
"Allison." She raised her voice just enough to carry. "We're downstairs."
The footsteps were quick across the floor above them, then on the stairs — and then Allison appeared at the bottom of the basement steps, and she looked around the space with the involuntary frown of someone registering something wrong before she'd consciously processed what it was. The marks on the floor. The freezer. The quality of the light.
Then she saw Scott and went straight to him.
She crossed the basement without hesitating and went down on her knees in front of him and looked at his face with the specific attention of someone checking something important, and Evelyn watched her take in the yellow that was still bleeding in and out of his eyes and not flinch from it.
"I'm almost done with the chains," Evelyn said, which made Allison look at her briefly — an acknowledgment, a shared understanding of the situation's practicalities.
"Is there nothing else we can do?" Allison asked. Her eyes went to the freezer, and Evelyn watched her read it the same way she herself had read it, arriving at the same conclusion with the same expression. "Is that really—"
"It's strong enough to hold me," Scott said. He was getting up slowly, carefully, he surely wasn't thinking that was the best of ideas too, since what had happened to Isaac down there. But there was not somewhere that they could close him that could hold him enough.
"I've tightened the chains as much as I could." Evelyn looked at Allison. "Do you want to do it? Lock him in."
Allison didn't hesitate. She stood and moved to Scott's side and the two of them did the thing together — Scott getting inside, Allison arranging the chains with the focused attention of someone who needed their hands to be busy — and Evelyn watched them and thought about how different this was from every version of this situation she'd imagined when she'd first understood what Scott was.
Evelyn thought about the first time she'd seen Allison. Lydia's party, months ago now, standing in someone's kitchen holding a drink and looking like someone who had materialized from a catalogue of what a normal Beacon Hills teenager was supposed to look like. Dark hair, easy smile, the particular comfort of someone who'd moved enough times to have learned how to land in a new place without showing the effort of it. She had left an immediate good impression.
And then Clara had leaned in and said that's Allison Argent, and Evelyn had felt her face try to do something she'd had to actively prevent.
Argent, the most famous and ancient family of hunters.
She remembered observing her, astonished that that girl could be a huntress. But she had seen her at some point. When she shot two arrows at Derek. That kind of gaze that she matched with Kate. The same gaze in Vanessa's eyes.
Only Vanessa had not had that ease for a single second she'd been in her presence. Vanessa had the ease of someone who found most situations less threatening than they appeared, which was entirely different — not innocence but competence so deep it read as calm. She'd been in Evelyn's history class for one day and Evelyn had spent most of it feeling unsettled.
She couldn't understand how two people who carried the same name and came from the same family had grown up to be so entirely different.
"It's done," Allison said. "It's locked."
"Go." Scott's voice, slightly muffled through the door of the freezer.
"Scott—"
"Just go."
The sound in his voice had something in it that wasn't quite Scott anymore — the edge of something else present underneath. Evelyn stepped forward and took Allison's elbow, gently but firmly.
"Come on," She said, "Let's go upstairs."
Allison looked at the freezer for a moment longer. Then she let herself be steered.
The first floor felt larger than it had when they'd come through it earlier. Or maybe it just felt emptier. Evelyn moved through it slowly, letting her eyes go to the surfaces — the photos, the ordinary domestic objects of a life that had been someone else's, the particular silence of a house where the people who lived in it weren't there anymore and probably weren't coming back.
Allison stood near the window, her arms crossed, watching the basement door.
"How did you know where we were?" Evelyn asked, trying not to think of Scott going through his turning just below them.
"Stiles." Allison's hands were moving against each other, a slow unconscious motion. "I was telling him about the hunters Gerard sent after Isaac."
"Is Gerard your—" She tried to place the relationship. "What is he?"
"Grandfather. From my father's side." Allison said letting out a shakey breath, her eyes finding the door again. "I've never met him before tonight."
Evelyn was surprised by that. She would have assumed hunters maintained close contact — a network, a family structure that stayed tight by necessity. But apparently not always. Apparently you could be an Argent and not meet the head of your family until you were seventeen and your aunt had just died and he arrived for the funeral.
"I imagine he's going to be staying for a while," velyn moved slowly through the room, looking at things without touching them. "Vanessa's in my history class."
"Oh—" Allison said, "You've met her."
"Don't take this as an offense." She glanced at Allison. "But I find her quite scary."
Allison looked at her for a moment with an expression that was hard to read — something between understanding and something more complicated. "I haven't really—" She stopped. Started again. "I've never had the chance to say sorry for—"
"shooting Derek?" Evelyn asked crossing her arms. "Or me being kidnapped by your aunt?"
Allison's face went very still. "What?"
"Oh." Evelyn looked at her. "So she didn't tell you."
"I thought she'd only taken Derek." Allison's voice had gone careful in the way of someone recalibrating several things simultaneously.
"Not that it makes it better." Evelyn kept her voice even. It was the truth and she wasn't going to dress it up. "I don't say that to make you feel responsible. I know you weren't." Then she took a breath. "It was just a tough moment."
They looked at each other. There was a silence that had weight in it, the weight of things that had happened to people who were now standing in the same room and trying to figure out what they owed each other.
"I'm glad you want to help Scott," Evelyn said, because it was true and because it moved them forward.
"Of course." Allison's voice was simple. "I love him."
Evelyn nodded. She thought about the months of Scott navigating this — the back and forth of it, seeing Allison and not seeing her, trying to hold the two parts of his life apart when they kept pressing together. She'd watched Chris Argent's car outside the school on two separate occasions and watched Scott look at it and decide to go the long way around, and she'd understood then the specific weight of what he was carrying.
There was probably something in the code about it. Hunters and creatures. Some kind of rules about the boundaries it thought needed enforcing.
"Can I ask you something?" Evelyn said after a moment of silence.
Allison turned to look at her with a nod.
"Did your father say anything about me?" Chris Argent was there when she had stopped Peter. She had seen her do... whatever she had done. She wanted to know if they had labled her as anything, or if they would hunt her.
Allison's eyes were honest — she could see her actually thinking, actually reaching back through recent conversations to check. "I don't know," she said finally. "He doesn't include me in these things. I only know a little bit about Lydia."
Evelyn took a step towards the girl, "What are they saying about her?"
"That they're confused." Allison's voice was careful, precise. "That's all I understood. They want me to keep an eye on her." She took a breath. "Do you think something's going on with her?"
Evelyn looked at the wall opposite her. She thought about what Deaton hadn't said, and about the bite that wasn't healing and wasn't transforming, and about a girl found standing naked in the woods at three in the morning after two days missing.
"She ran naked into the woods in October," she said. "That's not human behavior. But I'm confused too. She shouldn't—" She frowned, reaching for the thing she was trying to say. But then suddenly, she heard something from behind her.
She wasn't sure where it had come from — not quite from above them, not quite from the floor, from somewhere in between, like something moving along a surface that wasn't designed for moving along. She went very still.
"Allison." She kept her voice low. "Did you hear that?"
Allison had gone still too. She nodded, barely.
For a moment nothing happened, and Evelyn started to think she'd misread it — an old house settling, the specific acoustics of a building this size at night — and then she felt it before she saw it, the same low frequency thing she'd been developing since the Hale house, the sense of the room that was getting clearer every morning at Deaton's. Something wrong in the air above them. Something present that hadn't been present ten seconds ago.
It happened the way things had been happening lately — her body doing something before her conscious mind had caught up, the channel opening without her choosing it. She felt the familiar heat move through her palms and then there was something between her and the ceiling, some kind of resistance that she couldn't see and couldn't name, and then a sound like impact, something hitting a surface and being deflected—
The force of it threw her sideways. She caught the edge of the counter with her hip before she hit the wall, and then she did hit the wall, shoulder first, and she went down hard onto the floor and stayed there for a moment with the room rearranging itself around her.
"Evelyn!"
She was already trying to sit up. Everything hurt due to the impact with the wall.
She got one hand on the floor and pushed.
And then they both heard it again.
She looked up from the floor and saw it at the same time Allison did. A figure in the shadow near the far wall, low to the ground in a way that was wrong. The eyes came first — gold, the pupils long and thin, vertical in the irises in a way that wasn't wolf. It was crouched, and even in the shadow she could see that the way it was crouching was wrong.
What is that? She thought with wide eyes. What is that?
She got herself to sitting. Her shoulder was going to make itself known later. Right now she was watching the thing trying to find something familiar in her studies. It was bipedal in the shadow but moving like something that wasn't, gold eyes with slit pupils, and something about the surface of it in the shadow that didn't look like skin at all.
It shifted. It lowered slightly, the weight redistributing, and she read it the way she was learning to read things — it was going to move again. She started to pull herself up.
Allison was already moving. She'd crossed to the kitchen counter while Evelyn was watching the shadow, and her hand closed around a knife from the block, and she turned back to face the thing with the specific stance of someone who had been doing this long enough for the instincts to be physical rather than considered.
"Come on," Allison said. Her voice trembled, but she was trying to keep it steady. "Come on!"
The basement door came off its hinges, all at once, with a sound that filled the entire first floor, wood splintering at the frame. And Scott was through it, yellow eyes and claws and everything that he'd been fighting to contain for the past hour — except that he wasn't going for them, he was going for the thing in the shadow, putting himself between it and Allison with the kind of deliberateness that was clearly willed rather than instinctive. He'd heard them. He'd broken through.
The creature moved.
With Scott between her and it, Evelyn could finally see it properly. It went up the wall. Not alongside it, not using handholds — straight up, its body flattening against the surface in a way that distributed its weight in a way that shouldn't have worked, and then it was on the ceiling, looking down at all of them with those slit gold eyes, and then it made a sound — dry, sharp, the sound of something with scales — and it was gone. Out through a window she hadn't seen open, into the dark outside, and the room was quiet.
None of them moved for a long moment.
"What was that?" Allison said finally. She had moved to Scott's side and his hand had found her arm without either of them seeming to decide it.
Scott shook his head slowly. "I don't know."
He turned to Evelyn. She was still against the wall, but she'd gotten herself the rest of the way to sitting, her back braced against it, looking at the window the thing had gone through. Scott crossed to her and crouched and took her by the forearms.
"Eve. Are you alright?"
"Yeah." She let him pull her up, and stood carefully, testing her weight. The shoulder would be a bruise, but other than that all seemed good. "Yeah, I'm alright."
She looked at the window. At the ceiling where it had been, the places where the light fell differently because of how it moved through the room. She thought about what she'd done — the thing that had happened without her deciding it, the resistance she'd generated between herself and the impact — and she filed it alongside all the other things she was filing, in the category of things to discuss with Deaton tomorrow morning.
She looked at Scott and Allison, and then she looked at the window again.
"So," she said, with the specific exhaustion of someone who has reached the end of their capacity for surprise for the evening. "There are lizard men too."
She took a breath. Outside, Beacon Hills was quiet in the way it always was — the particular quiet of a town that contained considerably more than it admitted to, at night, with everything that lived in it going about its business in the dark.
What the hell was that new creature now?
She didn't have an answer. She was beginning to understand that in this town, not having answers was simply the baseline condition from which you worked outward, one impossible thing at a time.
***************
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 33
Clarke's words hung in the air after she had said them.
Murphy's the weapon.
Lily stood very still and let herself understand what that meant. She had read about it once, in the Ark's archives — pages about the old world, about wars fought with disease instead of blades, about armies that had sent sick men through enemy lines on purpose. She had read it the way you read about things that happened in another time entirely, things too distant and too strange to feel like anything more than history.
It didn't feel like history now.
She looked at Murphy on the floor — trembling, his face marked by three days of deliberate damage — and she thought: they built this. Every wound. Every hour they kept him. And when they had finished, they had opened the door.
And she had brought him in.
She had pushed past Connor. She had put his arm over her shoulders. She had walked him through the wall and through the camp and into the dropship, past everyone who had been standing between the gate and this room.
Lily pressed her fingers flat against her thighs.
"Is this your revenge?" Bellamy's voice cut through the silence — hard, directed at Murphy, who was still on the floor with Clarke crouched beside him. "Helping the Grounders kill us all?"
"I didn't know about this," Murphy shook his head, his voice trembling. "I swear."
"Stop lying!" Bellamy took a step forward. "When are they coming?"
Clarke's voice came steadier, quieter. "Murphy. Think, all right?" She kept checking his wounds while she spoke, her hands not stopping. "What can you tell us that's useful? Did you hear anything?"
Lily watched Murphy's face. She thought about the Grounders — about what little she knew of them. They spoke English, both Lilcoln and the commander of the bridge had proved that. But they had their own language too, the one they used among themselves. If Murphy was telling the truth, and she believed he was, they would never have spoken their plans in front of him. They would have used their own tongue, kept him deaf to it on purpose. Whatever he had heard would have been nothing they wanted him to carry back.
Murphy looked at Clarke with wet eyes. Still trembling, he shook his head. "They are vicious," he said. "And cruel."
Bellamy let out a sharp breath and turned back to Murphy.
"You wanna see 'vicious'?"
"Bellamy, stop." Lily stood, and he turned to her with wide eyes.
"Why do you keep defending him?" Anger in his voice, and underneath it something that moved faster than anger. "Look what he has done!"
"It was the Grounders, Bell." She kept her voice level, trying not to make it tremble. "They took him, tortured him, and then freed him." She held his eyes. "It's not his fault if the virus is in the camp..."
They looked at each other. She had learned Bellamy's silences by now. This one was not the silence of someone who had nothing to say. It was the silence of someone holding too many things at once, trying to decide which one to put down first. She could see it in the set of his jaw, in the way his eyes stayed on her face with an intensity that had nothing to do with anger anymore, or not only anger. There was something else underneath it. But she didn't want to know if it was fear or anger.
"We have to be careful." Clarke's voice broke the silence. "Whatever this is, it spreads through contact."
Lily took a step back without deciding to. Her body making the choice before her mind named it, as her eyes stayed on Bellamy.
"Clarke!"
Finn's voice arrived a second before he did, coming through with that urgency.
"Finn, you shouldn't be here." Clarke turned, concern clear in her face. "No one should."
"I heard you were sick," he said, and Bellamy's eyes moved to Lily.
"Yeah." Something in his voice had gone flat. "She's not the only one."
Lily looked away. She bit down on her bottom lip and held it there. Behind them, Jake coughed — deep and wrong, the sound she had been learning to dread all night. Bellamy frowned at him, then looked back at Lily with a little frown.
"Clarke, what is this?" Finn asked.
"I don't know." Clarke moved to check on Jake, then straightened. "Some kind of hemorrhagic fever."
"There's something we can do about it?" Bellamy asked, and his eyes went to Lily.
She thought about what she had. Yarrow — it helped slow external bleeding, she had used it enough times to trust that. Willow bark to bring the fever down, to give the body some relief from the heat that was burning through them. Charcoal, if she could find enough of the right kind, to absorb whatever the body was trying to expel. Plantain, which she had used for infection and inflammation ever since Jasper.
But she knew, with the same certainty she knew the names of the plants, that none of it was a cure. She could not cure this. There was nothing in the forest that cured this. What she could do was slow it, and try to keep them from drowning in their own bodies before something changed.
"There are things I can do," she said carefully. "To slow the bleeding. To bring the fever down." She paused, and made herself say the rest of it. "But I can't stop it, Bell. Not with what I have here. The most important thing right now is water — clean water, as much as they'll take. Whatever this takes from them, we have to put back."
Clarke thought about what she had just said, "So we can just contain it for now, before—"
The sound Eric made stopped everything.
The cough became something else entirely — his whole body seizing with it, going sideways, limbs moving without control. Lily watched with her hands pressed together, her mind going very fast and finding nothing to hold. There was nowhere to act. There was nothing she had that would stop this.
Eric pushed himself upright. Then he vomited blood.
The sound that followed had no name she knew. And then his body went still.
The room held its breath.
She could not move.
She watched Clarke cross to him, telling Finn not to touch her as he attempted to. Then Lily watched Clarke press two fingers to the side of Eric's throat, and she already knew. She had known from the moment the convulsions stopped.
This is what it does, the thought arrived without asking permission and stayed. This is what I brought in.
"Clarke," she whispered.
Clarke raised her head.
"Is he—?" Bellamy said.
"He's dead." Clarke stood and turned and looked at Lily.
Bellamy turned to her too.
Lily held his gaze. She did not look away, because she thought that if she did something in her would not come back from it. She felt the full weight of it arrive.
She had brought Murphy in because she could not leave him outside. She had been right. She still believed she had done the right thing.
And yet boy was dead on the floor.
"What do we do?" Finn asked, his hands freshly wet from the alcohol he'd poured over them.
"Quarantine." Clarke's voice steadied into command. "Round up everyone who had contact with Murphy. Bring them here." Finn nodded and moved for the exit.
"And everyone they had contact with?" Bellamy asked. He didn't sound certain about the plan.
"We have to start somewhere." Clarke turned to Lily. "Lily. Who was with you when you brought Murphy back?"
She knew the answer. She had known it since she had walked in and found Connor and Eric already on the floor.
"Octavia," she said. She closed her eyes. "She was with Eric and Connor when Jake and I brought him back."
When she opened them she found Bellamy's face.
She watched it move through fear first. Then the thing that lived underneath fear in him, harder and older, the thing that had always been there when it came to his sister.
"I'll go get her," he said, with jaw set.
Lily let out a shakey breath in seeing him move away. "Bell—"
He looked at her. She had wanted to say something enough, something that could hold the weight of what she had done, but there was nothing like that and he could see that she knew it. His eyes said more than his voice did.
"You have to hope she doesn't get sick because of this." He said quietly, as his eyes glistened under the light that came through the courtains of the dropship.
She felt the tears come without wanting them. He held her gaze for one more second, and then he was through the entrance, and his footsteps crossed the clearing fast, and she heard them until she didn't.
The breath that left her was unsteady. He would have never forgive her for that.
"Lily." Clarke's hand touched her shoulder, brief and warm. "Come on. Help me arrange this place."
They worked without talking much, which Lily was grateful for. She was not ready to talk about all those thoughts that were circling inside her head. She knew she had to helpd Murphy, but now not only Murphy, but the whole camp could get sick. And this sickness was deadly.
She looked at Eric, until two guys decided to bring him outside. Then she looked at Connor and Jake on the floor. And then she saw how many people were starting to be brought inside the dropship.
"The third level will be for who had a contact but don't show any syntomps. "The second for who is having just a fever, and the first--" She stopped as she looked around.
"For who's bleeding," Lily finished for her, with a nod, but her glistening eyes were betray her. "Alright."
They moved the stored supplies against the wall to clear space, laid out blankets and coats in the rows that beds were supposed to make. Lily did what her hands were told and kept her mind on the task in front of her and nowhere else, and it helped the way it always helped — narrowing everything to what was immediate, what was possible, what could still be done.
Lily sent two of the boys who were still standing near the entrance to fetch a barrel from the stores. Then she went to the dropship entrance and called out a list to one of the patrol boys standing nearby.
"Yarrow. All of it that's dried and ready in the medical tent." She kept her voice steady. "The white willow bark infusion — left side of the table, stoppered cloth. Plantain, both dried and fresh if there's any left." She thought for a moment. "And charcoal. From last night's fire, if it's cooled enough — the dark pieces, not the ash." She paused thinking if she had asked for everything. "Clean cloth. More than you think we need. And a second barrel of boiled water, left to cool."
The boy looked at her for a moment, then went.
She went back inside and crossed the floor to Murphy.
He was still propped against the wall where they had left him, trembling less than he had been, which might have been improvement or might have been exhaustion. She checked his forehead — still hot — and reached to take a metal glass of water.
"Make sure to drink, alright?" She asked him, pointing at one of the hammoks they had arranged. "And try to sleep a bit."
"As my nurse say," he said tiredly, and Lily took a breath when she saw him struggling to get on his feet. So she helped, taking him by the arm. They shared a look, as she gave him a nod, before bringing him to lay down.
She was crunched next a girl that was coughing, when she heard the flap of the tent move again.
Bellamy had a cloth pressed to his mouth and nose with one hand, but his other arm stayed close to his sister's back as they moved — not quite touching, but near enough that she could feel him there. And even she seemed annoyed to have been dragged there, he wasn't leaving her side. Lily knew that he wasn't going to leave the dropship until he knew Octavia was safe.
Then Lily turned back to the patient in front of her and helped the girl tip the cup to her lips, to go back to what she was supposed to do. But she kept watching even from there.
"We're done?" Octavia asked.
"No visible signs of swelling or bleeding." Clarke's voice had flattened out over the course of the day, worn smooth by repetition. Lily could hear the exhaustion underneath it, had been hearing it for hours.
Bellamy's hand tightened around the cloth. "So she doesn't have it?"
"She doesn't have symptoms." Clarke looked at him steadily. "But that could change."
Lily's eyes went up to the ceiling without her choosing to, toward the third level where they'd put the ones who'd been exposed but weren't showing anything yet. There were too many of them up there. And more were still coming in — she could see two of Bellamy's patrol boys helping someone through the entrance even now, the boy's arm thrown over one of their shoulders, his head hanging.
Every one of them could already be sick.
"Lily."
James was at the entrance with her bag. She moved toward him, and as she passed Bellamy their eyes met for a moment, and she looked away first.
"Thank you, James. Leave the bag there, so I don't get too close." She waited until he stepped back, then crouched to go through it. Yarrow, dried and bundled. Willow bark infusion, the cloth stopper still tight. Plantain, both dried and fresh. Charcoal in a folded cloth. She was checking the charcoal when Bellamy spoke from just behind her.
"Hey."
His voice was cold in a way that was different from his usual cold. There was distance in it that hadn't been there before, even during their worst arguments. She kept her eyes on the bag.
"Is Octavia alright?" she asked.
"For the moment. Clarke's putting her on level three." A silence that had weight to it. "You need any more of that?"
Lily took a breath. They needed the medicines on the Ark, or at least components that could be more useful. But it was useless to even think about it.
"There's more yarrow still dehydrating in the medical tent," she said, her voice careful and level. "It won't be ready for a while. But it would be great if you could keep an eye on it."
"Alright," she heard him say. She could feel his presence still behind her for some moments, but then he just quietly walked away. When Lily turned, she could only see his back disappearing behind the courtain.
She didn't regreat helping Murphy, but with everything that was happening, she really couldn't handle the way Bellamy was looking at her.
She bit down on her bottom lip and held it there until she was sure it wouldn't tremble. She stood and moved to the table and began working the herbs into the water, keeping her hands busy, keeping her mind on the motions. She had to focus on helping, that was all she needed to think about.
She was still at the table when she caught a movement at the entrance. And she frowned when she noticed Octavia walking out of the dropship.
"Clarke." She turned towards the other girl. "Where's Octavia going?"
Clarke looked up from the patient she was tending, and Lily could see immediately that she already knew. Her expression didn't need to say more than that.
"We need to know what's happening," Clarke said.
Lily let out a breath, "You've sent her to Lincoln." She said, "Clarke, if Bellamy finds out--"
"He's the only one who can help us find a cure. You know that." Clarke's voice was tired in a way that went past the body. "And she's the only one who can convince him to talk."
Lily looked around the room — at Connor on the floor with his jaw clenched, at Jake on his side breathing too shallow, at three others whose names she had learned an hour ago and was already afraid to lose. Two of them were bleeding from the nose. One had his eyes closed so tight it was impossible to tell if he was sleeping or just trying not to be there.
"Let's hope she comes back with some answers," Lily said finally, and turned back to her plants.
The hours after that had no clean edges. She knew time was passing because the light changed through the entrance, and because her body kept adding new things to the inventory of what it was doing without her permission — the ache in her legs had become a burning, the pressure behind her eyes had become a dull throb that sharpened when she moved too fast, and once when she stood from a crouch the room swam gently before it righted itself. She didn't stop. She brought water and changed cloth and crouched and stood and crouched again, and Clarke moved through the room doing the same things from a different angle, and sometimes they passed each other and sometimes they worked side by side in silence, and the silence between them held everything that neither of them had enough left to say.
She did not count the ones who were getting worse. She had tried that, early on, and had stopped.
Then the girl in the corner started coughing.
Lily heard it before she turned — the way it changed, the way it deepened into something that had no rhythm left in it, something that belonged more to the body than to the person inside it. She was already moving when the convulsions started, already crossing the floor, already getting her hands under the girl's shoulders to slow the fall. She held her through it, hands steady, voice low, doing the only thing she had, which was to stay and not look away.
She didn't know her name. She had seen her in camp — at the fire, at the wall, passing through the clearing in the mornings — and she had never spoken to her, and now she was holding her on the floor of the dropship and she still didn't know her name.
The girl's body jerked once, hard and final, and then went still.
Lily kept her hands where they were. She breathed. Behind her eyes something pressed very hard, and she felt the heat of it rising, and she pushed it back down because there was no room for it yet, no room until it was over, and it was not over. She heard Clarke behind her, heard her crouch, heard the brief quiet while she checked for a pulse.
"We have to bring her out," Clarke said.
Her voice was doing the thing Lily had watched it do all day — staying level by force alone, staying useful when everything underneath it was not. Clarke stood and her face when she straightened was the face of someone who had decided not to feel anything until later. Lily understood that. She had been doing it herself for hours.
She let herself look at Murphy. He was lying on the hammock with his eyes closed, and she couldn't tell if he was sleeping.
"I'll go tell Bellamy what happened," Clarke said. Then Lily noticed her observe her for a moment. "Do you want me to tell him something?"
Lily looked at her. Clarke's face was careful and quiet and holding more than it was letting out, and of course she knew — it had never really been a secret, even if there had been nothing official about it, nothing named. Though Lily wasn't sure anymore that there would be anything left to name, after this. If she didn't die first.
"I don't think he's going to ask anything about me, Clarke," she said. She kept her voice even, despite the sting in her eyes. "His sister could get sick. Two people have died. Believe me, I don't think I'm any of his concern right now."
Clarke held her gaze for a moment, she could read simpathy behinf that, but Lily wasn't bothered by it. Then Clarke touched her arm just before heading out of the dropship.
She felt her lip tremble, as she looked around herself, but then as she could feel a tear run down her cheek, she quickly dried it, and get back to work.
When she heard Connor caughing, the girl went to the barrel of clean water and dip one of the cups in it, to fill it. Then she turned and knelt beside Connor.
"You have to drink," she said.
He knocked the cup from her hands. The water spread across the floor in a dark stain.
"I don't need anything from you," he said. His voice was rough and mean with fever. "This is all your fault."
Lily's jaw clanched at those words, but she kept looking at him. "Can you stand up and take it yourself?" He groan, but he didn't need to talk, by only look at him it was easy to guess the answer. So she faught against the fatique in her own legs to go back to the barrel and take some more water.
"Then take it," she said once she was back, "and stay hydrated." This time he didn't refuse, even if he clearly wasn't appreciating her help.
She moved toward the next person, and then Jake made the sound she had come to recognize, and she was there before she had finished deciding to go. She got her hands on his shoulders and held him through it, and when it stopped she helped him settle and straightened slowly, and pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes.
God.
"You should sit down." Murphy's voice, from somewhere behind her.
"I can't," she said, before noticing him standing up. "What are you doing? Lie down."
"Commanding, aren't we?" He said, but he didn't do as she said. But she saw him hold his side as he followed her towards the barrel. She was almost there when she felt again; the room moving a half-second after her, lagging slightly, the way it had been doing for the past hour whenever she changed direction. She was telling herself it was tiredness. She had been telling herself that for a while now. It was happening more and more as the hour passed.
"You still sure you don't regret it?" Murphy said. He was somewhere behind her now, closer than before. "Helping me."
Her hands clenched at the barrel, closing her eyes to try and get her balance back. "Stop it, Murphy. Please." She really didn't want to talk about it. Because she didn't have a clear answer. And she asked herself what her mother would have done. And then she found herself asking what Marcus would have done. The anwers where both so different that didn't help her at all.
"Just asking." He said still behind her.
"I helped you," she said, turning to him, "and now I'm trying to help them. That's all that matters."
She noticed a frown appear on his face as he observed her face. "And who's going to help you?" He asked.
That managed only to confuse her, "What?"
"Your eyes," he said, his eyes never leaving her. "They're bleeding again."
She felt it in the same moment he said it — the thing she had been calling tiredness naming itself at last, the pressure behind her eyes announcing what it actually was — and her body, which had been managing this all day through sheer insistence, decided it was finished being managed. Her legs went wrong beneath her, and the floor came up, and she heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize.
"Woah, woah—" he reached her, his arm going around her waist, but he didn't have the strenght to keep her up, so he only managed to guide her onto the floor. Her hands on his shoulders, as her knees touched the iron of the dropship. He was knelt in front of her, still not letting her go. And he was the only steady thing in the room, that kept turning and turning, making her feel dizzy.
"You really need to lie down," he said, his arm unexpectedly steady against her.
But she couldn't, "I have to help." Her voice came out thinner than she wanted. "Two people have already died—"
"Yeah." Something in his voice went quieter. "Let's not make it three."
"Murphy—"
"Sweetie." He said making her look up at him. "You need to lay down, and I'm one cough away from dying myself. So, work with me here."
He managed to pull her upward, slow and careful, and she helped as much as her legs allowed, and between them they got her to one of the hammocks. The canvas took her weight and she felt the day come down all at once — every hour of it, every cup and changed cloth and held breath and managed moment. It was heavier than she had known while she was carrying it. Murphy disappeared and came back and held out a cup of water.
She looked up at him. His posture was more upright, and he moved better than before. And his breath did not seem laboured anymore.
"You look much better," she said, as he gave her the metal glass.
His mouth moved. "Are you hitting on me, sweetie?"
She didn't even fight the urge to roll her eyes. "You're definitely feeling better."
"Yeah." He looked at her, and something moved through his face quickly, something she almost caught before it was gone. "I'd like to say the same about you."
"My head feels so dizzy." She heard herself say it and was faintly surprised, because she had been keeping that back for hours.
"You need to sleep." He insisted.
"But I have to—"
"Help, I get it." His voice was dry, but there was no edge in it. "I find that difficult for you to do if you can't even stand up." He looked at her steadily. "I'll wake you if someone gets worse. I promise."
She looked at him for a long moment. She was not especting him to be that helpful, and careful. It was a very different side from the person that she had met when we lend on Earth.
"Why are you helping me?" she asked.
He was quiet. Something moved through his face, quick and carefully controlled, gone before she could name it. He reached over and adjusted the edge of the hammock.
"Sleep, sweetie," he said, and turned to go.
"Wait—" She put her hand on his shoulder before he could take a step. He looked back at her, and she thought about the last time she had seen him, when they had left him alone, without a chance to prove himself.
"Thank you, John."
He went very still for a moment, his eyes studying every part of her face. But he didn't spoke a word. He just nodded and the he turned away.
It didn't took long for Lily to closed her eyes, and for the sounds of the dropship — the coughing, the low voices, the weight of all of it — to fade into something she was no longer able to hold onto.
And before she even realized it, she was sleeping.
***********
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The revenge is over. Peter is dead. And Scarlett Black is left alone with what she is - and everything she's done. Becoming something better is harder than destroying everything. It doesn't come with forgiveness, or second chances, or clean slates. It comes one choice at a time, in front of people who have every reason not to trust her. Stiles Stilinski is one of them. That's the problem.
《 Previous - Next 》
Chapter 10
The room was dim, lit only by the single desk lamp she'd left on, the curtains drawn tight against the night. Vanessa moved on top of Bennett with focused intensity, her hips rolling in a steady, demanding rhythm, hands braced on his chest with her nails digging in just enough to make him hiss. His fingers gripped her waist tightly, dark eyes locked on hers, his body solid beneath her — strong, athletic, exactly what she'd wanted when she'd pulled him into her room earlier that evening. She wasn't looking for connection. She didn't need sweet words or lingering touches or the particular performance that some people seemed to require around something that was, at its core, a physical transaction. She needed this: the heat, the friction, the sharp precise release of tension that worked better than anything else she'd found before a long night of work.
She leaned forward, changed the angle, and felt the pleasure coil tight and then break, quiet and controlled, her body shuddering once above him. Bennett followed right after, groaning her name as his grip tightened almost painfully on her hips, and then the only sound in the room was breathing.
Vanessa lifted herself off him and swung her legs over the edge of the bed in one smooth movement, already thinking about the next two hours. She stood and began gathering her clothes from the floor, working through the routine of it — dark jeans, fitted black top, the lightweight leather jacket that sat close enough to the body to conceal what was underneath it without restricting movement in the shoulders. The jacket had taken three fittings to get right. Kate had taught her that the difference between a good jacket and a great one was whether you could still throw a full-extension punch in it without the seam pulling, and she had tested this one thoroughly.
"Wow," Bennett said, still lying back against the pillows with a surprised smile finding its way onto his face. "That was unexpected."
She walked to the mirror without answering and began dressing with quick, practiced movements, sliding two throwing knives into the loops at her waist and checking that the sheaths sat flush against the denim before she pulled the jacket over them. She worked through the inventory by touch — the knives, the electroshock weapons she pulled from the drawer and checked for charge, the small blade that went into the sheath at her ankle. She pulled her hair into a high, tight ponytail and assessed the result in the mirror.
"At first I thought you needed help with the hunt tonight," Bennett added from the bed, propping himself up on his elbows with the specific hopefulness of someone who hadn't fully accepted that this conversation was already over.
She let out a short, dry laugh. "I don't need help during my hunts."
"Oh, you're a tough one, aren't you?"
She met his eyes in the mirror and raised one eyebrow. "Oh, you're bad at flirting, aren't you?" No venom in it, but she genuinely wasn't interested in playing the game.
Bennett chuckled, rubbing a hand over his shaved head. "I'm Bennett," he said, as if realizing they'd omitted that part.
"Yep, I know." She adjusted the ponytail and picked up the electroshock weapons, slipping them into the jacket's inner pockets. "Grew up in Beacon Hills. Good at basketball and swimming. And apparently can't have sex without developing a crush."
He smiled at her, "Who wouldn't crush on Vanessa Argent?"
"Because you don't know me," she answered simply, giving herself one last look in the mirror. The jacket lay flat over everything underneath it. Perfect. "Get out of my room before my grandfather finds you. He's not against it, but he doesn't appreciate me having sex before I have to work." She didn't wait for his reply. She was already at the door, and then through it, and the corridor outside was quiet and dim and considerably more useful to her than the room she'd just left.
The sitting room light was on. She could see it from the top of the stairs — the warm yellow of the lamp Gerard preferred over the overhead lights, which he'd always considered too harsh for thinking. She came down without making noise and pushed the door open.
Gerard and Chris were standing over the table, with files and maps of the city. They both turned towards her when she stepped in.
"Ah," Gerard said. "Here you are."
She nodded, sharing a smile with her grandfather, "Here I am."
"You're sending her going to take Isaac Lahey down tonight?" Chris asked to Gerard. She appreciated the directness — he didn't waste time on the approach when he had a question, which was more than she could say for most people. But she didn't quite like the tone of it, as if he wasn't liking that kind of idea.
"No. I've got much more interesting things to do." She was the one who answered, moving to the side table and ran a final check on her primary weapon, turning it over in her hands. "We still don't know if the boy killed his father?"
"Not yet, my darling." Gerard's voice carried the warm patience of a man who had never in his life experienced genuine urgency. "The police still have the body. We can't access it yet."
Vanessa nodded her head, before she thought that he was not the only case they had under the radar. "What about Allison's friend?" She asked looking from one man to another. "The one that likes running naked in the woods."
"We're keeping them under observation," Chris said with his arms crossed.
She looked at him, on her face appeared a knowing smile. "You mean Allison is keeping her friend under observation."
Something moved through his expression — controlled, quick, but she didn't miss it. "Don't you trust Allison?"
Vanessa raised her hands, "I trust my family," she said, her voice calm. "But I'd trust her more if I knew she had proper training."
Chris turned to Gerard with the look of a man looking for confirmation that he'd heard correctly. "Did you tell her that?" Gerard laughed — the genuine version, warm and satisfied, the laugh of someone whose prediction had just been confirmed.
"Vanessa is known to have strong opinions," he said, with the specific pleasure of a man describing a quality he considered one of his better achievements. "I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to change her mind even if I wanted to."
She looked at her uncle. His jaw had the tight quality it got when he was managing more patience than he naturally possessed, and she recognized that she'd contributed to that, and she softened her tone without softening the substance. "I'm sorry, uncle. I didn't mean to be rude about Ali. She seems like a sweet girl. " She paused for a moment. "But we both know that sweet isn't particularly useful in this job."
"She'll keep an eye on her friend," Chris said. "I'll make sure of it."
Vanessa looked at him for a moment. She thought about Lydia Martin — the girl she'd seen at school that morning, the composure slightly too deliberate, the edges of it visible if you knew what to look for. She'd been in the woods for two days, naked, with a werewolf bite that apparently hadn't healed and hadn't turned her. That was an anomaly worth keeping track of. But would a sweet girl with no training push her friend aside if it ever came to that? Vanessa wasn't sure about it.
But she didn't talked about it anymore, it didn't seem to be of any use against Chris. So she crossed to Gerard and kissed his cheek. The familiar smell of him — cedar, something old and sharp underneath — and his hand coming up briefly to pat her face the way it had since she was seven years old. "Night, grandpa."
"Have a nice hunt, my darling."
"I will," she said, and she meant it in the precise and literal sense in which she meant most things she said. "Night, uncle," she said looking up at Chris as she passed by.
The police station was chaos.
She stood across the street in the shadow of a closed hardware store and assessed it with the unhurried attention she gave to any scene she was reading. The alarm had stopped — recently, by the looks of it — but the emergency light was still cycling red and white over the front entrance, and there were three deputies in the parking lot moving with the specific agitation of people managing an aftermath rather than an event. A fourth was on a radio inside the glass lobby. Near the side entrance a man in a deputy's uniform was being helped to a sitting position by a colleague, and she looked at the quality of his injuries — the particular distribution of them, the way he was holding his right wrist — and felt a faint, clear interest move through her.
He did not kill him, she thought seeing the man they had sent still alive, and with no evident wound. And yet he failed.
So she turned around. Derek and his new werewolf must have left. But where to?
The Hale house was the first place that came to mind, but it was too obvious. Too predictable, and she wanted to believe that Derek Hale wouldn't be that predictable — she needed him not to be, because a predictable target was a boring target and she hadn't come to Beacon Hills for boring. Then she thought about something else. The Lahey house had police tape on it and was therefore the last place anyone with operational sense would return to, which was exactly why it was worth checking. People came back to the places they'd been, especially when they were moving fast and thinking about something else, and Derek had left from there and would want to know what the police had found.
So she turned and started heading through the woods to cut short.
SCARLETT BLACK — CHOOSING PATHS
Capitolo 10 — Three
POV: Vanessa Argent
The room was dim, lit only by the single desk lamp she'd left on, the curtains drawn tight against the night. Vanessa moved on top of Bennett with focused intensity, her hips rolling in a steady, demanding rhythm, hands braced on his chest with her nails digging in just enough to make him hiss. His fingers gripped her waist tightly, dark eyes locked on hers, his body solid beneath her — strong, athletic, exactly what she'd wanted when she'd pulled him into her room earlier that evening. She wasn't looking for connection. She didn't need sweet words or lingering touches or the particular performance that some people seemed to require around something that was, at its core, a physical transaction. She needed this: the heat, the friction, the sharp precise release of tension that worked better than anything else she'd found before a long night of work.
She leaned forward, changed the angle, and felt the pleasure coil tight and then break, quiet and controlled, her body shuddering once above him. Bennett followed right after, groaning her name as his grip tightened almost painfully on her hips, and then the only sound in the room was breathing.
Vanessa lifted herself off him and swung her legs over the edge of the bed in one smooth movement, already thinking about the next two hours. She stood and began gathering her clothes from the floor, working through the routine of it — dark jeans, fitted black top, the lightweight leather jacket that sat close enough to the body to conceal what was underneath it without restricting movement in the shoulders. The jacket had taken three fittings to get right. Kate had taught her that the difference between a good jacket and a great one was whether you could still throw a full-extension punch in it without the seam pulling, and she had tested this one thoroughly.
"Wow," Bennett said, still lying back against the pillows with a surprised smile finding its way onto his face. "That was unexpected."
She walked to the mirror without answering and began dressing with quick, practiced movements, sliding two throwing knives into the loops at her waist and checking that the sheaths sat flush against the denim before she pulled the jacket over them. She worked through the inventory by touch — the knives, the electroshock weapons she pulled from the drawer and checked for charge, the small blade that went into the sheath at her ankle. She pulled her hair into a high, tight ponytail and assessed the result in the mirror. Functional. Clean sightlines. Nothing that moved.
"At first I thought you needed help with the hunt tonight," Bennett added from the bed, propping himself up on his elbows with the specific hopefulness of someone who hadn't fully accepted that this conversation was already over.
She let out a short, dry laugh. "I don't need help during my hunts."
"Oh, you're a tough one, aren't you?"
She met his eyes in the mirror and raised one eyebrow. "Oh, you're bad at flirting, aren't you?" No venom in it, but she genuinely wasn't interested in playing the game.
Bennett chuckled, rubbing a hand over his shaved head. "I'm Bennett," he said, as if realizing they'd omitted that part.
"Yep, I know." She adjusted the ponytail and picked up the electroshock weapons, slipping them into the jacket's inner pockets. "Grew up in Beacon Hills. Good at basketball and swimming. And apparently can't have sex without developing a crush."
He smiled at her. "Who wouldn't crush on Vanessa Argent?"
"Because you don't know me," she answered simply, giving herself one last look in the mirror. The jacket lay flat over everything underneath it. Perfect. "Get out of my room before my grandfather finds you. He's not against it, but he doesn't appreciate me having sex before I have to work." She didn't wait for his reply. She was already at the door, and then through it, and the corridor outside was quiet and dim and considerably more useful to her than the room she'd just left.
The sitting room light was on. She could see it from the top of the stairs — the warm yellow of the lamp Gerard preferred over the overhead lights, which he'd always considered too harsh for thinking. She came down without making noise and pushed the door open. Gerard and Chris were standing over the table with files and maps of the city spread between them. They both turned when she stepped in.
"Ah," Gerard said. "Here you are."
She nodded, sharing a smile with her grandfather. "Here I am."
"Are you going to take Isaac Lahey down tonight?" Chris said. She appreciated the directness — he didn't waste time on the approach when he had a question, which was more than she could say for most people.
"No. I've got much more interesting things to do." She moved to the side table and ran a final check on her primary weapon, turning it over in her hands. "We still don't know if the boy killed his father?"
"Not yet, my darling." Gerard's voice carried the warm patience of a man who had never in his life experienced genuine urgency. "The police still have the body. We can't access it yet."
Vanessa nodded before it occurred to her that Lahey wasn't the only case they had under the radar. "What about Allison's friend?" She looked from one man to the other. "The one that likes running naked in the woods."
"We're keeping them under observation," Chris said, arms crossed.
She looked at him, a knowing smile on her face. "You mean Allison is keeping her friend under observation."
Something moved through his expression — controlled, quick, but she didn't miss it. "Don't you trust Allison?"
Vanessa raised her hands. "I trust my family," she said, her voice calm. "But I'd trust her more if I knew she had proper training."
Chris turned to Gerard with the look of a man looking for confirmation that he'd heard correctly. "Did you tell her that?" Gerard laughed — the genuine version, warm and satisfied, the laugh of someone whose prediction had just been confirmed.
"Vanessa is known to have strong opinions," he said, with the specific pleasure of a man describing a quality he considered one of his better achievements.
She looked at her uncle. His jaw had the tight quality it got when he was managing more patience than he naturally possessed, and she recognized that she'd contributed to that, and she softened her tone without softening the substance. "I'm sorry, uncle. I didn't mean to be rude about Ali. She seems like a sweet girl." She paused. "But we both know that sweet isn't particularly useful in this job."
"She'll keep an eye on her friend," Chris said. "I'll make sure of it."
Vanessa looked at him for a moment. She thought about Lydia Martin — the girl she'd seen at school that morning, the composure slightly too deliberate, the edges of it visible if you knew what to look for. She'd been in the woods for two days, naked, with a werewolf bite that apparently hadn't healed and hadn't turned her. That was an anomaly worth keeping track of. But would a sweet girl with no training push her friend aside if it ever came to that? She wasn't sure, and she didn't press it — it didn't seem to be of any use against Chris when he'd made up his mind. So she crossed to Gerard and kissed his cheek, the familiar smell of him, cedar and something old and sharp underneath, his hand coming up briefly to pat her face the way it had since she was seven years old.
"Night, grandpa."
"Have a nice hunt, my darling."
"I will," she said, in the precise and literal sense in which she meant most things she said. She glanced at Chris as she passed. "Night, uncle."
The police station was chaos. She stood across the street in the shadow of a closed hardware store and assessed it with the unhurried attention she gave to any scene she was reading. The alarm had stopped recently — the emergency light was still cycling red and white over the front entrance, three deputies moving through the parking lot with the specific agitation of people managing an aftermath. Near the side entrance a man in a deputy's uniform was being helped to a sitting position by a colleague, and she looked at the quality of his injuries — the distribution of them, the way he was holding his right wrist — and felt a clear, cool interest move through her. They had sent someone in and he was still alive, which meant the interference hadn't come from Derek. Someone else had been in that building tonight and had moved fast and left clean. She filed that.
She looked at the parking lot. No black Camaro.
He got the boy out, she thought, and felt something that wasn't quite admiration but lived in the same neighborhood. The Hale house was the first place that came to mind as a destination, but it was too obvious, too predictable, and she wanted to believe Derek Hale wasn't predictable — she needed him not to be. A predictable target was a boring target and she hadn't come to Beacon Hills for boring.
She thought about it for a moment, standing in the shadow of the hardware store with the emergency light pulsing at the edge of her vision. He'd gotten the boy out and he'd left fast, which meant he was moving and meant he was going to cross the woods at some point to get back to wherever he'd come from. The woods east of the station were the most direct route between the police station and most of the town's outer roads. She turned and started moving, cutting through the back streets toward the tree line.
The woods swallowed the town noise almost immediately. She moved through them the way she always moved through them — low, economical, her weight distributed evenly, compensating for the right side with adjustments so automatic they no longer registered as adjustments. She wasn't tracking yet, just moving, covering ground, using the dark the way she'd learned to use it. The full moon was high enough to give her light through the canopy and she didn't need more than that. She moved east and slightly north, keeping her senses open, attending to the shape of the silence around her.
She heard him at about four hundred meters. Not his footsteps, but something large moving through undergrowth with more speed than caution, the kind of movement that meant someone thinking about a destination rather than about being followed. She adjusted her angle and moved to intercept, and when the change in his cadence told her he'd sensed something, she was already close enough that it didn't matter. She went completely still and waited, and he came around the edge of a stand of old oaks and they saw each other at the same moment.
She respected that. Most of them didn't see her coming at all.
He was bigger than the photograph had suggested and the red had bled into his eyes, the wolf present behind the surface. She smiled as he growled at her.
Here he is, she thought.
"I wasn't expecting to see you without your new puppy." She kept her voice pleasant. They were maybe fifteen feet apart, each reading the other, neither committing yet. He growled — low, from the chest — and she felt it register somewhere below her sternum and found it interesting rather than threatening. "Where did you leave him, Derek?" She watched his face. "You're Derek Hale, right?"
He kept looking at her. She gave him the smile.
"Yeah," she said as her eyes observed his body, then she tilted her head. "I'm Vanessa Argent."
"I know who you are."
She found the smile on her face grew larger, "Ah, you've heard of me. That's very nice to know." She said keep looking at him. "It means you're going to take me seriously from the beginning." She began moving sideways, the slow lateral movement of someone measuring distance and angle simultaneously, and he matched her, which was the correct response and which told her more about what kind of fighter he was going to be. "Others made that mistake."
"That's how you killed to Alphas?" he asked as he moved. "Because they made mistakes."
Vanessa chuckled, "Every fight is won by who makes the less mistakes. Or who gives up first."
They circled. She kept her weight on the balls of her feet, shoulders loose, every part of her attending to the data he was generating — the way he favored his left slightly, the quality of his reaction time, the distance at which he seemed most comfortable.
"You were the one who freed Isaac... umm Lahey?" she said, conversationally. "It's his name, isn't it?"
He shook his head, "He didn't hurt anyone."
She had serious doubt about that, "His father was killed the night before the full moon." She kept her voice even. "That's a hell of a coincidence, don't you think?"
He growled, "Leave him out of this."
She laughed genuinely. "That's very cute, Derek Hale." She watched the red deepen slightly in his eyes and found it clarifying. "But you're lucky, because I don't care about him right now." She let that land. "I've decided to make you my new project." She looked at him steadily. "Let me see if I can bring that count up to three."
He moved first, which she'd been expecting, which was why she was already dropping under the angle of his reach when his hand came for her — she went low, used his momentum, came up behind him with her elbow driving toward his kidney. He turned faster than she'd calculated and she caught his forearm on hers instead, the impact traveling up to her shoulder in a clean solid line, and she moved through it because there wasn't time to do anything else. He was fast. Faster than her in pure straight-line speed, which was an alpha's gift and which she'd already accounted for. She didn't need to be faster. She needed to be in the right place.
She came back inside his reach — her natural ground, where height and strength and speed stopped mattering and positioning took over. His claws caught the leather at her side and she felt the tug without flinching, drove her knee into his thigh targeting the nerve cluster, felt his leg buckle fractionally. She followed with her elbow toward his jaw and he moved his head just enough that she caught cheekbone instead of chin, but it still rattled him and she saw it in the half-second hesitation that followed.
The next exchange was longer. They moved through the trees in the fluid back-and-forth of two people learning each other's rhythms in real time — she using the trunks for leverage and redirection, him adjusting as he read her patterns, both of them building the map of the other with the specific focused attention that a real fight required. She caught his right wrist on the fourth exchange, twisted into the joint, stepped into the space it created. He got his free hand to her shoulder before she could close it off and the force of it sent her sideways into a tree, bark scraping through the jacket.
She used the tree. Pushed off it before he'd finished recalibrating and came back from a direction he hadn't anticipated, and she could see in his face that he'd almost missed it, that she'd surprised him, and the satisfaction of it was clean and specific. She had him at a slight disadvantage — his weight just wrong, his right side slightly exposed — and she was already mapping the follow-through when the world went white.
The flash hit her right eye first and the left a fraction of a second later, the kind of sudden high-intensity light in deep darkness that didn't just blind but froze her completly. Her balance went with it. She turned away from the source on instinct and got both hands on the nearest tree and breathed through it — three seconds, four, the white fading at the edges — and heard him go. The sound of Derek Hale moving away through the trees was distinct and then diminishing and then gone.
She stayed where she was until her vision had fully returned, one hand still on the tree, breathing evenly. Then she turned.
Chris came through the trees with the dart gun at his side. "Follow him," he said to two hunters that were with him. Vanessa looked at him and the the gun in his hand and then she looked at the direction the hunters were going.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" She asked with wide eyes, as she took a step towards her uncle. "This is my hunt!"
"You can't hunt alone," he said with a firm tone, and Vanessa felt almost offended. "You especially shouldn't be attacking an alpha alone, Vanessa."
"I had him, Chris." She heard the flatness in her own voice and didn't try to warm it up. "You are the only reason he walked away from this clearing tonight." She looked at him steadily. "I can do this job. I've been doing this job."
"You're seventeen." Chris said making her frown. "Gerard might forget it, but I don't. My brother wouldn't want--"
"Your brother had no chance to tell us what he wanted," Vanessa said feeling the anger in her voice. "He died and I grew up."
She looked at him for a long moment. She thought about what seventeen had meant for her — about Lyon, about the forest outside it, about the phone call the next morning and Kate's voice saying "you're going to be better than me". She thought about what seventeen had apparently meant for Allison, who was the same age and had spent it doing something else entirely, and she thought about the expression on Chris's face right now, which was trying to be paternal authority and was actually something closer to fear wearing authority's clothes.
"I didn't take you for weak," she said. "Now I understand why nobody prepared Allison the way she should have been." She kept her voice even, because this wasn't cruelty — it was just the shape of what was true. "Listen to me. The only reason I'm in Beacon Hills is to kill Derek Hale." She held his gaze. "Don't get between me and the hunt ever again."
Chris looked at her for a long moment. The dart gun was at his side and the woods were quiet around them, and his face had the expression she'd learned to read on him over the past week — the controlled version of something he wasn't going to say. "I don't want anyone of my family die, Vanessa."
She looked at him for a moment, "Is that what you want?" She asked, before her tone dropped down. "Then get off my back and let me do my job." His jaw clenched as she spoke, but he didn't say anything more as she moved away from him.
She walked back through the trees toward the lights of the town, already thinking about the adjustments she was going to make, already building the next approach from the data tonight had given her, and by the time the house came into view she had a plan and the plan was good and Derek Hale was already, in every way that mattered, as good as found.
Three, she thought.
She was going to get there.
***************
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The revenge is over. Peter is dead. And Scarlett Black is left alone with what she is - and everything she's done. Becoming something better is harder than destroying everything. It doesn't come with forgiveness, or second chances, or clean slates. It comes one choice at a time, in front of people who have every reason not to trust her. Stiles Stilinski is one of them. That's the problem.
《 Previous - Next 》
Chapter 9
The Beacon Hills police station had exactly one entrance that she could see from the parking lot, two deputies' cars parked outside, and a light on the second floor that hadn't moved in a few minutes since they'd arrived. They had to wait for the deputies to leave the station and now there was only a woman at the entrance, for the night shift. Scarlett had observed all of this while Stiles and Derek sat in the jeep not coming out, which had been going on long enough that she had stopped pretending she wasn't watching them through the windshield.
She got off the motorcycle.
The cold hit her, without making her shiver, she had never shivered from cold since she had died. The wind was just a nice sensation against her skin, and it only made her hair move.
he crossed the parking lot and stopped beside the driver's side window and knocked.
Both of them turned.
"Am I interrupting something?" She asked as Stiles opened the window.
"Yeah," He said. All the sarcasm in his voice was doing load-bearing work. "Derek telling me his incredible plan."
She looked at Derek. "What plan?"
"I'll go inside and distract her," Derek said, with the specific economy of someone delivering information they don't consider worth elaborating on. "So that you and Stiles can get the keys and get Isaac."
She looked at him for a moment. Derek Hale. Flirting. She turned this image over in her head and found she couldn't fully assemble it into something coherent. It was like being told that a hammer intended to take up painting. "Or," she said, "I can go in and charm her. Make sure she's not going to be a problem for anyone."
"You're not using the charm, Scarlett. Alright?"
She looked at Stiles. He was looking back at her with the expression he'd been wearing since she'd arrived at the Lahey house — the one that was trying to be flat and neutral and was actually broadcasting several things at considerable volume to anyone paying attention. Which she was, because she could feel his heartbeat from here and had been trying not to track it since the moment she'd pulled up behind the jeep.
She wanted to ask him what exactly he thought she was going to do. Walk in there and drain a deputy? The idea that he thought her so far gone that she couldn't be trusted to use compulsion without causing harm — that she was just looking for an opportunity, that the offer had been predatory
— she felt that land somewhere in her chest and chose not to let it show.
Her jaw was tight. She didn't answer.
"Stay behind me," Derek said, already getting out of the car. "Wait for the right moment. And try not to argue while I distract her."
He walked toward the entrance without looking back. She and Stiles were left standing on opposite sides of the space where the car had been, and she watched him sigh — a short, controlled exhale, the sound of someone resetting before they had to continue.
"I just wanted to help," she said, when he came around the front of the jeep. Quietly. "I wouldn't have hurt her."
He looked at her. That was the thing about his face — she knew it too well, had spent too many months learning the specific grammar of it, and what she read now was not what she wanted to read. The distance in it. The tension underneath, the way the anger and something else were coexisting in his expression, something harder than anger that she didn't have a clean name for.
"Let's just get Isaac," he said, and walked toward the door. Scarlett observed him walking away, feeling the hurge to call for him. But she decided against it. And taking a deep breath she followed.
The entrance was glass-fronted, the lobby visible from outside — a reception desk, a female deputy, fluorescent light that made everyone inside look slightly ill. Derek was already at the desk when she and Stiles pushed the door open silently and stopped just inside.
"Um, I had a question." Derek's voice had taken on a quality she had genuinely never heard from him before. Something softer in it. Something that was attempting to be charming. "I'm sorry, I'm a little — a little thrown. I wasn't really expecting someone—"
"Like me?" the deputy said apparently flattered.
"I was going to say so incredibly beautiful." He answered, showing her a smile. "But yeah. I guess that would be the same thing."
She stared at the side of Derek's face for a moment. That was his seduction technique. That was the thing he had assembled in his head and decided constituted flirting. She felt something between secondhand embarrassment, and deep confusion since the deputy seemed to be all over him, not even bothering to look anything else but him.
Scarlett glanced at Stiles and she saw that he was already moving to cross the lobby, and she did the same.
She followed him into the corridor behind the reception area, staying close, tracking the sounds from the lobby to make sure Derek's deeply improbable performance was still holding.
"I cannot believe that worked," Stiles said, under his breath.
"That was genuinely strange to watch," she said.
They both looked at each other for a fraction of a second, for the first time he had turned to her with a lighter gaze, but as their eyes met, he seemed to realize. And then the moment dissolved and the distance came back, and she looked away first.
"I'll get the keys," Stiles said. "You go down the corridor, make sure Isaac hasn't destroyed anything."
She wanted to say something. She looked at his face and found he was already deciding not to look at her, already turning the conversation into a logistics problem that didn't require them to stand next to each other for longer than necessary, and she swallowed whatever she'd been about to say and nodded.
"Alright." It was all she said before they split.
The corridor ran deeper into the building than she'd expected, past closed doors and empty offices, the fluorescent light buzzing at a frequency that she was aware of in her back teeth. She moved quietly, trying to concentrate to understand if there was other deputies inside. But it seemed to be empty.
She was halfway down when she felt it, her whole body freezing alltoghether.
The sensation she now had come accostumed to know, the frequency shift of a heartbeat going wrong. She knew how that feeling crept up across her chest and up her back, she had memorized it across months of proximity, and she knew what she was feeling.
Her fangs descended before she'd made the decision.
Stiles.
The alarm went off a second later, the whole building suddenly loud and red-tinged with the emergency light, and she was already running back the way she'd come, back toward where she'd left him, tracking the heartbeat through the noise.
She turned the corner and saw them.
A man in a deputy's uniform had Stiles from behind, one arm across his chest, one hand over his mouth. Stiles's feet were partially off the ground, but he was trying all he could to free himself as the man dragged him back.
She let out a sound she didn't entirely choose — low, involuntary, the sound of something predatory locating a target — and moved.
The man turned at the last second. He was good — faster than a civilian, better trained, the reaction time of someone who'd been doing this for years. He released Stiles and met her coming, and she had half a second to clock the silver in his left hand before she adjusted her angle and came in from the right.
The first hit connected — her elbow to his jaw, the kind of close-range strike that didn't give the opponent's height advantage any purchase — and he staggered but didn't go down. He was strong. Not supernatural strong, but the genuine dense strength of someone who had been building it for a long time.
Fucking hunters, she thought.
They moved back down the corridor, blow and counter-blow, she was using the walls to redirect his weight, he was trying to get the silver close enough to touch her.
She stayed inside his reach, the way she'd learned to fight before she'd turned, the compact close-range work that made size irrelevant. She caught his wrist on the third swing and twisted and heard something complain in the joint and he went to one knee.
She had him against the wall when she realized they'd reached the cell block.
Scarlett looked at the hunter on the floor, satisfied that he wasn't getting up immediately, and turned.
Stiles was behind her. He'd followed her all the way down the corridor, his face a mix of exasperated and relieved, and he was slightly out of breath, looking at the man on the floor and then at her.
"Are you alright?" She asked with her fang still out.
But she saw his eyes going wide. "Scarlett!"
The impact hit her from the side — a tremendous sideways force that she hadn't had time to brace for — and then she was against the wall and then she was on the floor, and when she opened her eyes the room had shifted forty-five degrees and there was a ringing in her skull that she was already pushing through because there wasn't time for it.
Isaac. Standing between her and where Stiles had been, the yellow fully present in his eyes now, the animal looking out through them with blankness. He was not recognizing her. The full moon was close enough to taste.
But then he was turned toward Stiles, and Scarlett pushed herself up as fast as she could.
She came in from behind and took him by the shoulders, "Stay the fuck away from him, sunshine." Using his own momentum Scarlett pushed him sideways, away from the direction of Stiles. Isaac was strong, the moon pulling at his new blood — and for a moment they were actually fighting, actually exchanging force, and she felt the scrape of his claws across her forearm and filed it under irrelevant and kept moving.
Then she had managed to throw him against the far wall, when she heard the roar.
The sound of it hit her in the chest like a physical force — deep and total and carrying in it the specific authority of an alpha that bypassed everything conscious in her and went straight for the oldest part of what she was. Her head went down on its own, her eyes dropping. She hated that, as much as she had hated it with Peter.
Isaac made a sound like a wounded animal and folded toward the wall, hands over his head, trembling. The yellow drained out of his eyes by degrees, the tide going out.
She straightened and turned.
Stiles was on the floor against the wall, one hand pressed to the side of his head, watching Derek.
She crossed to him and went down on one knee.
"Are you alright?"
He nodded glancing at her, catching his breath. He looked at Derek. "How did you do that?"
"I'm the Alpha," Derek said, and the turned his attention toward Isaac.
She looked back at Stiles. His heart rate was still elevated but coming down, the sharp peak of the fear flattening into something more manageable. Her eyes went to his body, but luckly he seemed to not have been harmed by the hunter. She had so much hurge to touch him, relieved that he was unharmed. But she decided against him.
"You sure you're alright?"
He avoided her eyes. Pushed himself up the wall to standing. "Yes. I'm fine."
She felt her jaw clenched as she stood up, "You don't even look at me anymore?"
The words were out before she'd caught them, which was the problem with having a brain that moved faster than her better judgment. She watched his face process them.
"It's not the time to talk about this," he said.
She knew he was right. She knew the station alarm was still going and there was an unconscious hunter on the floor and Isaac was out of his cell.
She knew all of that.
She still felt the words like something pressing from the inside of her sternum.
"We need to get Isaac out," Derek said, already moving toward the other boy.
She reached into her jacket and pulled out the motorcycle keys and threw them to Derek without looking at him. He caught them.
"Here." She made her voice flat. "I'll make sure Stiles gets home."
"No." Stiles said firmly, making her turn towards him.
"Stiles—"
"You go with your pack." He had moved slightly away, not toward the exit, just the distance that had been between them. "I don't need your help."
She heard the harshness in it. She heard, underneath the harshness, the thing that had slipped past whatever control he was using, the edge that was more than anger, and she didn't know what to do with what that meant.
She looked at him. She felt her eyes fill and caught it before it became anything, locked it down, kept her face doing what she needed her face to do.
"Alright," she said.
She went to Derek and put Isaac's arm across her shoulders, taking most of his weight on her left side, and felt Isaac lean into it with the exhausted compliance of someone who had used everything they had and had nothing left to fight with. He smelled like fear and exertion and something new underneath — the change, still settling in.
She looked at Stiles one more time.
He was looking back. Not looking away, with an expression she couldn't read from this angle or this distance or this particular version of them, the one where they were on opposite sides of a thing she had caused. His jaw was set. His heartbeat was still coming down.
"Scarlett." Derek called her from the other side of Isaac. "Let's go."
She moved Isaac toward the exit, one step and then another, and she did not look back at Stiles again. Her eyes filled with tears of blood, but she kept helping Isaac, managing not to get any tears from slipping down her cheeks.
***************
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 32
The medical tent was quieter after they took Murphy away, but the quiet had a different quality than peace. Lily stood in the middle of it with the damp cloth still on the floor where she throw it and the bowl of red water on the table beside her, and she listened to the sounds of the camp settling back into its evening rhythms — the fire, the voices, the ordinary sounds that had no idea what had just happened — and she felt the anger sitting in her chest like something with edges.
She was not going to stand here.
She turned and started gathering what she needed; the clean cloths, the tincture of thyme, the fever infusion she had prepared two days ago. She packed them into her bag with hands that moved faster than they needed to, and she told herself she was not shaking, and she was mostly right.
He was taken by Grounders. They did that to him. She had said it to Connor and he had looked at her like it didn't change anything, like the fact of what had been done to Murphy was simply irrelevant to the question of whether he deserved to be tied to a ladder on the floor of the dropship with a fever and nobody checking on him through the night.
She picked up her bag and walked out.
The majority of people in camp had went to bed, like they usually did, but she could see that people were still busy at the dropship. She didn't have to wander to guess what was the reason behind it. But she kept walking and crossed the clearing toward the entrance.
Connor was standing outside it and he saw her coming from ten yards away. She watched his expression close the more steps she made.
"Not again," he said, stepping into her path.
She stopped in front of him with her bag in her hands and her jaw set. "I had not finished with him," she said. "I need to see those wounds."
"I told you." He insisted, "He'll survive."
"You don't know that." She kept her voice level with effort. "He has a fever. He needs his wounds monitored. He needs—"
"He needs to be where we can watch him." Connor did not move. "That's what he needs."
Lily stared at him. She thought about the last two days — about the Exodus ship burning somewhere in the forest, about Clarke trying to run toward it while Bellamy held her back, about lying awake in the tent watching the canvas go from black to grey. She thought about Murphy's face when he had recognized her, that involuntary release she had seen in him when he understood he was not still alone. She thought about his hands.
"What the hell is wrong with you, Connor?" The words came out full and she did not apologize for them. "Let me through."
"As I said." He crossed his arms. "He can survive."
She felt the anger rise past the point where she had been managing it. "You don't get it," she said. "He was taken by Grounders. They did that to him." She watched his face and saw nothing change. How could he not feel even a little bit of compassion. Of course Murphy was not the best of people, but they had wrongly accused him, attacked him, almost hanged him, and then they had left him to die, and he almost did. How could no one feel anything for that?
"He's one of ours, Connor." She kept saying. "We have to help him."
He took a step towards her, but Lily didn't backed away as he did so. "You're not in charge of this camp, Lily."
Her jaw set as she blinked, "Oh, but you are?"
They stared at each other across the short distance, Connor's jaw working, the sound of the camp going on behind her as if none of this was happening.
Then from inside the dropship came a sound — Murphy, audible even through the metal walls, a groan that had real pain in it, the kind that wasn't manageable.
Lily moved before Connor could say anything, shoving past him with both hands, hard enough to get through, and ignored the protest behind her and pushed through the entrance into the dropship.
The inside was not empty, she realized. She had expected Connor and Eric and perhaps a couple of other guys. But what she found was a dozen people — fifteen, maybe more — standing around the edges, all watching Murphy as if he was in any condition to attack them.
Murphy was on the floor near the base of the iron ladder, his wrists bound to the lowest rung with rope that had not been tied carefully. He was on his side, his body curled slightly inward, trembling in the way she had been watching for all evening. She could see the wounds she had been cleaning, the cuts and bruises she had been trying to address, looking worse against the shadows. And nobody was doing anything.
She stood in the entrance for one full second, looking at the room, looking at the people in it, and felt something in her chest go very tight and very still.
Then she moved toward him.
The crowd parted, because she was walking through it with a directness that left no room for interpretation. She crossed the floor and got down on her knees beside Murphy as soon as she reached him.
"Hey." She kept her voice even, trying to sound calm to not startle. "How are you feeling?"
His eyes found her. She watched the recognition travel through him, and then she watched his shoulders shift — just slightly, just enough. "Could be better," he said, "in all honesty." His voice was still thick, still working harder than it should have been. But he seemed conscious enough. Then her eyes moved to the rope, and the way it was tight against his wrists.
"Alright," she said, reaching for the knife at her belt. "I'll finish tending your wounds. Just... just try not to fall asleep." She opened the blade.
But Connor's hand closed around her wrist, stopping her from moving. "What the hell are you doing?"
She turned and looked at him with an angry glare, bothered by the way other people were looking at her. "I need to tend to his wounds. I'm not leaving him tied up on the ground like an animal." She pulled her arm free. "Let go."
Then a voice from outside made them turn.
"Where is he?"
Bellamy's voice came just before the flap of the tent moved, and then he was through the entrance and moving through the crowd, Clarke behind him and Finn behind her, and the crowd parted faster for him than it had for Lily. His eyes found her immediately — she saw them do it, the quick scan of the room that stopped on her face first, then moved to Murphy.
She watched his expression change.
She had learned to read Bellamy's face in the past months and she knew the look that came before he made a decision he had already committed to. She saw it now, settling over his features like a door closing, and she felt her stomach drop.
"Bellamy." His name came out before she had finished deciding to say it.
He had not looked at her again. His eyes were on Murphy.
"Everyone but Connor and Eric," he said, and his voice was the voice he used when he was not asking. "Out. Now."
The room began to empty around her — the spectators filing toward the entrance, shuffling past Bellamy and Clarke and Finn without making eye contact. Lily did not move. She felt Bellamy's gaze find her again, and she read in it what it was asking, and she shook her head.
"I'm not leaving."
He looked at her hard and she looked back. Lily had nothing to apologize for and he could see that she knew it, and the hardness in his gaze did not move her.
"What happened to him?" he said finally. Not at her. He just wanted someone to answer, and she did.
"He was taken by the Grounders," Lily expalined. "They did this to him."
"We caught him trying to sneak back into camp," Connor added, making Lily glare in his direction.
"I wasn't sneaking." Murphy's voice, flat and tired and not quite strong enough but present. "Lily found me while I was running from the Grounders."
Bellamy turned to her, his eyes sharp. "You brought him here?"
She looked at him and then she looked at Murphy on the floor and then back at Bellamy and she could not quite believe they were having this conversation. "I couldn't leave him outside."
"Why?" Bellamy's word came out hard. "Did you see any Grounders?"
Lily frowned, "What—no, but—"
"Did anyone see Grounders?" He turned to Connor, who shook his head as he glared at Murphy.
"Uh-uh." It was all he said.
Bellamy nodded once. The kind of nod that was a conclusion rather than an agreement. He turned back to Murphy and raised the rifle.
Lily moved.
She was still on her knees when she shifted — forward and sideways at once, putting herself between the rifle and Murphy, her arm out. She heard Murphy make a sound behind her. She looked up at Bellamy down the line of the weapon and she said, "Are you out of your mind? Put that rifle down!"
But Bellamy kept his position, as his jaw tightened, "Move, Lily." That was all he had to say. He was pointing a gun to a wounded boy and herself and that was all he had to say?
Her gaze hardened as she looked at him, "No."
"Move—"
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Finn stepped forward and pushed the barrel of the rifle down with both hands, putting himself beside Lily. She felt the air change in the room — Bellamy's eyes going to Finn with that particular cold quality, the calculation happening behind them.
"We knew what would happen if he returned." Bellamy's voice was controlled, which was worse than if it hadn't been. And then he looked back at Lily, that was not about to give up.
"Do you think he's lying?" She kept her eyes on Bellamy's face and tried to find the thing she knew was in there — the thing that had breathed with her in the dark, that had held her face in careful hands. "Bell, look at him. He couldn't have done this to himself." He didn't answer just observed her.
"And if he was with the Grounders," Finn added, "then he knows things that can help us."
"Help us?" The word had a bitter quality in Bellamy's voice. "We hanged him. We banished him. And now we're gonna kill him." He looked between her and Finn, and then he raised the rifle again. "Get the hell out of my way. Both of you."
Lily's jaw set not moving an inch. "No."
She held his gaze as he looked at her and for some moments the room was very quiet. Lily knew he would not have shoot her, at least of this she could be sure. It was Clarke that broke the silence.
"They're right." She said and Lily turned to see her crouching beside Murphy, her fingers moving over his wounds with the practiced assessment Lily recognized.
"Like hell they are!" Bellamy argued, "Clarke, think about Charlotte."
Clarke looked up at Bellamy. "What happened to Charlotte was as much our fault as his." She pressed her fingers carefully to the skin around one of the deeper cuts, and her expression confirmed what Lily already knew. "He's not lying. His fingernails were torn off."
The silence that followed was the kind that had weight.
"They tortured him, Bell." Lily said it quietly. She watched his face for the thing she had seen pass through it in other moments — the places where his certainty cracked around the edges — and she thought she saw something, for just a second, in the particular stillness that came over him at her words.
"You and the Grounders should compare notes," Finn said.
Lily closed her eyes briefly. "Finn—"
But Bellamy had already closed back up, the moment gone, his expression hardening in the way it did when something had gotten too close and he was putting distance between himself and it. "The Grounders know we’re at war," he said and then he turned to Murphy like he had already made a decision and was not interested in revisiting it. "What did you tell them about us?"
Murphy was quiet for a moment. Lily turned to look at him — the trembling in his limbs, the effort it cost him to simply stay upright, the way his lips pressed together before he answered. When he spoke, his voice was flat.
"Everything."
Lily closed her eyes. She heard the word land in the room and felt the weight of it, the practical danger of it, and she understood why Bellamy's jaw was set and why Clarke's expression had gone careful and calculating. She understood all of it. She could not bring herself to blame Murphy for a single syllable of it.
Clarke stood. She crossed to Bellamy with that purposeful walk she had when she was managing something. "Once he's better, find out what he knows, then he's out of here." Lily heard her say directly to Bellamy and before she could stop herself, she got up to get closer to the two.
"What?" She looked between Clarke and Bellamy. "Clarke, after what's happened to him — you want to send him off on his own again?"
"He’s leaving, Lily. Like we decided." Bellamy was the one who spoke, and from his tone she knew that he didn't want any argument about it.
But Lily did not back away, "That was before we knew the Grounders would actually—" She stopped as she observed the both of them, they truly had no seconf thought about it?
"You can't do this." She insited, "You can't just—"
"I’m sorry, Lily," Clarke said, her tone kind but firm. "He can’t stay." And then she moved towards the exit of the dropship.
"And if he refuses to leave?" Bellamy said to Clarke, making her stop on her tracks and turn to them. "What do we do then?"
Clarke's answer was quiet and final and Lily felt it land somewhere in her chest like a stone. "Then we kill him." She walked toward the entrance without looking back.
Lily stared at the space Clarke had just occupied. She turned to Bellamy and looked at him for a long moment — at the set of his jaw, at the rifle, at the particular quality of his stillness — and she spoke, very quietly, "Careful not to enjoy it too much."
She moved back toward Murphy.
"Hey." Bellamy's hand closed around her arm. She turned. His face was close and his eyes were doing several things at once. "I need to talk to you."
"You might be eager to see him dead," she said, "but I'm not." She pulled her arm free with a steadiness she had to concentrate to maintain. "Once I'm done with Murphy, I'll come find you. Alright?"
She heard the sound he made — somewhere between a scoff and a breath — and then she heard his footsteps toward the exit, and then he was gone.
She waited until she was sure he wasn't coming back. Then she knelt beside Murphy and reached for the rope with her knife.
Her hands were not entirely steady. She noticed this and said nothing about it. She sawed through the rope with the particular focus of someone who needed to be doing something specific, and when the last of it fell away she heard Murphy let out a long breath that he had probably been holding for a while.
She reached into her bag.
"Why are you helping me?" His voice was barely above a whisper.
She felt her lips move — not quite a smile, not quite anything. She thought about what she wanted to say. She thought about Murphy at the dropship entrance, the way he had said her name twice while Connor and Eric were taking him out. She thought about what she had said to him in the forest three months ago when she gave him a strip of cloth and told him she was sorry.
"We should never have left you alone. No one should be alone," she admitted without trying to cover her saddness. Then she reached for his face with the cloth soaked in thyme. "Now relax. Let me clean your wounds."
She worked in silence, retracing the ground she had covered earlier in better light, checking for the things she had not been able to fully assess. The firelight was worse than the lamp in the medical tent. She adjusted.
"Have you become a doctor while I was gone?" he said, after a while.
The breath that came out of her was almost a laugh. "Something like that. Clarke's way more skilled than I am. I'm sticking to the basics." She moved to his hands and paused, frowning at the damage that the earlier cleaning had not fully addressed. "How long—" She stopped. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't ask."
He was quiet for a moment. "Three days," he said. "They tortured me for three days."
"I'm so sorry." She said it, meaning every word.
He turned his head and looked at her with an expression she had seen on him before and never quite known what to do with. "Why?"
"What do you mean, why?" She frowned up at him.
"You should hate me." His voice was flat as he looked at her. "Like all of them. What are you trying to prove?" She observed him in silence for a moment before moving so that she could look at him better.
"What are you trying to prove?" she asked. But there was no harshness her voice. She was genuinely interested to know that.
He made a sound — pain, or something adjacent to it — and looked away. "Nobody does anything for nothing."
She was quiet for a moment. She thought about Bellamy saying the same thing to her once, under different circumstances, with that same flat certainty. The Ark had done that. The Ark had taken children and taught them that care had conditions and generosity was a transaction and you always, always looked for the cost before you accepted anything.
"My mother was a teacher," she said as she took his hand to clean his fingers. He turned to look at her with a little frown as she spoke. "She always believed that kindness was the most important thing. Kindness, compassion. That was what she taught me."
"And yet you're a criminal." He said not keeping his eyes away from her.
"I stole medicine for a person I deeply cared about." She watched something move across his face as she said it — a small involuntary thing, a tightening, and she filed it away without pressing on it. So she continued.
"I don't do things because I need something in return, Murphy. I just believe in some things, and I try to stick to them as much as possible." She met his eyes. "Even when it's difficult. Even when the people around me make it very difficult."
He looked at her for a long moment. His eyes were bright in the torchlight — she told herself it was the fever, the exhaustion, the particular quality of what he had been through. She did not press on that either.
"Did you save them?" Murphy asked after a moment, making her look at him. "The person you stole the medicines for." Lily felt her eyes fill with tears thinking about Grace. The lump in her throat got tight everytime she though of her. And the only thing she could do was shake her head.
"You should lay down," It was the last thing she said to him that night. But she did not leave.
She had told herself she would check on him every hour. She had not managed to leave for more than twenty minutes at a stretch. The dropship floor was not comfortable and the light was bad and she was running on the particular wired exhaustion of too many consecutive difficult days, but she stayed because the fever had not broken and because every time she got up to go, she thought about what the night would be like if she left and came back in the morning to find it had gotten worse while nobody was watching.
Clarke did not come.
Bellamy did not come.
She had known that this was likely. She was still angry about it. She had spent the better part of the night moving between low-grade anger and a bone-deep tiredness that made the anger difficult to sustain, and what she was left with, somewhere around the third hour, was something quieter and more complicated. She thought about Murphy and about what three days of torture must have meant. She really didn't want to think what it must have been like. She thought about the Grounders' violence, which she had seen in other contexts, and tried not to follow that thought to its end.
Murphy woke suddenly around when the sun had already came up.
She heard him before she saw him — the sharp intake of breath, the scrambling quality of someone coming out of a bad place too fast — and she was up and across the space before she had finished deciding to move.
"Hey, hey." She got her hands on his shoulders, careful, not restraining. She really didn't want to scare him. "It's alright. You're alright."
He was fighting it for a moment — the disorientation, the impulse to move before he knew where he was — and she held steady and kept talking until she felt the tension begin to ease, slowly, the way it did.
His eyes focused on her face.
She saw him find himself, locate the present, put together where he was. She watched the transition from wherever the dream had been to here, and she kept her expression even and her voice calm, and after a moment she felt his breathing begin to slow.
"You've still got fever," she said.
"Yeah, well." His voice was rough with sleep and pain and the aftermath of whatever had woken him. "Lucky enough I feel like shit. I didn't even notice."
"That's comforting," she said.
He looked at her for a moment, she was about to ask him why he was looking at her like that, when suddenly he bent forward and vomited.
She moved without thinking — getting her hand to his back, helping him turn so he could breathe, keeping him from going forward into it — and when she saw it her chest went cold.
Blood.
"Oh my God, your lungs could be compromise. I'll get Clarke." She said just before she started to rise. But then his hand caught hers, making her look at him.
"Wait." Barely audible as he took deep breaths. He turned his head to look at her. His eyes were clearer than they had been all night, which struck her as strange and not entirely reassuring. "Thank you."
She felt her expression do something she didn't fully control. She thought about all the versions of this she had not said, all the ways she had been trying to say it since she found him in the undergrowth outside the wall with his face a map of what the Grounders had done. "Lie down on your side," she said. "I'll call Clarke."
And she went out into the camp.
The people were already moving and going on with their usual activities and duties for the day. She looked around for Clarke and did not immediately find her, and she was crossing toward the tents when she heard Bellamy's voice.
"Can you talk now?" She could hear the wish he had to provoke her, exactly like he used to do when they met. But she had no time for that.
Lily let out a breath and kept walking. "Not now, I need to find Clarke."
His hand suddenly closed around her ar,m making her turn.
"What the hell are you thinking?" He looked like he had not slept, which she could have told him before she left the previous night. His eyes were tired, but she could see the anger in them. But she did not let this make her back away.
"I'm just trying to help him." She said firmly.
"Why?" He asked seeming genuinely confused, and almost betraied as he looked at her. "You know what he did."
Lily's jaw clached at that, "I know what we did as well." She still remembered the mod, the way they had attacked Murphy, how they had hanged him and then they had left him alone in the woods to die. They were not better than him.
"He brought this on himself." He said in an angry hiss.
She shook her head slowly. "Not enough to deserve this." He made a sound in between frustrated and dismissive and looked away with a humorless chuckle.
"You know what I think about all of this." She waited until he looked back at her. "I never wanted Charlotte to die. But I also didn't want Murphy left alone in the woods. And I was right! He was tortured, Bell!"
"Stop trying to save everyone, Lily!" He said raising his voice, enough for some people to turn to them.
"I can't believe you right now." She said it quietly, which she knew was worse than if she had said it loudly. His eyes widened as she saw them glisten under the sun.
"What would you have me do?" He spread his hands. "Let him back in and trust him? Wait for him to riot again?"
"I'm not talking about trust." She said with a shake of her head, her eyes never leaving his face. "I'm talking about the fact that we are a community, Bell. We shouldn't—"
She saw his eyes widen suddenly. "What's that?" His voice changed. His hands came up — careful, the way they always were around the bruises, around the places where she might be tender — and he turned her face gently toward the light. "Lily. There's blood."
She frowned. "What?"
Her fingers went to her cheek. She pulled them away and looked at them — the smear across her fingers, dark and wrong. Murphy had vomited blood. What if it was not the lungs? What if it was something else.
She touched her face again, getting her fingers dirty with more blood.
"Oh my God." She stepped back from Bellamy, gently pushing his chest so that she could get free from his touch. "You have to stay back."
Bellamy's eyes widened at her request. "What? No—"
But before she could say anything, she saw Connor start to caugh just a few feet from them. She could see blood coming out of his mouth. And then another, her eyes widened when she recognized Eric. And then she heard someone vomiting.
Jake... she though as soon as she saw him.
The three of them, Lily herself, they were all people that had something in common. And when she heard the flap of another tent move and saw Clarke walking out with blood stains on her cheeks that was just the confermation.
"Oh my God," she whispered, "Murphy..."
Then her and Clarke looked at each other across the clearing. From her expression Lily could tell that the girl had come to her same conclusion.
They moved toward the dropship at the same time.
"Lily!" Bellamy called her, but she turned her head without stopping.
"Stay here, Bell." Her voice came out shakey as she looked at him. "Please, just stay here."
She did not wait to see if he listened as she entered the dropship.
Inside Murphy was where she had left him, on his side as she had told him, but he had moved — struggling upright or trying to, his arms shaking with the effort. He was vomiting blood again when they came through the entrance, and Lily was beside him before Clarke had finished crossing the floor.
"Murphy." Clarke's voice was softer than Lily had heard her use with him before. She crouched in front of him and waited until he had finished, until his breathing had settled slightly, until his eyes came up to her face. "Look at me." He did. "I need you to tell me how you escaped from the Grounders."
He was quiet for a moment. His breathing was labored, the blood still at the corner of his mouth, his hands pressed flat against the floor as though testing its reality. Then he spoke.
"I don't know." He looked between Clarke and Lily. "I woke up and they forgot to lock my cage. There was no one there." He paused, breathing. "So I took off."
Lily closed her eyes.
She heard the silence that followed. They were both trying to process what that all meant.
Clarke said it instead, barely audible. "They let you go."
They looked at each other over Murphy's head. Lily thought about the bridge — the Grounder commander with her skull-masked riders, the arrows from the tree line, Jasper firing first. She thought about what followed. She thought about every hand that had touched Murphy in the past three days, every hour he had spent in the Grounder camp.
"They don't use just poison," Lily said as she looked at Clarke.
She recognized the footsteps coming from outside immediately.
Bellamy, she thought.
And then he was through the entrance, his eyes going immediately to her, wide in a way she did not often see.
"Bell, you have to get out of here." Lily said as soon as she saw him.
"What the hell is going on?" He stepped forward and she watched him take in the scene — Murphy, Clarke, the blood, the quality of the light on all of it — and she watched his expression do several things in rapid succession before settling into something focused and afraid.
Clarke turned to him, but she didn't got up. "Biological warfare," she explained, and Bellamy moved his eyes towards Lily.
The words sat in the dim space of the dropship, and outside the camp went on with its morning sounds, and Lily looked at Bellamy's face as he took in what Clarke had said — the widening of his eyes, the slow shift of his gaze from Clarke to Lily, the fear that she saw there clearly because she knew how to read it now. He looked at her the way he looked at her when something had gone beyond what he had prepared for, when the thing he was facing was bigger than his ability to put himself between it and the people he was trying to protect.
Clarke's voice was steady and quiet and final. "You waited for the Grounders to retaliate for the bridge?" Bellamy said nothing, he just nodded. "This is it." She looked at Murphy, then at Lily, then back at the door where the morning light was coming in. "Murphy's the weapon."
***********
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 31
The canvas of the tent had gone from black to grey without Lily noticing the exact moment it changed.
She had been watching it happen — or not watching, exactly, more blankly staring the gradual change of lightening. Her eyes were open and her mind was somewhere else entirely. She had not slept. She was not sure she had even tried, in the proper sense of the word. She had lain down because Bellamy had insisted, but she had not closed her eyes because it was easier than explaining that doing it made it only worse.
When her eyes were closed she saw the dark sky lit orange again.
She saw the cloud rising — dark smoke, fire at the base of it, and the explosion. She didn't want to think about it, but her mind kept going back there in the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth. She would get somewhere else in her thoughts and then she would be back there, watching it from the clearing, her hand finding Bellamy's arm before she knew she had moved.
Marcus, she had thought. That single word, simple and declarative, arriving before anything else.
That had been hours ago. She had been lying here for hours.
He was going to be on the first ship, she kept talking. The image of her father's face in the screen flashed once again. And then she would close her eyes to not think of him, but she'd seen the explosion again.
She had been doing this for hours. Starting the thought and running it until it hit the wall of what she didn't know, and then starting again from a different angle, looking for the place where it resolved into something she could hold. But it didn't resolve. It just kept moving in the same circle, wearing a groove into her, and she was exhausted from it and still could not stop.
He's dead.
The thought arrived with a flatness that surprised her. And that frightened her more than sharpness would have. She felt the tears burn at the edges of her eyes and she pressed her fingers against them.
You've been angry at him your whole life, she thought. And now what?
She didn't have an answer. She had spent seventeen years watching Marcus Kane make hard decisions in the name of order and feeling the particular fury of someone who understood the logic and hated the cost of it. She had stolen medicine for Grace and landed in the skybox and been dragged to the dropship while she screamed his name, and he had stood there like stone. She had every reason to feel nothing.
But she did not feel nothing. She felt something large and formless that she didn't have a name for, the kind of feeling that came from a long history that had never been resolved, and now it would never be resolved. Whatever she and Marcus Kane had been to each other, whatever it might have become, that was over. And she had never—
She stopped herself again. Pressed her palms flat against her thighs.
Outside, she could hear the camp beginning to move. Low voices. Purposeful footsteps. The particular sounds of people preparing for something.
They're getting ready, she thought.
She thought about Clarke's face last night, how it changed after the explosion. Clarke had tried to run toward it, and Bellamy had to physically blocking her, his arms around her from behind as she struggled, and Clarke making sounds that Lily had not been able to fully hear and had been grateful not to hear. Bellamy speaking into the top of Clarke's head.
"We can't go now," Bellamy had said.
"I have to go," Clarke had tried to get free, but Bellamy hadn't let her.
"We can't go alone," he had insisted. "We need to organize a rescue party. Hey," he had said making Clarke look at him. "We'll go at first light, but we need more people."
Lily had stood very still through all of it, frozen in a way she recognized. She had already felt that... when her mothe had died. The stillness that came when too many things were happening at once and the mind simply could not keep up. She could not stop her mind from thinking about Marcus and the fact that he had just crushed on the ground before her eyes.
And after hours, Lily was mentally still in that moment.
She sat up, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, and made herself breathe.
The canvas had gone from grey to pale gold, that was the color of the dawn.
She reached for her shirt, her jacket. Found her boots and started pulling them on. She was tying her shoes when she heard the flap of the tent move.
She didn't turn. She knew the sound of it — the particular way it shifted, the weight of the footsteps on the earth outside.
"Hey," Bellamy's voice came soft, almost careful.
"Hey." She kept her eyes on her laces, trying to keep her voice even.
"We're moving out in ten minutes." He said quietly. Lily nodded her head.
"Yeah." She finished with the first boot and started on the second. "So I've heard."
He was quiet for a moment. She could feel him looking at her, and she kept her hands moving, kept her eyes down. Only the feeling of his gaze was enough to make her tear up.
"Sure you don't want to come?" he asked at some point.
She had known the question was coming. They had briefly spoken about it last night. She remembered him asking if she wanted to help organize it. She remembered shaking her head. She remembered her eyes burning. She did not remember if he had told her to lie down or if she had simply gone, the two things blurring together in the fog of those hours.
She stood up, smoothing her shirt against her sides, still not turning toward him. "No. I…" She cleared her throat. "I think it's better for me to... to stay here."
"Don't you want to know if your dad was on that ship?"
The question landed the way she had known it would if she had let herself anticipate it, which she had been working hard not to do.
"It crashed," she said putting her jacket on. Her voice was flat. "Whether Marcus was there or not, I cannot know."
"You said he would have been on the first ship to land."
"I don't want to go, Bell, alright?!" She turned to him sharply, and then when she met his wide gaze she felt the tears came before she could stop them.
"God," she said, covering her face with her hands. "I'm so sorry." She let out a sob.
"Hey." He crossed the tent in a few steps and his arms came around her, steady and unhurried, the way they always were when she needed them to be. She pressed her face against his shoulder and felt the tears she had been not-crying all night finally go somewhere.
"It's alright," he said. "It's alright. You don't have to come."
She nodded against him, not trusting her voice.
His hand moved on her back, slow and patient. "I'll be back later. Keep an eye on the camp."
She pulled back just far enough to look at him, scrubbing at her face with the back of her hand, and nodded again. He looked at her for a moment, and then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead, warm and brief, and let her go.
She listened to his footsteps toward the entrance.
"Be careful out there," she said, her voice coming out thin.
He turned in the gap of the tent flap, and she saw him take her in, standing in the middle of the tent with her hands at her sides and her eyes still red. Something moved through his expression. Then he was gone, and the canvas settled behind him, and the camp sounds closed over his departure like water.
She stood there for another moment. Then she went to find something to do.
The work helped, like it always helped; giving her hands something to be and her mind a narrow track to run on. She started in the medical tent.
, going through the supplies with a methodical attention that did not require her to think about anything beyond what was in front of her. Inventory. Restocking. Checking the infusions she had left steeping overnight. The willow bark that needed another hour. The plantain paste that had set properly and needed to be transferred.
She worked through it all twice.
By the time she had finished the second pass, the camp had settled into its reduced morning rhythms — fewer people, the clearing quieter without Bellamy's presence at the center of it, the wall guard rotation going on without the usual oversight. She did what she could. She spoke to Miller about the patrol schedule, walked the wall once to check the new section Bellamy had reinforced, came back and found something else to do.
She thought about Marcus again, and she made herself stop, and then she thought about him anyway.
They little memories of him were bitter. Because when she thought of her mother, Lily remembered how she brushed her hair, and how they would laugh and wander when she spoke stories about the Earth. She remembered them reading together and walking through the corridors of the Ark hand in hand.
But with Marcus she had nothing of that. She remembered him across the hall. Or talking quietly to her mother at their door. She remembered him telling her not to cry as she brought her things in the Alpha Station. And she remembered him leaving her alone in the cellar he had given to her. She had no warm memory, not a smile, not an hug or reassuring words. And yet here she was, unable to stop thinking about his death.
She pressed her fingers against her eyes and made herself move.
The afternoon settled around her. The clearing was warm in the particular way of late summer afternoons, the light coming through the canopy at a low angle, throwing long shadows across the ground. She collected the dried mallow and yarrow she had hung three days ago, stripped and sorted them with hands that did not shake as badly as they had in the morning. She made a new batch of the antiseptic tincture, slower than usual, letting the attention the process required fill the spaces where the thoughts wanted to go.
By the time the light had begun to warm to amber, she had been moving through the camp for the better part of a full day and had managed to be useful for most of it.
They had not come back yet.
She had been tracking the light, the way it moved across the camp. First light, mid-morning, the high flat white of noon, the drop into late afternoon. She had not looked at the east wall as often as she had wanted to, which was to say she had looked at it constantly, every pass through the clearing catching her eye with the hope and the dread of seeing a group emerge from the trees.
They had not.
She was at the fire, adjusting one of the pots, when Octavia appeared at her shoulder.
Lily looked at her. She had been aware of Octavia moving through the camp all day — that particular quality of movement that came with the kind of anger that had nowhere to go, careful and too-controlled, speaking in short answers to the people who spoke to her and avoiding the ones who didn't.
"Hey," Lily said.
Octavia said nothing for a moment. She was looking at the fire with her jaw set in the way Lily had learned to recognize as the Blake default setting for strong feeling. "When they get back," she said finally, "tell my brother I'm still furious with him."
"Or you can tell him yourself," Lily said carefully.
The girl let out a breath as she shook her head. "It's pointless talking to him." Then she turned to go away.
"Octavia." Lily turned from the fire. "Be angry at him when you know he's safe."
The other girl's eyes moved to her face. "I'll be angry at him forever for what he had done to Lincoln, and for starting a war."
Lily looked at her properly. Looked at the line of her jaw, the brightness behind her eyes, and understood what she was actually seeing.
"Alright..." Lily said, more quietly.
Octavia turned away, and that was when Lily felt it — the particular sting behind her own eyes that she had been managing all day, the thing she had been pressing down since that morning in the tent. Something in her face must have changed, because Octavia turned back.
"What's wrong with you?" Not unkind. Just direct in the way Octavia always was.
"Nothing." Lily pressed her lips together, getting up before her eyes started to water again.
"I'm going to go get some plants. I'm running low on a few things." She reached for her knife, looping it onto her belt.
"What? Now?" Octavia asked with a confused frown.
"I need some flowers that bloom at night," Lily explained, "Evening primrose. Their just outside the wall."
"Are you sure?" Octavia asked observing her and Lily nodded her head.
"Yeah," she said pointing at her back "It's really close, I'll be visible from the guard post. Don't worry."
She didn't wait for Octavia to respond.
Connor at the gate looked at her with the expression of someone who wanted to argue about it, but Lily insisted and after some minutes of arguing, he finally let her go.
The air outside the wall was different in the evenings — cooler, the particular cleanness of late day in the forest, the light coming from low and sideways and turning everything warm. She moved a few yards out, crouching near a stand of plantain with little yellow flowers. It had grown thick in a patch of disturbed earth near the base of the wall. She pulled a strip of cloth from her pocket and began to harvest.
Her hands moved, and her mind went.
She let the tears come this time, because there was nobody to see them and she was tired of managing them. They came slowly, the way they did when the well had been almost emptied already — a few at a time, rolling down to her jaw, cooling against her skin. She pressed the back of her wrist against them without stopping the harvest.
Stop crying, she said to herself. There's no reason to cry.
But it was no use, for some reason more tears went down, hot against her cheeks. And she closed her eyes.
Then suddenly, Lily heard footsteps coming from behind her.
She turned with her hand already on the knife, the motion automatic, and then she went very still.
Jake was standing a few yards away, his hands raised, his expression carrying something careful and afraid.
She stood up slowly, the knife in her hand, trying to keep her hold on it stead. "Don't come any closer," she said.
He stopped his steps, his hands still up where she could see them. "I didn't want to hurt you." His voice was quiet, and almost trembling as he observed her. "I know that doesn't mean anything."
Her eyes quickly scanned him to be sure he was not armed, that he was really there just to talk. "And I should believe you?" she asked, feeling her legs tremble.
He let out a breath, taking another step. "Look, I'm sorry—"
"You can be sorry without walking toward me." She watched him stop, the knife in her hand still pointed at him.
"I had—" He swallowed. "That night. I had eaten those berries." His jaw shifted. "I was — I was frightened. I was not thinking right. I am—" He stopped to take a breath. "I'm sorry I scared you."
"You didn't just scare me," she said. Her voice was level, which surprised her. "You almost killed me."
"I know." His eyes were bright. "And I'm so sorry. I just—" He pressed his lips together. "I miss my parents."
That words hit her more than they should have, she knew. But she could not help but to close her eyes.
She thought about the things she had been thinking about for the past twelve hours. She thought about Marcus in the wreckage of an Exodus ship, and the conversations they would never have. And she felt stupid for thinking that their relationship would have ever changed. She knew who he was.
Marcus had been one of the reason why they had all suffered. Each one of them.
Try to be kind, Lily, her mother's voice rang in her mind.
She did not wipe her eyes when tears went down her cheeks this time.
"I know that I can't ask for your forgiveness," Jake said almost carefully. "I just wanted to thank you. For not reporting it."
"Yeah, well..." Lily said with a nod of her head, looking at him properly. "I don't think you need to thank me for that."
The silence between them was a different kind than it had been before. Not the deliberate ease he had been constructing on the walk to the berry patch. Something stripped and quieter and—
They both turned at the same moment.
The sound came from the eastern tree line. Not a clean sound — not the purposeful footfall of a group returning, nothing organized or deliberate. Something ragged. Uneven. A weight landing wrong with every step, and underneath it a breathing that was wrong in a specific way that made Lily's hands go still.
"Grounders?" Jake said.
"I don't know." Lily whispered, still looking at the dark woods.
She moved toward it before she had consciously decided to. Her knife was in her hand and her heart was in her throat and the shadows between the trees had the particular thickness of late evening, hard to read, shapes becoming other shapes. She pushed through the outer edge of the undergrowth when she saw a dark shape.
He was on his feet — barely. He was upright in the way of someone who had decided to stay upright through force of will rather than structural capability, his weight shifted wrong, one leg favoring the other. But when she saw his face, Lily's eyes widened.
"Murphy," she breathed.
Murphy's face was covered in cuts and blood, swollen by bruises. His shirt was torn, dried blood dark on the cloth. And even as she registered all of it, she saw his eyes find her face and go strange with something she recognized with a shock as relief.
His knees buckled.
"Oh my God, Murphy—" She was already moving, already reaching him as he went down, her hands finding his arms, trying to slow the fall. He groaned — a sound that was mostly air, almost nothing — and she got one knee under him, her hands against his chest and his arm, getting him down to the ground instead of against it.
"Hey." She got her face in front of his. "You have to stay awake, alright?" His eyes were trying to focus. "Stay with me." He groaned again, and she saw the fear in him through the pain — that animal readiness of someone who did not know if this was safe and could not yet afford to find out.
"Jake." She didn't look up. "Help me get him to camp."
"But..." Jake said stuttering, "He's been banished."
Lily turned to him, with wide eyes, "He's hurt. What is he going to do in this state?"
Jake didn't move. She could feel his hesitation from six feet away. Lily turned to look at Murphy again, his breath ragged, his eyes doing everything to keep themselves open.
"Fine," she said firmly. "I'll bring him in myself if I have to."
She got Murphy's arm over her shoulders, pressing her own shoulder up under his, trying to take the weight while keeping herself from being pulled down. He made a sound that cost him, and she felt the full weight of him for a moment before she found her footing.
Then she heard Jake let out a long, frustrated breath, and he appeared at Murphy's other side.
"This is a bad idea," he said.
"I won't leave him out here alone." She got her feet under her. "Come on," she said before they started to make their way towards the fance.
"Don't shoot!" she shouted as the wall resolved out of the dark ahead of them, torchlight glancing off the top. "Don't shoot!"
Octavia's voice came from the top of the barricate, sharp and alert. "Lily?" It didn't take too long before the girl ran outside, with Connor and Eric behind her.
Then Lily saw Octavia's eyes widen too, "Murphy?" she said under her breath.
"I need to bring him inside," Lily said firmly, not slowing down.
"Lily, you can't!" Connor excalimed, his eyes glaring at Murphy, "Bellamy said—"
"I know he's been banished." She argued, not quite believing that they were even having that conversation. "You can't seriously consider leaving him outside. Look at him."
Murphy made a sound between his teeth, and she felt Jake shift on his other side, redistributing the weight without being asked. She was grateful for it.
"Get out of my way, Connor," she said before gesturing Jake to follow her.
The camp was at its evening rhythms — fire, voices, the smell of food — and then it wasn't, because Lily was walking through the middle of it with Murphy between herself and Jake and the voices went quiet and she heard the whispers beginning and she did not stop, did not slow, kept her eyes on the medical tent.
She heard the gasps. She heard her name, twice, in voices that were not calling to her but to each other. But she kept walking.
Inside the tent, the light was steady, and she could finally see him properly. She settled him onto the surface she used for patients, as carefully as she could, and he hissed through his teeth at every shift in position, his hands going out as though looking for something to hold.
"Easy, easy," she said putting her hands on his shoulders, trying to calm him down. "You're inside. You're safe." Once Murphy seemed to calm down as he layed on his back, Lily took a breath before looking up at Jake.
"Thank you." She said letting out a breath.
He met her eyes. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said, and it did not sound unkind, and then he was gone.
She turned back to Murphy.
Up close and in lamplight, the damage was worse than she had read it in the dark. The cuts were not random — they had a particular deliberateness to them, shallow and numerous, the kind that were about duration rather than depth. Those were not wounds from a fall, it didn't take a doctor to see that. And as she touched his forehead his temperature seemed to be high.
She reached for the cloth and the bowl of water.
When she moved toward his face, his hand shot out and locked around her wrist. She felt him seize it — the grip trembling, but present, real, the grip of someone not entirely sure where they were.
"It's alright," she said quietly, not pulling back. "Murphy, It's alright."
His eyes moved around before he found her face.
"Lily?" His voice was wrong — thicker than it should have been, the consonants working harder than usual.
"Yeah, it's me," she said with a little nod, her hands shaking at seeing how scared he was. "I'm going to clean these wounds, alright?" She watched his grip on her wrist ease, not letting go but releasing pressure. "You're going to be fine, I promise."
She began to work.
He drifted in and out. When she moved from one wound to the next he would sometimes flinch back into alertness — eyes wide, body tensing, the particular animal readiness of someone who had been hurt enough times that their baseline was threat — and she would speak to him quietly until he came back to where she was. She noticed his hands and had to look away for a moment before she could continue. Two nails missing, the skin around them raw and dark with bruising.
What happened to you? She thought with dread. But she didn't dared to ask. He was frightened enough as it was.
The water in the bowl turned red as she worked. There was so much blood that she had to changed it twice.
"You're dying to ask me the question," Murphy said. His voice was clearer than it had been before. When she looked up he was watching her, observing her face closely.
"You should be resting," she said as she kept cleaning his wounds.
She looked up at him. A shaky breath moved through her before she could stop it. She thought about the last time that she had saw him. The mob, and then Charlotte, and Bellamy hit him and left him in the woods. She didn't want for him to be left there, and now, seeing all those wounds, she felt her eyes water once again, and her lips twitch. But she did all she could to not cry.
"What happened?" she finally asked, despite herself.
The silence lasted long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer.
"The Grounders," he said and Lily looked up at him. "They took me to their camp." His voice was flat and careful in the way voices got when the thing they were describing was too large to look at directly.
"They did this to you..." she said. The words came out as a whisper.
He didn't answer. But he held her gaze, and she held his, and in the space between them was everything that didn't need to be said about what that meant.
The tent flap moved.
Connor came through first, and then Eric, and before Lily could say anything they had already moved past her and grabbed Murphy by the arms, hauling him upright. Murphy hissed sharply in pain.
"What the hell are you doing?" Lily was on her feet immediately. "Let him go!"
Connor's eyes found hers and held them with a hardness she had not seen directed at her before. "He's a danger to us all." He didn't loosen his grip on Murphy. "We'll take him to the dropship, where we can keep an eye on him."
"Connor, you can't do this!" She stepped forward.
"You couldn't take him back to camp, Lily." His gaze was flat and unyielding. They stared at each other across the small space of the tent, Murphy between Connor and Eric, his face tight with pain he was trying not to show.
"He still needs medication," she said, her eyes never moving from Connor. "His got fever—"
"He'll survive." Connor nodded to Eric and they began to move toward the entrance.
"Lily..."
Murphy's voice made something tighten in her chest. He was looking at her from between them and Lily made some steps following them. Before they took him out of the tent.
Lily bit her lips, just before she threw the cloth in her hands on the ground.
***********
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The revenge is over. Peter is dead. And Scarlett Black is left alone with what she is - and everything she's done. Becoming something better is harder than destroying everything. It doesn't come with forgiveness, or second chances, or clean slates. It comes one choice at a time, in front of people who have every reason not to trust her. Stiles Stilinski is one of them. That's the problem.
《 Previous - Next 》
Chapter 8
History was the last class before the end of school, which meant forty minutes of sitting three rows behind Vanessa Argent and trying to look like she was taking notes.
Evelyn was taking notes. She was also watching the way Vanessa held her pen — loose, efficient, the grip of someone who used their hands for things that required more precision than writing — and the angle of her shoulders, and the specific quality of her stillness, which was not the stillness of someone bored or distracted but the stillness of someone who had learned to conserve energy as a default setting.
Deaton had told her about the code. "They don't hunt those who haven't spilled innocent blood." He'd said it with even composure, and Evelyn had believed him.
And then Kate had happened. Kate had taken her and chained her in a burned building and used her to get to Derek, and the code had looked a lot less solid from that particular vantage point.
She was something. She didn't know the right word for it yet, but she was something, and hunters hunted things, and the question of whether what she was fell inside or outside the parameters of innocent blood was not a question she had a comfortable answer to.
She couldn't not find out who this girl was, though. She find her extremly difficoult to read. And Evelyn didn't like it.
The bell rang. Around her the sounds of a class ending — chairs, zips, bags being lifted. She started putting her things away slowly, deliberately, and when Vanessa was doing the same she turned.
"Hi." She kept her voice easy. "I'm Evelyn."
Vanessa looked at her. That was the thing — she looked at her, in the specific way that Deaton had too. Except Deaton's version had warmth underneath it and this had something else. Not hostility. Something more like professional curiosity, a kind of interest. It made the back of Evelyn's neck feel strange.
"I'm Vanessa," she said.
Evelyn pushed a smile onto her face and hoped it read as genuine. "How are you liking Beacon Hills so far?"
"Small," she said without losing the strange smile. "Which isn't that bad."
The pendant at her throat caught the light. Evelyn looked at it for half a second before she could stop herself — the same design she'd seen on Allison, the same silverwork. The Argent pendant. The Evelyn looked away. "Why? You like to explore new places?" She asked as a laugh came out of her that sounded slightly wrong to her own ears, a little too bright, the laugh of someone performing ease rather than feeling it. But Vanessa didn't know Evelyn, so she hoped that the huntress would not read anything behind it.
That strange small smile stayed exactly where it was on Vanessa's lips. "Something like that, yeah."
The way she said it moved a cold finger down Evelyn's spine.
"Vanessa Argent."
A woman appeared in the doorway. Tall, short red hair, blue eyes that were doing an efficient survey of the room before she'd finished speaking. Evelyn was certain she'd never seen her before and equally certain there was something familiar about her — not the face but the quality of her presence, the specific way she occupied the entrance like she'd already assessed it. "The principal is asking for you."
Something passed between Vanessa and the woman — a shared look, brief and complete, the communication of people who had been operating together long enough to not need words for the simple things.
Vanessa picked up her bag. "See you around, Evelyn."
"Yeah. Sure."
She watched her go and stayed very still until the door closed, and then she let herself feel what she'd been managing for the past forty minutes — the specific cold that had settled in her chest somewhere around the third time Vanessa had looked at her like she was something to be identified and classified. The way it had recalled, with precise and unwelcome clarity, a burned building and a woman with a hunter's ease and a complete absence of hesitation.
She reminded her of Kate. And the thought itself pushed her to quickly gather and things to go and find Scott and Stiles.
It didn't take her long because she met Scott in the corridor. They were both moving fast and nearly walked into each other at the junction near the science wing.
"Eve! I need to talk to you." He exclaimed.
"Yeah, me too." She kept moving, pulling him with her. "There's a huntress in my history class."
He looked at her with big eyes, "The principal is Allison's grandfather."
Evelyn felt her mouth almost drop. "Alright," she said. "You beat me."
"I'm about to make it worse." He said as they kept walking, but Evelyn could hardly believe it.
"Worse than hunters in the school?"
He took a breath, kept glancing at her as they went, "Derek turned someone into a werewolf."
Evelyn's arm shot out, taking Scott's wrist making him stops. "What did he do?" She asked hoping to have not heard it correctly.
"Yes!" Scott insisted. "And they're bringing him to the police station."
Evelyn was so confused right now. "They? Who's they?"
The two of them looked at each other before they started to run. Evelyn followed Scott, through the crowd until they arrived to the exit, the conversation carrying them through the doors and into the cold October air, and she saw them immediately — two police cars pulling away from the curb, and through the window of the second one the face of a boy she didn't recognize, young, sitting in the back. His blue eyes grew larger when he saw Scott. But then the car went away.
"Alright," Evelyn said trying to understand. "Who is that? What did he do?"
"Isaac," Scott said still looking at the police car leaving. "They are bringing him in for murder."
Evelyn's eyes grew larger, "What?!" She excalimed.
She could not believe that Derek had turned a boy and then leave him on his own so that he could kill a person. She remembered how careful he had been with Scott, what changed now?
The sound of an engine made her turn. A black Camaro had pulled to the curb twenty feet away and she recognized it before she'd consciously processed the recognition — the car, the shape of the person behind the wheel. Derek. And behind the Camaro, pulling up on a motorcycle, Scarlett.
A dry sound came out of Evelyn. Not quite a laugh. "Unbelievable."
"Get in," Derek said, through the window.
"Are you serious?" Scott stepped forward, and she could hear the edge in his voice — not just anger, but confusion and worry. "You did that. That's your fault."
"I know that." Derek's eyes moved from Scott's face for a moment, then he looked back at them, composing himself once more. "Now get in the car and help me."
"No, I've got a better idea." Scott said taking few steps towards the car. "I'm going to call a lawyer. Because a lawyer might actually have a chance at getting him out before the moon goes up."
But Derek shook his head, "Not when they do a real search of the house."
Evelyn was confused at that. "What does it mean?" She asked moving forward to stand next to Scott. Derek looked at her for a moment, before he lowered his gaze.
"Whatever Isaac said to the cops, what's in the house is worse. A lot worse." Derek said firmly.
Evelyn and Scott shared a glance. None of them knew what that all meant but after a moment they both decided the same thing. So with a frustrated breath Evelyn pulled open the passenger door and got in, while Scott got in the back.
Derek glanced at her as she closed the door, but said nothing. She took that as some form of acceptance and she waited for him to start the car.
In the rearview mirror, Scarlett's motorcycle fell in behind them as they pulled out.
Evelyn looked straight ahead through the windshield for a while. The town moved past — ordinary streets, ordinary afternoon light, the complete indifference of Beacon Hills to the fact that there was a new werewolf in a police station and hunters in the school and a boy she'd never met who was apparently going to spend his first full moon in a cell.
"This could be the biggest mess you've ever made," she said at some point.
She saw Derek's jaw move. She looked at him — at the set of his profile, how he was containing several things at once, but as always he wouldn't share anything. Ans now a boy was a killer.
Then her eyes went to the rearview mirror and found Scarlett on the motorcycle behind them.
"You've teamed up with her now?" She heard the edge in her own voice and couldn't entirely locate where it had come from.
"Are you going to stay here questioning everything I do?" Derek turned to look at her briefly, glaring at her like it had happened before.
Something moved through her chest that she didn't immediately identify. And she turned all the way towards him. "Are you serious right now?" She exclaimed. "Why did you turn a teenager into a werewolf? Why are you siding with Scarlett of all people?"
"I've got my reasons." He simply answered and a humourless chuckle left her mouth as she observed him drive.
"So you trust her now?"
"What do you care if I trust her or not?" He asked her looking at her.
Evelyn opened her mouth, but then she closed it, not really knowing what to answer to that. She looked out the window at the passing trees and felt something she couldn't name pressing against the inside of her sternum, and she told herself it was about Stiles, it was about what Scarlett had done to Stiles, it was a reasonable and proportionate response to a legitimate concern, and she almost believed it.
"I don't care." She said finally, before turning to him again. "What I care about is that your new pack member just killed someone."
"His dad," Scott said from the back seat.
"That's great," she said leaning back against her sit. "Even better."
"It wasn't him." Derek said it without taking his eyes off the road, a flat declarative, not an argument.
Evelyn turned to Scott. Scott frowned back at her. She turned back to the windshield and did not ask the follow-up question, because for what she had understood about Derek, she knew that he gave informations if and only he decided to give them.
The Lahey house sat at the end of a residential street in the kind of neighborhood that had been nice for a long time and was still trying. She got out of the car and read the name on the mailbox — Lahey — and looked at the house. It was neat. Cared for, the garden maintained, window boxes with something green still in them despite October. The yellow tape across the door looked wrong against it, like a bad splice in a film.
She followed Derek and Scott to the door and watched Derek push it open without particular ceremony and step inside.
Scarlett stayed on the step. Evelyn stopped.
"Go on," Scarlett said, with a brief look at Derek that communicated something, and Derek went inside with Scott.
Evelyn stood on the step and looked at her. Scarlett was standing with her arms slightly crossed and her face arranged into the expression she wore when she was waiting for something unpleasant to be over. She looked, Evelyn thought, smaller than she usually did. Where was the upfront vampire she had all used them to?
"What do you want?" Scarlett said, once she noticed her staring.
"What you did was hideous." Evelyn could not help herself but say in a hiss.
"I don't need you to tell me that." The vampire said flatly, not even looking at her.
"Maybe you don't. But I do." Evelyn kept saying, it was the first time she had the chance to meet her after everything that had happened. After the truth about her came out. "Stiles is my friend, Scarlett."
Scarlett turned to look at her directly, and her eyes had the flat, but her jaw clenched.
"Yeah," She said, and Evelyn looked at her not quite believing what she was seeing. She had witnessed how Scarlett acted around Stiles, how she made him believe that she had feelings for him just to use him.
"You vampires are really hallow creatures," Evelyn said, glaring at the girl in front of her. "You don't care about anything, but roaming around in search of blood."
Scarlett's lips got thiner for a moment, just before her eyes flared again. "There's nothing I have to say to you," she said, as her hands clenched in fists.
"He cared about you. And you've hurt him badly," Evelyn insisted, and Scarlett blinked taking a step back. The anger in her eyes shifting to something else. "Do you even care?"
Scarlett looked at her for another moment, but she did not answer; she just took some steps from her, and then headed to the house, walking inside.
Evelyn stood there for a moment in the cold, looking at the open door. Vampires had really no feelings. Then she followed.
"I thought you needed an invitation," Scott said, looking at Scarlett, who was standing just inside the entrance with her arms, looking around with a strange expression. Like she didn't want to be there.
Maybe she killed him, Evelyn thought, glaring at Scarelett as she passed by her. That's how she could enter the house.
"Isaac invited me in yesterday," Scarlett expalined, "When I brought him home."
She did look uncomfortable. Evelyn would not have said that was possible for Scarlett, and the fact that it was shifted something slightly in her chest that she also chose not to examine.
"You said he didn't kill his father," Scott said to Derek, sweeping his flashlight across the ordinary living room — photos, furniture, everything in its place. "Then who did?"
"I don't know yet." Derek answered simply.
"Then how do you know he's telling the truth?" Scott asked with a frown.
"Because I trust my senses." Derek moved through the room, flashlight cutting across surfaces. "And it's a combination of them. Not just your sense of smell." He looked at Scott with a steady, knowing expression.
Scott's face did something brief and embarrassed. "You saw the lacrosse thing today."
"Yeah."
"Did it look that bad?"
Derek put a hand on his back and guided him further into the house. "Yeah."
Evelyn followed, running her flashlight along the walls. She stopped at the photographs. Isaac — younger than the boy in the police car, maybe thirteen in the most recent one, the forced smile of someone performing for a camera. A man who she assumed was the father. And another boy, older, who she didn't recognize — but there were only two bedrooms visible from here and no sign of anyone else in the house, no second presence of any kind, and she looked at the boy's face in the photograph and felt something she couldn't name pull at her and moved away.
The door Derek was heading toward opened onto stairs going down, frowining, not understanding what they were doing.
"What's down there?" Scott asked, confused as much as she was.
"Motive," Derek again said with semplicity, but it was only able to make her question more, why he had brought Scott into that house.
Evelyn felt the temperature drop a degree as they descended, the specific cold of a basement that didn't get much light or warmth. Her flashlight found crates, stacked boxes, the general accumulation of a space used for storage rather than living. It was a very different feeling from the room they had just seen upstairs. And something creeped at the back of her neck, making her shiver.
"What am I looking for?" Scott asked looking, around.
"Follow your senses." Derek said.
Then Scott crouched to the ground and Evelyn lowered her flashlight to follow and saw what he'd found. A frown appeared on her face when she noticed marks on the concrete floor; four long lines carved into the surface in a pattern that was clearly not accidental. She felt another shiver move through her from the bottom of her spine to the base of her skull. Scott put his hand over the marks and she could see the size of them, the depth, the specific desperation of something clawing at a surface it couldn't get through.
"Derek," she said quietly as she felt him stop beside her.
Behind them, on the stairs, Scarlett had not come further down. She was standing on the last step of the stairs. Her arms were still crossed and she looked even more uneasy than before.
"What happened down here?" Scott said.
"The kind of thing that leaves an impression."
Scott moved to the far side of the room, and Evelyn's gaze followed him. The refrigerator was ordinary-looking from a distance — white, standing against the wall — except that it wasn't running, and there was a padlock through the handles with the key still in it. He looked at it and Evelyn found herself getting closer.
"Open it." Derek said to Scott, breaking the silence.
The sound it made when Scott pulled it open was the sound of a seal breaking on something that had been closed for a while, but when she saw the inside, Evelyn's hand found Derek's arm before she'd decided to move. It was covered in marks. All four sides, the ceiling of it, deep lines in the white plastic where something had been locked inside it and had tried with every available surface to get out. There were dark stains in some of the deeper grooves.
"He closed him in here..." Evelyn said, feeling her breath getting laboured and her eyes water.
"If the police find this," Derek said grimly, "they'll think Isaac killed his father."
"I wouldn't blame him," Scarlett said, from the stairs, and her voice was flat in a way that was different from her usual flatness.
"God," Evelyn said, almost to herself. She couldn't look at the inside of the refrigerator anymore. She decided to look at the floor instead.
"This is why he said yes to you," Scott said.
Derek looked at him, before answer, "Everyone wants power."
"Yeah." Evelyn heard her own voice say. "I bet he did."
Scott stared at the fridge longer than he should have, according to Evelyn, but when he turned he had a resolution, she had never seen so strong in his eyes.
"If we help you, you have to stop," Scott said facing Derek, "You can't just go around turning people into werewolves."
But Derek was not agreeing, "I can if they're willing."
"Did you tell Isaac about the Argents?" Scott asked him raising his voice. "About being hunted?"
"Yes." Derek said almost unbothered. "And he still asked."
Evelyn pushed her hair back. The basement felt smaller than it had when they'd come down. She thought about the boy in the police car and the marks on the floor and what the inside of that refrigerator meant about the years that had led up to this particular Thursday.
"Then he's an idiot," Scott exclaimed.
"And you're the idiot dating Argent's daughter." Derek looked at him steadily. "Yeah. I know. And if I know, how long do you think it takes them to find out?"
"Her cousin is in school too," Evelyn said. She couldn't disagree with that particular logic. "They'll be watching. Allison most of all." Derek nodded his head as he looked back at Scott.
"With me," Derek said, "you learn to use all of your senses."With me, you learn control." He took Scott's hand — she saw the claws already partially out, and she felt a small shock of it even as an observer, the reality of it, the thing Scott had been trying to outrun for months made visible in that moment. "Even on a full moon."
Scott pulled his hand back slowly. "If I'm with you, I lose her."
"You're going to lose her anyway." Derek said it without cruelty. Just as a fact he'd already processed and was offering at cost. "You know that."
Evelyn looked up at him as he moved toward the stairs. She thought about the way Scott had fought for Allison and she wasn't sure Derek was right. But she also wasn't sure he was wrong.
"Wait." Scott's voice stopped Derek at the foot of the stairs. "I'm not part of your pack. But I want him out. He's my responsibility too."
"Why?" Derek asked with a little frown. "Because he's one of us?"
But Scott shook his head, "Because he's innocent."
"That's very noble of you, pup." Scarlett's voice from the stairs, dry and not unkind. "But you're forgetting something."
"What?" He asked looking at her.
"You can't go anywhere tonight." The vampire stated as she glance at him.
Derek looked at Scott. "She's right. You're already starting to shift." Scott's jaw was tight, his hands slightly too still at his sides, the specific quality of someone holding themselves together by will. He couldn't go to the station. He couldn't go anywhere with people, not tonight.
Scott looked at the refrigerator. He stood there for a long moment. Then he looked at Evelyn.
"Call Stiles. Tell him to bring the chains."
She stared at him. "Scott—"
"Tell him."
She pulled out her phone and followed Derek and Scarlett up the stairs and out of the house, and the cold hit her again as she stepped outside. She dialed Stiles' number, but he made her wait just two rings before he picked up. Evelyn quickly told him where they were and what Scott had planned to do to stop himself from killing someone that night. Evelyn hated to say out loud where he wanted to be confined.
"What kind of plan is that?" Stiles' voice rang from her speaker.
"The only one we have." Evelyn said looking up at Derek that was standing next to her, listening to what Stiles was saying.
"We have another problem." She saw Derek going very still at those words. "Allison told me her grandfather sent someone to the police station to kill Isaac."
Derek and Scarlett shared a look, eyes wide from both of them ready to do something.
"She managed to slow them down but I don't know for how long." Stiles kept saying.
"Derek," Scarlett said firmly, as her body went almost rigid. Evelyn observed her with a little frown. "There could be more. We have to go."
"And how excatly do you think you're getting in?" Stiles voice made the vampire look at the phone.
"I'll use my charm to get inside." Scarlett was quick to answer.
"No you're not." Stiles's voice was flat but quite stubborn. She watched Scarlett's jaw set, watched her let out a slow breath through her nose. "Give me ten minutes. I'll be there. We leave Scott the chains and then we go to the station."
"Alright," Evelyn said with a nodd. "Be quick."
She ended the call, and when she turned she saw Derek and Scarlett both already moving slightly — the contained restlessness of people waiting when they didn't want to be waiting.
"For all we know she could already be there," Scarlett said. Evelyn frowned. Was she worried about Isaac? No, that didn't make sense, she probably just wanted to kill--
"She?" Evelyn asked getting their attention.
"Allison's cousin," Derek was the one to answer, while Scarlett rolled her eyes as she didn't eant to listen to her.
But Evelyn's attention stood on Derek. "You know her?" She asked.
"By name." He shrugged his shoulders, as he looked at her. "But we have to hope she's not going to be there."
Evelyn thought about the pendant catching the light. About that strange way of talking to people that she had. About the cold finger down her spine and the small gold light above her palm that had lasted twenty seconds this morning.
Vanessa Argent was dangerous. She had been right about that.
"Alright." She straightened, then finding Derek's eyes. "When Stiles gets here, give me the chains. I'll stay with Scott."
Derek's eyes widened at her words, "Are you out of your mind?"
"Someone has to stay. To make sure Scott is staying inside," Evelyn insisted as her eyes stayed locked with Derek's. "And if the Argents send Vanessa or anyone else, you and Scarlett are the only ones who can stop them." She held his gaze. "I'll be more useful here."
He looked at her for a long moment with the expression she still hadn't finished learning to read. Was he disagreeing? Was he thinking that she was stupid? Was he worried?
Whatever he might think, he did not look convinced.
"Derek." She insisted, keeping her voice even. "You know I'm right." His jaw clanched as he looked at her, but he had no time to answer because the sound of an engine could be heard at the end of the street.
Stiles's jeep.
Derek looked at the house for a moment and then he went back at her. The same expression as before was all over his face, but he said said nothing, which was as close as Derek Hale got to agreeing with something she must had to admitt. So she took that her plan was the one they were going for tonight.
***************
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 30
The forest smelled different at night.
Lily had learned the daytime version of it — the green, living weight of it, the way light changed the quality of the air through the canopy. But this was something else. Denser. Closer. The dark pressed the trees together into shapes she couldn't fully read, and every sound that didn't come from their own footsteps was something she had to consciously decide not to startle at.
She was getting better at that. She was not yet good at it.
Bellamy crouched at the edge of the path and held out his hand, palm flat — stop — and they all went still. Ahead, barely visible through the undergrowth, she could make out the shape of the trail Clarke and Finn were following. Clarke had the berries.
"At least they are good for something," Bellamy said, rising after a moment, pocketing the handful he'd collected.
Lily found herself in quiet agreement. They had been sitting in the supply crate since the night everyone had been high on those.
The flash arrived before she could stop it: bark against her cheek, the cold of the ground coming up to meet her palms, the pressure across her throat that had made the next breath come in wrong and shallow. The warmth of blood reaching her jaw.
She pressed her fingers briefly against the side of her face and made herself release the breath she had been holding.
"Sorry for bringing up Clarke," Jasper said somewhere behind her, in the tone of someone who had said something without quite thinking it through. "Awkward."
"Shut up," Raven said.
"Both of you shut up." Bellamy didn't look back. Keep your eyes open.
Lily kept hers on the path and adjusted her grip on the rifle.
She was still not entirely comfortable with the weight of it in her hands — had not been, even in the clearing during the training sessions, where the mechanics of it had become almost familiar and the targets had been stationary and the stakes had been theoretical. This was not theoretical. If something went wrong out here, he would have to decide, in the space of a second, whether to use it.
She had defended herself against Jake. Her body had simply moved, had found the stone and swung it before her mind had finished catching up. But that had not been the same as pulling a trigger. She had not killed him. She had not known, in that moment, whether she would have been able to. If it came to it out here — a Grounder charging, someone she cared about in the way of a blade — she still didn't know.
Maybe that's what the body does, she thought. Maybe it moves anyway.
But she hadn't even been able to tell anyone what had happened with Jake. She wasn't even able to speak clearly about it, not even with Bellamy, that knew what had happened. If she couldn't speak that out loud, what made her think she could do this?
"Lily". Bellamy's voice was low, just behind her. "Stay close."
She looked up. He was watching her with that particular attention — the one that meant he had noticed something without making it a thing to address in front of the others.
"Hey." He stepped even with her, his tone firm but gentled at the edges. "I need you focused, alright?"
"I know," she said with a nod. "I'm sorry." She took a breath. Jasper and Raven were a few yards back, their footsteps steady. "We are going to make it, right?" She looked at Bellamy sidelong as they walked. "Without a fight?"
He held her gaze for a moment. She could see it — the thing he wasn't going to say, the comfort he wasn't going to offer because it would have been a lie, and he had stopped lying to her.
"Come on," he said instead. "We can't lose ground."
She nodded and followed him.
The night stretched. She tracked it the way she had learned to track most things out here by the quality of the darkness, the sounds that changed as the hours moved, the way her legs registered the miles. Somewhere around what she guessed was the second hour, she found herself thinking about Unity Day — the fire, the particular looseness of the camp, Bellamy's face when she'd found him across the clearing. Strange, that she could be walking through Grounder territory in the dark and still feel the warmth of that when she reached for it. But it was deeply sad to realize that they seem to not be able to have a quite night. With nothing happening. Would have always been like that?
The third hour, or thereabouts, she thought about Finn's expression when he'd told her about the Grounder, Lincoln. The stubborn certainty in it. She had not misread him — he had believed, genuinely believed, that this was the right way. She didn't think he was stupid. She thought he was someone who needed very badly for there to be a peaceful answer, and had decided to find one before he was sure it existed. But she didn't feel to disagree with him, not on everything. She just wished that they would cooperate as a team, and not going behind each other's backs.
By the time the sky had begun to grey at the edges, her thoughts had quieted into something more functional — the path, the tree line, the distance between herself and Bellamy's shoulder. She was tired in the way that went past wanting to stop, into something almost meditative. Her hands had stopped trembling around the rifle.
Then the light came all the way up, and Finn and Clarke stopped.
There was a bridge ahead — elevated, old, the kind of structure she had only seen in pictures. Clarke and Finn had stopped at its near end, and Lily eased back with the others into the tree cover, watching. She scanned the bridge, the tree line on the far side, the scrub below. Nothing yet.
Then she saw Octavia.
"What's Octavia doing here?" Jasper's voice was barely a whisper.
Lily looked immediately to Bellamy. His jaw had set, his eyes fixed on his sister with that particular expression — not quite shock, not quite anger. But she knew he didn't like for her to be there.
Lily moved her hand to his arm without thinking about it. She felt the muscle there, coiled and still.
Then suddenly Lincoln appeared.
She looked at Octavia moving toward him, and the last piece of it fell into place — how Finn had managed it, who had been the bridge between them. And then Octavia ran the last few steps and Lincoln's arms came around her, and the embrace was not tentative or uncertain. It was the kind that came from people who had already been through something together.
He's in love with her, Lily thought. The man who had stabbed Finn was in love with Bellamy's sister.
"Guess we know how he got away," Raven said quietly.
Lily tightened her grip on Bellamy's arm. She felt him wanting to move — felt the tension shift and gather, the way it always did before he acted on something — and she held on without increasing the pressure, just reminding him she was there.
The plan could still work. Lincoln had already shown that he didn't want anything to happen to Octavia. If Finn's read had been right, if the desire for peace was genuine on both sides, then the next few minutes could end something before it became a war. All Bellamy had to do was hold still.
She watched Lincoln and Octavia separate. She watched Finn reach for Clarke's hand, and she turned her eyes briefly to Raven before she could stop herself. Raven's expression had gone very still. Lily looked away, feeling the particular discomfort of witnessing something that belonged to someone else.
Then Bellamy moved, and she was already turning before she consciously registered why.
His rifle was coming up.
"What are you doing?" She kept her voice flat and below carrying distance.
"Let go." Bellamy said pointing his rifle in Lincoln's direction.
Lily's eyes widened. "You can't kill him — he's not attacking anyone." Her grip on his arm held when he didn't turn to her. "Bellamy!" She called almost desperately.
He didn't lower the rifle, but he didn't fire. And then the sound of hoofbeats reached them.
Wait. Raven's hand went up. Guys, look.
They turned. At the far end of the bridge, three figures were emerging from the tree line — and they were mounted.
Lily had seen horses in photographs, in the Ark's educational archives, in videos that had the quality of something recorded from another world entirely. She had read about them, had known their approximate size and the way they moved. None of it had prepared her for the reality of them in motion — the particular grace, the sound of them, the sheer living presence. For one involuntary second she simply looked.
Then she registered the riders.
Two men flanked the central figure, enormous, their faces hidden behind masks shaped like skulls, long lances resting across their horses. And between them, a woman — upright, unreadable, her expression carrying the particular dignity of someone who had never once in her life wondered whether she belonged somewhere.
Lily looked away from the horses and toward Bellamy. His rifle had moved again, tracking.
Would he keep his promise? The thought arrived with a specific sharpness, and she hated that it did, hated that it still surprised her when Bellamy did the thing she had asked him not to do — though it did not surprise her, not really. Fear in him moved toward action. That was what fear did in him. She knew that. But he had promised that he wouldn't attack first.
She was about to speak when he glanced sideways and found her eyes. Held them. And the rifle didn't move further.
She turned back to the bridge.
Clarke was walking forward, alone, toward the center. The woman with the skull-masked riders had dismounted, and she was walking forward too. Lily's palms were damp against the rifle stock. She watched Clarke's posture — straight, deliberate, the particular composure Clarke had when she was afraid and refusing to show it — and tried to believe it was enough.
Please make it work, she thought, watching the distance close between the two figures.
She was too far to hear the words. She watched the gestures, the pauses, the quality of the silences between them. The Grounder commander — because that was what she was, whatever her title — did not look afraid.
Raven raised her rifle and Lily's hand moved on reflex. But she relaxed when she noticed Raven only peering through the sight. "The grounder princess looks pissed." She said.
Bellamy didn't seem surprised. "Our princess has that effect."
"She can make it," Lily said. The words came out quieter than she intended, more for herself than anyone. "She will."
Then suddenly Jasper made a sound.
"No, no, no." Low, under his breath, "This is bad."
Lily turned immediately with a frown. "Jasper?"
"What the hell are you talking about?" Bellamy, tight and controlled.
Jasper didn't answer. He was looking through the rifle sight, his body gone rigid, and Lily watched the tension move through him. What did he see?
"The Grounders are in the trees."
The breath left her before she could stop it. She turned to Bellamy and in his eyes were scanning the trees. Lily tried to do the same but she couldn't see anything.
"Where?" Bellamyn asked confused. Lily really hoped that Jasper was mistaken.
"Are you sure?" Raven asked with a frown.
"I don't see anything," Bellamy said, but then siddenly Jasper let out a gasp and before one of them could do anything, he moved.
"They're gonna shoot!" He yelled, making everyone turn in their direction, "Clarke, run!"
And then everything happened at once.
The first shots were Jasper's. They broke the morning open, and for a full half-second Lily stood exactly where she was with her rifle in her hands and the sound ringing through her body — nothing like the training sessions, nothing like the controlled percussion of the clearing inside the east wall. This was inside her chest, inside her teeth. A man fell from the trees. He had been there. Jaspen was right...
Then the arrows began.
They came from the tree line on the far bank, fast and low, and the four of them moved without discussing it — down to the stream bank, behind what cover there was, Jasper still firing. Lily brought her rifle up. Her hands were steady. She aimed at the space between the branches and held the position and did not pull the trigger, because there was nothing specific in her sights.
What should I do? She trembled. What do I do?
Then the shot from directly beside her made her flinch — Bellamy, not at the trees but at the bridge, and when she tracked his line she saw the commander stumble, her shoulder struck, already moving away.
"Go, go!" Bellamy's voice was behind her, "Lily, go!" And she was running.
She ran.
The woods closed around her immediately — branches catching at her jacket, roots she had to read in half-seconds, the ground uneven beneath her boots. Behind her she could still hear the arrows, the crack of Jasper's rifle, and then Bellamy's voice again cutting through it all, close and certain, and she ran toward the sound of him.
She had not fired.
The thought arrived between one stride and the next and stayed there, flat and specific and impossible to put down. She had brought the rifle up. Her hands had been steady. And she had held the position and not pulled the trigger, and now she was running through the forest with her heart hammering against her ribs, and she kept thinking: what if Bellamy had been hit? What if it had been Jasper, or Raven, or Clarke on that bridge? What if her hesitation had cost someone something she could never give back?
She had defended herself against Jake. Her body had moved then without asking permission. But this had been different — a choice, a real one, and she had made it, and she didn't know yet if it had been right or only the thing she was capable of.
You hate violence, Bellamy had said to her. She did. She still did.
But hating something and being safe from its consequences were not the same thing.
The trees thinned. She could see Finn ahead, Clarke beside him, Octavia just behind — all of them moving fast, not yet speaking, the shared understanding of people who knew they were not yet clear. Lily pushed harder.
They ran for a long time. The forest changed around them — the quality of light shifting as the sun climbed, the sounds of the birds returning slowly to the canopy as if testing whether the morning had gone back to normal. It had not. She could feel the camp pulling at her from ahead, that particular orientation she had developed over weeks of knowing where north was relative to the dropship, and she followed it without having to think.
When the wall finally appeared through the trees, grey and solid in the evening light, she felt the breath leave her in one long, involuntary release.
They had been in the forest for almost a full day.
Nobody spoke until they were inside and the gate had been drawn shut behind them, and even then the silence lasted another full minute — six people standing in the clearing, breathing hard, the camp moving around them with the ordinary sounds of evening that felt, at that moment, almost incomprehensible.
Lily stood between Bellamy and Clarke and pressed her hands flat against her thighs and made herself breathe.
"You've got something to say?"
She turned. Bellamy was looking at Finn, who was looking back at all of them with something that had passed through fury and arrived somewhere quieter and colder.
"I told you — no guns."
"I told you we couldn't trust the Grounders," Clarke said. "And I was right."
"Why didn't you tell me what you were up to?" Raven's voice was tight in a different way — not at Clarke, at Finn.
"I tried," Finn argued back. "But you were busy with the guns."
"You're lucky she brought that." Bellamy's voice was hard and flat. "They came there to kill you."
"You don't know that!" Finn excalimed.
Lily stepped forward. "Finn." She kept her voice below the heat of it. "They had weapons too. You saw it."
"It was Jasper who fired the first shot!" Finn said.
"You ruined everything." Octavia's voice, directed at Jasper, and Lily watched it land on him — watched his face receive it and close around it.
"I saved you." His voice cracked slightly at the edges. He was already backing away. "You're welcome." He turned and shook his head and walked.
"Jasper—" Lily reached for his arm and he moved past her touch without looking at her, and she let him go, because she knew the shape of what he was carrying and she knew it needed to be set down somewhere private.
"Well, if we weren't at war already, we sure as hell are now." Finn, still going.
Lily looked down. She could not disagree. Whatever the Grounders' intentions had been on that bridge, this was what they were left with. Shots fired. The commander wounded. A man dead in the trees. Whatever Lincoln had promised Finn had ended in a way that could not be undone.
"You didn't have to trust the Grounders," Finn said, and now it was only at Clarke. "You just had to trust me."
Then he walked away and Raven followed letting out a breath.
Lily watched them go. She thought about Finn's face when he'd asked her — obliquely, carefully — to keep Bellamy occupied. She thought about the rifle in her hands at the stream bank, the moment she had held the sight steady and not fired. She thought about what it would mean if the Grounders came for them now in force, and whether not pulling that trigger had made any difference to anything at all.
She didn't know. She was beginning to accept that there were things like that — things you did or didn't do whose consequences you would never be able to fully read.
"Like I said," Bellamy said, with that particular flatness that meant he was containing something, "best Unity Day ever."
She turned and looked at him, sharing a glance that made him touch her back, silently leading her inside. But before she could walk away, she turned to the other girl.
"Clarke." She put her hand on the girl's shoulder. "It was the right thing to do."
Clarke looked at her. Something in her jaw shifted. But with a little sad smile, she nodded.
They were turning back toward the camp when the sound reached them.
It was not a sound she had heard before, but her body understood it before her mind did — the deep, percussive wrongness of something large descending too fast, the particular quality of an impact that hadn't been cushioned. She looked up the same moment Bellamy did, and Clarke half a second after.
"The Exodus ship?"
"So soon?" Lily's frown came immediately. "They were supposed to be here in two days."
"They must have decided to come earlier," Bellamy said, from just behind her.
Clarke's face had opened into something that was almost relief, almost joy, and Lily watched her and understood it; she was probably thinking about her mother. As the chief doctor, she was surely coming down with Marcus. And she observed the longing smile on her face, that anticipation of wanting to meet a person she loved that much again after so much time. And Lily wanted to feel it too, she really did, but found she couldn't. The thought of seeing Marcus was giving her so many mixed thoughts and feelings.
She was sure that Clarke and her mother would have hugged each other, once they would meet. What would have her and Marcus do?
Nothing surely, she thought bitterly. They would have looked at each other from across the camp, not daring to speak to each other with so many people around. Like it had always been.
Lily had so many questions on what he would have done once on the ground. How he would have handeled everything. And part of her was sure that he would disappoint her again, and yet she hoped he wouldn't.
Stop that, Lily, she told herself as she kept looking up.
As she looked the dropship keeping with its descend, Lily found herself frowning. It was so strange that Marcus had told her that the landing was scheduled in sixty hours. Why tell her that if he was going to be on the ground earlier?
That thought made her really consider that. It didn't make any sense.
"Wait." Clarke's voice had changed. Lily turned to her, a strange feeling was creeping in her stomach.
"Too fast," Clarke said and only then Lily noticed it. The angle was strange, the deceleration sequence hadn't engaged, the parachute wasn't there, and the thing descending was no longer a ship being guided but an object obeying gravity, and they were watching it and there was nothing any of them could do.
Lily's eyes widened when the ship hit the ground. It was far from they were, but they could still see it and hear it.
The sound traveled through the earth before it reached the air — she felt it in her feet, in her spine — and then the sky lit with it, the explosion blooming orange against the dark, and the sound that followed was the kind that stopped thought entirely.
Lily's hand found Bellamy's arm. She was not aware of reaching for it. Her breath laboured.
And then she saw it, the cloud rising up into the sky, dark smoke that brought fire with it. Fire from an explosion.
The Exodus had crashed.
Marcus, she thought.
***********
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The revenge is over. Peter is dead. And Scarlett Black is left alone with what she is - and everything she's done. Becoming something better is harder than destroying everything. It doesn't come with forgiveness, or second chances, or clean slates. It comes one choice at a time, in front of people who have every reason not to trust her. Stiles Stilinski is one of them. That's the problem.
《 Previous - Next 》
Chapter 7
The problem with high school was the smell.
Not the industrial cleaner and the cafeteria food and the particular staleness of a building that housed three hundred teenagers — she could filter all of that without effort. The problem was the blood. Three hundred humans in enclosed corridors, all of it moving, all of it present, the constant low-level awareness of it that she had learned to manage in the same way she'd learned to manage everything else that came with being what she was — by building walls around it and maintaining them by conscious effort, every minute of every day.
She'd been away from crowds for two weeks. The walls needed rebuilding.
She stood at the entrance of the main corridor and breathed through it — slow, even, the specific discipline of making her body understand that the thing it was registering was not a threat and not an opportunity and not anything except background noise — and when she was reasonably confident she had it under control she walked in.
The anxiety was a separate thing from the blood. It sat in her chest like something with weight, pressing against her sternum, and she recognized it as the specific anxiety of someone who had done something irreversible and was now walking back into the space where the consequences lived. Every face she passed was a face that might look at her the wrong way, or say something, or — worse — say nothing, the particular silence of people who knew something and had decided what it meant.
She kept her head forward and her pace even and her expression the careful neutral she'd been perfecting for eight years.
She thought about Isaac's father, and the car, and the blood.
That mess could not have been made by a werewolf, that she was sure of. If it wasn't for the slash on the troath and chest she would have thought that it was someone of her kind to have done such job. Vampires would drown and dranch themselves in blood, it ha happened to her too. It could get messy and that gave like a rush, a frenzy. Her fangs trembled at the thought, begging her to release them. But she forced them back,
She was still turning it over when she saw Jackson.
He was at his locker, pulling out a textbook with the practiced ease of someone for whom the mechanics of a school morning were deeply automatic. Hair perfect. Jaw set. Looking, by every available metric, entirely fine.
She stopped.
She looked at him with the particular attention she usually tried not to give people in public spaces, the kind that used more than just her eyes. She felt for the blood — the specific pull of it, the frequency, the thing she registered in every human body she was close to without deciding to register it.
Nothing.
She frowned.
He was alive, she could see that much, but nothing that read as werewolf. No elevated anything. No new frequency. She had felt Isaac the moment she'd gotten close enough, had felt the change in him like a different note in a familiar song. Jackson was — the same. The exact same as before.
Strange, she thought. Why don't I feel the werewolf blood?
"Scarlett."
She turned. Isaac was coming down the corridor toward her, moving with the self-conscious deliberateness of someone trying very hard to appear normal and not quite getting there. She could feel him from twenty feet away — the blood running fast, the elevated everything that came with the first few days of the change, the specific frequency of a new wolf who hadn't learned yet that the body had volume control.
"Try to breathe," she said when he reached her, keeping her voice low. "Jesus, Isaac. I can feel your blood running from a mile away."
He looked at her with the slightly offended expression of someone being told something they already knew. She looked past him at Jackson, who had closed his locker and was walking away without apparent difficulty, moving through the corridor like someone who owned it, which was how Jackson always moved.
Tonight was the full moon. How was he that calm? She'd watched Scott during his first full moon — had felt the effect of it from outside the building — and it had been nothing like whatever Jackson was currently doing, which appeared to be absolutely nothing. If the bite had taken, he should have been a wire of tension right now. If it hadn't taken—
She turned back to Isaac and noticed the bag on his back and the long handle sticking up above his shoulder.
"Oh, are you fucking kidding me," she said under her breath.
He frowned, "What?"
"You should be keeping your heartbeat down, Isaac." She said with her eyes wide, as she tried not to raise her voice. "This is how you turn."
"I can't miss practice, Scarlett." He answered.
She put her hands on her hips and looked at him. "Why? You want to make the team?"
"Yeah," he said, nodding like this was self-evident. "Why not?"
She stared at him for a moment. "You all have a serious problem with this sport in this town." She thought, involuntarily, about whether she'd been this exhausting for Peter when she'd first woken up. She decided she had probably been considerably worse and moved on. "And besides," Isaac said, "isn't that the best place to be?"
She looked at him flatly. "I really want to see how you're going to sell me this one."
"Derek wants for you to keep an eye on me and on Jackson." He said getting cocky. "You're the coach's assistant. You'll never be able to have us that close anywhere else."
Scarlett let out a groan, "You werewolves are fucking exhausting," she said. But she could not say that he was wrong. She had to make sure that Isaac didn't lose control and she needed to understand what was going on with Jackson.
"Alright," she said, gesturing ahead. "Go."
"We're not going together?" He asked with a frown.
"What, have you forgotten how to find the locker room now that you're a werewolf?" She pushed him slightly in the right direction. "Go. I need to keep a low profile."
She heard him chuckle as he walked away and she frowned at his back. She was not going to be able to keep a low profile. She'd known that when she'd agreed to come, and yet she'd come anyway but she was not doing it only for Derek. She knew it was stupid, but she really wanted to see Stiles. And part of her really didn't want to. Even because under his gaze there was no chance that she could have a low profile. He would notice.
Scarlett let out a breath as she stood there in the hallway alone.
"I don't want to talk to the coach," she complained to no one, and then kept a groan between her teeth and walked toward the locker room.
She stopped outside the door. She could hear the sounds from inside — the locker doors, the voices, the specific acoustic of a room full of boys before practice. She stood there for a moment with her hand not quite on the door and did what she'd been doing since she arrived: listened for the one heartbeat she was trying not to listen for.
She didn't hear it. Or she couldn't locate it specifically. Either way.
She straightened her spine, pulled her shoulders back, and became the version of herself that moved through rooms without apologizing for being in them. Opened the door and walked in.
The boys nearest the entrance turned to look. Word traveled, the way it did in enclosed spaces, and by the time she was halfway across the room most of them had registered her presence. She felt Jackson's eyes on her before she saw him — and when she did, there was a smirk on his face that she found profoundly irritating and declined to acknowledge.
She knocked on the coach's door.
"Not now, Greenberg."
"That's almost insulting, Coach."
There was silence for a moment and then the sound of a chair rang through the room. Bobby Finstock appeared in the doorway, looked at her, and did the specific Finstock thing where his face went through several distinct expressions in rapid succession before settling on one. "Black! Where the hell have you been? I couldn't understand anything about that rearrangement you did to my folders."
Scarlett fought the urge to frown, hiding how offended she was that he said that. "I arranged them alphabetically, sir." She said, faking a smile.
The coach seemed confused, "Not by colors?"
She looked at him blankly for a moment. "What order could I give them with colors?"
"A better one," he said, apparently deciding this was a debate for another time, "Anyway, you didn't finish the job. The team needed you." She doubted this strongly but kept it to herself. "Where were you?"
She crossed her arms. "In bed. With chickenpox."
"Chickenpox." He looked at her with unexpected intensity. "I remember when I got it. My butt itched like a—"
"Okay," she said, closing her eyes briefly.
The crash from the locker room was loud enough to cut him off entirely. Metallic, sustained, growing — the specific sound of something chain-like unspooling from a confined space onto a hard floor, each link catching the next, the whole thing taking considerably longer than made immediate sense. She and Finstock both turned.
Stiles was standing in front of his open locker with Scott beside him, and from inside the locker a chain was descending in slow, inexorable loops onto the floor, coiling around their feet, the sound filling the entire room. He was watching it with the expression he wore for situations that he had planned carefully and which were going slightly beyond the parameters of the plan.
She looked at him. At the redness moving up the back of his neck. At the way he was watching the chain with the resigned attention of someone waiting for a process to complete.
You never change, she thought, and felt something press against the inside of her chest that she pushed back down before it could become anything. Her fangs moved. She put her tongue behind her teeth.
"Part of me wants to ask," Finstock said beside her, deeply uncomfortable. "The other part says knowing will be more disturbing than anything I could ever imagine. So I'm going to walk away."
"That's good," Stiles said, eyes still on the chain. "That's a wise choice, Coach."
Scarlett shook her head as she watched the boys crouch down to start picking it up. That was probably his idea for keeping Scott safe during the full moon. She almost smiled at it, and then stopped herself, because she could not believe that just a month ago she and Stiles had been in entirely different terms than they were now. She was about to follow the coach when she noticed the two boys turn toward them. Scott was watching her. Stiles, as always, set his jaw.
Fuck, she thought, taking a breath, and turned and went with the coach. This is a bad idea. I shouldn't have come back.
She stayed with Finstock while the boys changed, and while she waited she started preparing the first aid kit — checking the supplies, organizing the bandages, doing the things her hands knew how to do without her brain needing to participate. Then she filled the water bottles. One by one, her eyes moving without her permission to the locker room door, to the sounds coming from the other side of it.
She was watching for Isaac. She was also watching, when the door finally opened and the team filed out, for Scott and Stiles. And she was watching for Jackson, who came out moving like he always moved — easy, deliberate, the specific economy of someone who had never had to think about whether there was enough space for him in a room.
She watched him and felt nothing. No shift in his blood, no elevated frequency, no new note in the signal. Derek had told her the body was fighting the bite. But Jackson looked better than he had before the bite. He looked, if anything, more himself than usual, which was not what a body fighting a foreign agent looked like.
What the fuck is going on, she thought, as the coach said the boys to go to the field.
She waited until the others had gone ahead, her eyes finding Isaac in the group, watching the set of his shoulders and hoping he could hold it together for one practice. Then she was moving toward the door when a hand closed around her arm and she was against the lockers before she'd processed the motion, and her fangs came out on pure reflex.
"Scott, what the hell!" Stiles exclaimed from behind his friend, that was glaring at her. The full moon giving him more initiative.
"You're getting bolder," she said, fangs still out, looking at him not able to stop a smirk from appear. "That's cute. But take your paws away from me, pup."
"Who is he?" Scott's voice was low and direct.
Scarlett knew what he meant. "Who's who?" She asked still glaring at him, the smirk not leaving her face. Werewolves got emotional with the full moon, but vampires had a rush when they attacked.
Stiles was the one who spoke this time, taking a step forward, "The new werewolf, Scarlett."
She turned to him, their eyes locking with each other, "What?" She asked, "You need my help now?" Stiles' jaw clanched, but Scott got her attention back.
"I sensed his presence." He said.
"Yeah." She met his eyes. "I did too."
"And you magically reappear today." Stiles spoke again, making her turn to him. "You really want us to take that as a coincidence?"
"Take it as you want." She looked at him steadily, before glaring at Scott once again.. "And take your hands off me."
This time he let her go, taking a few step back as they glared at each other. She was sure that he would have glow his eyes at her at some point, and maybe even showing his fangs if they kept that up. Her blood was reacting to how his blood was pumping, but not enough to make her lose focus. Stiles' scent was too close for her to do that.
The whistle cut through the room, making them all jump.
"Black! McCall, Stilinski! What the hell are you still doing in here?" The coach's voice was more bothersome than usual, as Scarlett retracted her fangs. He was too busy shouting to notice.
"Sorry, Coach." She said flatly as she looked at the boys. "We were just catching up."
"Catch up later." Finstock argued, not lowering his voice. "Get your asses on the field." And then how he had arrived, he disappeared.
Scarlett had not took her eyes away from the boys, but then she was the first to move. A hand closed around her wrist, though, the wrong grip entirely, the one she would have recognized in complete darkness — and she stopped, closing her eyes briefly, then she turned to meet Stile's honey brown eyes.
"You're with Derek, aren't you?" He said with a low tone, his gaze studying every corner of her face. And Scarlett felt her eyes sting, but she did all she could to held it together.
"Where else should I be?" That was all she said, and that made him let out a chuckle without humor, before letting go of her arm and walk out of the locker room.
Scarlett felt her own jaw get thight as she looked at him disappearing behind the door.
"Why are you helping him?" Scott asked, his tone calmer than before.
Scarlett let out a dark chuckle, "Why?" She turned. "You'd have asked for my help, Scott?" And she saw him look away not answering that question. Scarlett nodded, keep silent for a moment. "Yeah, figured." She before taking a step towards him, the moviment made him glance at her again.
"Derek wants the same thing you should want, Scott. A pack. And believe me, you're going to need one." Scarlett said. "Don't be stubborn — being an omega will only kill you faster." Her eyes lowered for a moment, her eyes finding Stiles' locker before she could stop herself. "You and the people around you." Se noticed Scott looking in the same direction she was looking, and Scarlett cleared her throat before moving away from the lockers and she moved past him toward the door.
"Scarlett." Scott's voice stopped her on her tracks. "Who is it? The other werewolf?"
Scarlett took a breath, "I can't tell you that, pup." She pushed through the door. "Try not to get killed."
The field was bright and cold. She took her usual position on the bench near the equipment and sat down and looked at Isaac, who was sitting alone on the far end trying very hard to look like someone who had everything under control. She could feel him from here — the blood running too fast, the specific frequency of a wolf too close to the surface. She breathed and watched and hoped he could hold it.
Then she looked at Jackson. He was on a bench further down, talking to another player — number eight which was strange. Jackson had exactly one person he talked to voluntarily and that person was Danny.
"Black!" The Coach's loud voice almost made her fangs pop out, but she managed to keep them in before she turned.
Finstock was standing just few feet from the benches, but she frown when she saw Stiles standing beside him. She noticed his jaw tight when his eyes landed on her that was now standing up to walk to the Coach.
"Change of routine today," Finstock said almost too happily. "I want versatility."
"Versatility, Coach?" She let her eyes move briefly to Stiles who held her gaze.
"Yeah." Finstock said making her look back at him. "We do the purple today and the red tomorrow."
Scarlett closed her eyes, trying to gather all the patience she could find in herself. "Alphabetic order, Coach." She reminded him, "I don't know the color order."
"Told you my way made more sense." Scarlett would have really bit him and let him die, but she forced herself not to. "Today launches on goalie. Tomorrow we do the match. McCall will be in goal."
Her eyes went to Stiles again, as a knowing smirk appeared on her face.
"All clear, Coach," she said with a pleasant tone, but her eyes were glaring at the boy in front of her.
"Versatility!" Finstock excalimed almost proud of himself and then he walked away.
Stiles and Scarlett glared at each other without saying a word for some moments. She could feel the tension in her body, but she could feel the tension in him. And then Stiles was the first to move, but Scarlett reached out and took his arm as he walked pass her, holding him enough just to stop him from walking away.
"That was your idea, wasn't it?" She asked looking up at him, trying not to get distracted by his scent. It had been long since they had been that close.
"I'm quite good at convincing people." He kept himself slightly turned away, but then he met her eyes. "And since you didn't want to help, I had to do it on my own."
"So, you need my help now?" She asked already knowing his answer.
"No need." He freed his arm from her loose grip with the deliberate minimum of contact. "I can handle it." He walked toward Scott without looking back.
She stood there as she watched him sit down beside Scott.
His is a bad fucking idea, Derek, she thought as she shook her head.
Scott in goal was immediately catastrophic. She watched him run out of the area on the first approach, intercept the attacker bodily, and begin sniffing him with the focused intensity of something that had forgotten it was supposed to be a person. She watched him do it again. And again. She watched Danny pick himself up from the grass with an expression of profound bewilderment. She watched Finstock's patience compress down to a very small and dangerous object, threatening to make Scott run laps until the end of time, and Scott smiling apologetically and doing it again anyway.
Oh my god, she thought. Are they serious?
"Coach." Jackson's voice. "My shoulder's hurting. I'm gonna sit this one out."
She watched him walk to a bench further away and sit down, and she frowned at his back, and then the wave hit her — blood pressure spiking, heat, the intense fast-running frequency of a wolf losing the thread — and she turned.
Werewolf's blood.
Isaac had the ball. He was running toward Scott. The quality of his movement had changed entirely — no longer the deliberate self-conscious control of the past hour, something more animal in it now, the new instincts surfacing under pressure. Scott read him coming and something in Scott shifted too, the same frequency responding to the other, and when they hit the ground the sound of it was wrong, too much force behind it, and from where she was sitting she was almost certain she could hear them growl.
She was on her feet.
She saw Stiles look in her direction immediately, reading her reaction. Of course he would have observed her.
Then sudden movement at the edge of the field made her turn and her eyes widened.
Sheriff Stilinski and two deputies were walking toward the field, and Scarlett knew immediately who they were looking for. She looked at Isaac and Isaac looked at her, in his eyes she could see that he knew it too.
They'd identified the body.
She watched the deputies reach the field and speak to Finstock and she watched Finstock's face change as he called for Isaac. The boy stood up slowly and walked to the deputies that started to talk to him. She took two steps forward before she stopped herself. There was nothing she could do here.
Isaac looked at her one more time as they walked him away.
"Fuck," she said, already turning. "Shit."
Isaac was a new werewolf at his first full moon in a police station full of humans. The moon came up in six hours. She needed Derek and she needed him now, and Derek did not carry a phone like a normal person, which meant she needed to physically locate him in a town that had more woods than was strictly reasonable, which meant she needed to start moving.
Fucking werewolves, she thought, as the field disappeared behind her and the tree line came up ahead.
She ran faster.
***************
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 29
The fire had been burning since sundown, and the camp looked different by its light.
Lily had noticed it an hour ago — the way the familiar shapes of tents and people had softened, the way laughter moved through the clearing with a looseness she hadn't heard since before the storm. Bellamy had organized this, which still surprised her every time she thought about it. The threat of the Grounders hadn't lifted. The Ark was coming down within days. And yet he had looked at the camp and had decided that one night of something different was what they needed.
She was watching him from across the clearing now. He was standing near the fire with Clarke, a rifle on his back and a apple in his hand, but he was smiling.
He said something and Clarke laughed, and the line of his shoulders had a quality she didn't often see in them — loose, unguarded, the version of him that existed when the weight of the camp wasn't pressing down on every muscle. She had been learning to recognize that version. It came out in the mornings, in the particular quiet of his tent before the day asked anything of them, in moments like this when the light was warm and the work had briefly stopped.
She thought about this more often than she probably should have.
Beforeshe had known him as anything other than the person giving orders, not quite understanding everything that he did. But now she was starting to see him differently. Now she noticed when he was carrying something, when the set of his jaw meant he was thinking something he hadn't decided to say, when the sharpness in his eyes was protection rather than hostility. Now she saw it, much more clearly than before.
And she thought about it most evenings now: how strange, and how glad she was of the strangeness.
How much she liked to see him in so many different shades now, helped by all the time time they shared alone. She hoped she could know him better and better... but than she thought about Marcus. And the fact that she had less than sixty hours for their organization to change.
She reached for her cup — something Monty had pressed into her hands an hour ago with the particular insistence of someone who had decided she needed to relax — and took a slow sip. It burned going down. She was getting used to that.
Less than sixty hours...
She had turned those words over a dozen times since this morning and had not yet arrived at a place that felt like solid ground. The Ark coming down was right. She knew that. The threat of the Grounders was real and it was growing, and a group of teenagers with rifles they had been learning to shoot for two weeks was not a long-term answer to a people who had been living in this forest for generations. They needed the Ark's resources, the Ark's doctors and engineers, the infrastructure of three generations of human survival. She knew that.
But she didn't liked it.
The Council would come down with its laws. With its logic of necessity, its careful arithmetic of who was worth what, its conviction that order required a particular kind of ruthlessness. She had spent seventeen years watching that logic at work and had never once seen it leave room for mercy when mercy was inconvenient. Down here they had been building something — messily, painfully, with more failures than she could count — but building. And she did not know what it would look like when the Ark arrived and looked at what they had made and decided to improve it.
And Marcus specifically.
She turned the cup in her hands.
She did not want to see him. That she was sure of. She had not wanted it to be true, had spent long enough hoping it might not be true, but she had stopped lying to herself about most things and this was one of them. She did not want to stand in front of him on solid ground, in a world he hadn't been shaped by, and try to understand what he was on the ground.
She had no much faith in that man.
Be kind, Lily. Her mother's voice, so clear it almost hurt.
She pressed her lips together and looked toward the fire.
"Hey." Jasper appeared at her elbow, slightly flushed, eyes bright. "So you're that kind of drunk."
Lily frowned looking up at him. "What kind of drunk?"
"The one that gets emotional," he said before chuckling.
"Let me guess," she said cocking her head to the side, "You are a funny kind of drunk." He laughed at her. She shook her head as she looked at the cup in her hand.
"I'm fine, by the way." She said. "Are you having a good time?"
"Extremely." He held up his cup. "Monty's latest batch is better than the last one. He's been practicing."
"I can tell." She said with a giggle. "It tastes better than before."
"I know, right!" Jasper excalimed, before drinking some more. "Well at least we are having a good time, others are too much in to work." He said pointing at one of the tents.
Lily frowned looking at him, "Who's working on Unity Day?"
"Raven," Jasper said, with another chuckle.
Lily frowned. She had spoken to Raven earlier in the week — had known she was working on the bullets — but hadn't thought she would be at it tonight of all nights. She glanced across the clearing. The light in the far tent was steady and focused, not party-shaped.
She picked up an extra cup.
The tent smelled of metal and something acrid. Raven was bent over the table with the focused stillness of someone who had left the party about three hours ago in her head, her hands moving with small precise motions through bullet casings she had split open. She didn't look up when the flap moved.
"I brought you something," Lily said.
Raven turned, and her expression went through surprise before settling into something more measured. "Thank you," she said, taking the cup.
Lily set her own down and looked at the table — the arranged casings, the gunpowder carefully separated, the tools laid out with Raven's particular neatness. She thought, not for the first time, about how much intelligence it took to do what Raven did. She had piloted her own pod down here alone. She had repaired the radio. She was manufacturing ammunition from the components she had on hand. They were extraordinarily lucky to have her.
Then though she noticed the strange way her eyes were clouded, and even if she was not sure she could ask, she decided to do it anyway.
"Hey," Lily said. "Are you alright?"
Raven set down the casing she was holding. "I don't understand," she said. "Finn is defending the Grounder." She gestured toward the table. "He's almost upset that I'm doing this. How can you forgive someone who did that to you?"
The image arrived before Lily could stop it — Jake's hands on her jacket, the forearm against her throat, the way he had spoken to her. Lily pressed her fingers lightly against her cup.
"Probably he has his reasons," she said, keeping her voice even.
"I don't get what it could be." Raven sounded genuinely baffled, which was worse somehow than if she'd sounded angry. "Finn thinks you're kind. Am I missing something?"
Lily looked at her. "I don't think it's a matter of kindness," she said, letting out a breath. " Honestly, I don't know what Finn is thinking. You know him better than I do. But he was the one who almost died. I think our experiences could be perceived very differently." She remembered to have a kind of conversation like that with Bellamy a few days later form Jake's attack.
He didn't understan. According to him, they should have done something, but Lily had asked him not to do anything. From his point of you it was the right thing to do, but from her point of you she didn't see it in that way. But she could not expect for him to understand.
Raven's jaw tightened slightly. "Do you regret it? The Grounder?" she asked. "Because Finn seems to think we should."
Lily thought about it properly before answering. She thought about that room on the upper level, the sounds she had put her hands over her ears not to hear, Bellamy's face before it started. She was not proud of any of it. She would not say it had been right. But she looked at Finn moving carefully through the camp with his healing wound, and she was just glad he was still alive.
"Finn is safe," she said. "We made our choices about how to save him. But I don't think he needs to like them."
Raven looked at her for a long moment. Then she picked up the casing again. It wasn't agreement, but it wasn't argument either. Lily picked up her cup and left her to it.
The evening deepened, and the camp leaned into it.
The fire had burned down to something steadier and warmer, and people had arranged themselves around it in the particular clusters of those who had been through things together — not assigned, just settled, the way groups settled when the edges of who they were to each other had been worn smooth by weeks of shared difficulty. Lily moved through it slowly, stopping when something pulled her, letting conversations find their own length.
She spoke with Monroe for a while about the wall, about whether the new section Bellamy had reinforced would hold against a serious push.
At one point she stopped near where Clarke was standing with Sterling and another girl — the three of them laughing at something, Clarke's head tipped back, her whole face changed from its usual careful composure. Lily watched her for a moment and felt something that wasn't quite envy and wasn't quite relief, but lived somewhere between the two. Clarke deserved evenings like this. They all did, and they didn't get enough of them.
She found Miller at the edge of the fire and said something about the berry situation, and he laughed in the way he did when something struck him as both funny and deeply inconvenient. She accepted a second cup from Monty, who handed it to her with the expression of someone checking on a patient.
She was about to move on when she saw Jake.
He was near the outer edge of the clearing, not quite in the party and not quite outside it — the position of someone who had come out because staying alone felt worse, but hadn't been able to make himself join properly. When his eyes moved in her direction and found her, he went very still. Then he looked down.
She stood where she was for a moment. She thought about the undergrowth, the stone, the particular sound. She thought about what she had said and what she decided to keep for herself.
She didn't move toward him.
She turned, and on the far side of the camp, across the fire, Bellamy was looking at her. She didn't know when he had found her in the crowd. He was standing with his arms loose at his sides, the firelight catching the angles of his face, and when their eyes met he smiled, something quiet and warm, something that had been slowly arriving in the past weeks.
She smiled back.
"I didn't think you'd become this close with him."
She turned. Finn was beside her, his eyes on the same direction hers had just been. From his tone she knew he wasn't saying that as if he was happy for her.
"Only because you two don't get along doesn't make him a bad person," she said looking up at him.
"What about his actions?" He asked and Lily shook her head.
"It's more complicated than that."
"Is it?" His voice wasn't hard — that was the thing that made it harder to dismiss. It was genuinely tired. "Lies, violence, torture."
"He made his mistakes." She kept her voice even. "But, Finn — he wanted to help you."
"So it's okay to torture people?" He was looking at her with sad eyes. And she knew how terrible all of that was. But that was not what had happened.
"Of course not." She said turning to him. "I'm not saying he did the right thing. But he did what he thought was best to find answers. To save your life."
Finn looked away. A breath moved through him. "You don't have to find excuses," he said quietly. "Go to bed with him. But don't lie to yourself. You're better than that."
Something tightened in her chest, but she could not tell if it was hurt or anger. "Are you going to lecture me about honesty after how you've treated Raven and Clarke?"
He flinched. And she immediately closed her eyes, already feeling bad for what she had told him.
"Look." She softened her voice because she meant to. "I'm sorry. That's not my business." She met his eyes. "But what I do with Bellamy isn't yours, either."
He was quiet for a moment. As if he was thinking about what she had just said. And then he spoke again.
"You've always talked about non-violence. Are you still standing by that?"
She frowned at the question. "Of course I am. Why?"
He turned to face her more fully, looking around as if to make sure no one was listening.
"I found a way to talk to the Grounders."
She went very still. What did it mean? How did he manage to? She had a lot of questions running into her mind, but she voiced only one of them.
"Talk," she said. "You mean — in peace?"
He nodded taking a step towards her. "I've spoken to the Grounder—"
Her eyes widened, knowing that of who he was talking about, "Finn--"
"He told me to bring Clarke, so that our leaders could talk." He pressed on before she could. "Maybe we could end this. But I don't want anyone following."
Lily looked at him for a moment, crossing her arms over her chest. "You mean you don't want Bellamy following."
He held her gaze. "He thinks violence is the only way."
"He doesn't think that lightly." She kept her voice from rising. "Maybe if you tried explaining it to him—"
"I don't think that's a good idea." He said firmly with a shake of his head.
She looked at him confused. He knew she was close with Bellamy, if he didn't want his help, why was he talking to her?
"Then why tell me?" she asked with a frown.
The pause before he answered was one beat too long. And the way he was looking at her gave her the answer. An answer that only managed to made her flare.
"No," she said shaking her head. "Absolutely not."
"He seems distracted enough with you." Finn said glancing breafly at where Bellamy was standing, before looking back at her.
The particular flatness in his voice made her jaw tighten. "Finn, I'm not distracting Bellamy so that you can sneak off to this meeting." She said firmly and almost offended.
"It's the only way we can end this before the first Exodus ship arrives." He insisted, looking at her in the eyes as if he was trying all he could to convince her.
"We need to end this before it begins. Before the Council gets here and makes everything worse. And we don't need any riot because of Bellamy."
She looked at him with wide eyes. "You speak like it's always him who starts this. That's not what happenes."
But he shook his head, "I don't trust him."
"And how do you know you can trust them?" Lily asked in return.
"Lincoln said—"
"Lincoln." She heard her own voice go flat. "It's his name? The person who stabbed you?"
Finn's jaw shifted. "You even talk like him now."
Lily stepped closer to him. "Forgive me for being careful, Finn." She said. "But last time, you ended up with a poisoned blade in your side. And now you want to go alone with Clarke to speak with them with no back up." She held his gaze. "This is a bad plan, please think about it."
But he looked at her stubbornly, "It's the best chance we have." They observed in silence for some moments before he spoke again. "So? Are you helping me?"
Lily knew from the way that he was looking at her, that Finn had already decided. And he would go on with that plan even if there was no way it would have ended well. How could they be sure that the Grounders would have kept their word? The only reason Finn was alive was because Lincoln seemed to care about Octavia well being, he didn't do it for the goodness of his heart. He didn't do it out of mercy.
But Lily found herself nodding at his request. Finn seemed relieved about it, before he turned to walk away. She observed him disappear through the crowd, feeling her stomach turn in knowing that she had just lied to him.
She could not let him and Clarke to risk their lives like that. So she decided to make her way towards the only person that could protect them for real.
She moved through the people and the firelight, stepping between conversations and clusters, until she was across the clearing.
"Bell."
He turned toward her, and the smile came as he saw her.
"Hey." He shifted slightly to make room for her at his side.
"I need to speak with you alone." She said quitely, looking up at him. "Can we?"
He read her face, which took him about two seconds. "Sure." They moved to the edge of the clearing, just past the last of the firelight. "What is it?"
"Finn told me about a meeting he's arranged with the Grounders." She watched him. "They want to speak with Clarke. But they want to go alone—"
"I know."
She frowned in confusion. "You do?"
"Clarke told me." He said with a nod, while he looked briefly around the camp and then he looked back at her. "She wants me to follow with weapons. In case something happens."
The tension in her shoulders loosened a fraction. "Yeah, I prefer this plan." Then she looked at him with a frown. "Does Finn know?"
He shook his head, "Clarke doesn't want him to." Then he paused, observing her in silence for a moment. "Why did he tell you?"
Lily felt her heartbeats quicken for a moment, remembering what was Finn's actual intent regarding her and her situation with Bellamy.
"He... thought I'd agree with him." She decided to tell him instead.
He looked at her for a moment, something moving through his expression. "And?"
"And what?"
The corner of his mouth shifted. "Thanks for telling me." His hand found her arm briefly, warm and sure, and he moved to step away, but she stopped him.
"I want to come." Bellamy's jaw tensed at that.
"No, Lily."
But she insisted, "You can't go alone — it would be too dangerous—"
"I'm not going alone." He assured, "Jasper and Raven are coming with me."
She crossed her arms. "Then bring me as well." He let out a breath, but she kept talking. "You taught me how to shoot. I can help."
The silence stretched. She could see him running through it — the arguments, the reasons, the calculation he did between what he wanted to do and what was actually true. He knew she wasn't wrong. She could tell from the way his jaw didn't quite set.
"Bell." She called him and he looked at her.
"I thought you hated violence," he said.
"I do." She said firmly, "But you're not going to attack the Grounders, are you?"
He took a breath, "Not unless they attack us first."
She nodded at that, "Then we're on the same page."
He looked at her for another moment. Lily hoped he'd let her go with him. She wasn't sure she could manage to keep calm knowing him outside, with Raven and Jasper as they followed Clarke and Finn in the woods. She didn't like that situation and she needed to be there.
Then she noticed something in him settled. "Alright." Bellamy held her gaze as he took a step towards her. "You follow what I say."
A smile appeared on her lips. "Of course."
"And stay close."
"Naturally."
"I'm serious, Lily."
"So am I. " She kept her expression level. Then she cocked her head to the side, with a curious smile. "Did you have this prep talk with Raven and Jasper as well, or am I the lucky one?"
The corner of his mouth moved. "You've got a bit of luck." He reached behind his shoulder and unhooked the rifle he'd been carrying and held it out to her.
She took it. The weight was familiar now, which was still strange.
"Let's go," he said.
She fell into step beside him, and behind them the fire burned on, and the voices carried in the warm night air, and for just a moment before the dark took the camp out of sight, she turned and saw it — the people, the light, the ordinary extraordinary fact of them still here.
Then she faced forward and followed Bellamy to find Raven and Jasper.
***********
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 28
The morning light through the canvas of Bellamy's tent was the pale gold of early hours, and Lily had learned by now the particular quality of it — the way it made the space feel suspended, as though the camp outside hadn't started yet, as though the world was still giving them a few minutes before it asked anything of them.
She was not thinking about the world.
"Bell," she breathed, her nails finding his skin, and he groaned low in response, his eyes closing for a moment before finding hers again as he leaned down to kiss her.
His hips moved faster now, more erratic, and her sounds were swallowed into the kiss. But the pressure had grown unbearable — hot, tight, all-consuming — until she had to break away just to breathe.
She gasped, her mouth falling open, until it finally broke over her. Her body arched up against him, legs trembling, the tension snapping in a wave that made her whole body pulse. For a moment she felt weightless.
"Bellamy—" breathless, her back arching, her vision blurring at the edges.
He followed not long after, and then they lay still, breathing unevenly, the tent quiet around them.
"Happy Unity Day, I guess," he said, rubbing his nose against her neck, making her giggle.
"Happy Unity Day," she answered, as he shifted back just enough to kiss her again, her fingers finding his hair, as their mouths moved against each other. There was no urgency in it now. That was the thing she kept noticing — how the urgency had become something else in the weeks since the first time, something quieter and steadier, the kind that didn't need to prove itself. She had not expected that. She had not expected a lot of things.
"You've got to train with the guns again today," he whispered in between kisses.
"You said I'm good," she answered. He smirked just before he lowered his head, so that he could kiss down her neck. She let out a contented sigh, feeling his naked skin against hers. This had become ordinary in a way she was still learning to hold — the warmth of it, the particular ease of being with someone who knew her and had not left.
"It does not mean you can stop training."
"You're making it a bit difficult to go fulfill my duties." Her words made him chuckle, and he moved up so that their eyes could meet.
"Am I?" He chuckled. Then after a last kiss, he moved from above her, so that he could start to get dressed.
She thought about how strange it was that this had become ordinary. Not long ago she had lain awake in the dropship cataloguing everything she did not understand about him. Now she knew the sound of his breathing when he was asleep and the particular way his jaw shifted when he was thinking something he had not decided to say yet. She knew that he was gentle in ways he would never let anyone else see, and stubborn in ways that frustrated her even when she understood them, and that he had a habit of checking on her without calling it that — appearing at her tent with a question about medicine when what he actually wanted was to see that she was there. She knew all of this, and she had not planned to know any of it, and now she could not imagine not knowing it.
It was a dangerous kind of ordinary. She was aware of that. The Ark would come down soon, and with it a version of the world that would not look kindly on whatever this was. Marcus would come down. The Council. The rules that had governed all of them for three generations. She did not know what shape things would take when that happened, and she had been deliberately not thinking about it in the small warm hours of the morning when it was easy not to think about anything.
Lily moved up, covering her naked chest and she stayed where she was for a moment, her chin resting on her knees, watching him. There was something she liked about this — the particular quality of early light through the canvas, Bellamy moving through it with that ease he only had in here, unhurried, unguarded. Out there he was always the version of himself that the camp needed. In here he was just him, and she had come to value the difference more than she knew how to say.
Then she looked around for her shirt, frowning when she didn't see it.
"Where did we put it?" she said, confused. Bellamy gave her a glance as he was buttoning his pants, and with a little smirk he bent down to take her shirt and hand it to her.
"How was it there?" she asked with wide eyes.
He chuckled, "Do you want me to fold it next time?"
"Next time." The word lodged itself in her chest without her meaning it to, and she felt it sitting there, changing the quality of the air in the tent. He noticed and stopped moving. She looked at him, and his eyes stayed on her face with that look she had learned to recognize, the one that was not quite readable from the outside but that she had begun to understand from the inside.
"You okay?" He asked, cocking his head to one side.
She looked down at the shirt in her hands. She had been carrying this since yesterday — the particular tightening in her chest thinking about what she saw the day before.
"Lily, what is it?" He asked again, his voice becoming tense.
"I've seen Bree walking out of here, yesterday." He let out a breath, and Lily felt silly for bringing it up; she and Bellamy had not said anything that gave her a claim on this, and she had not asked for one, and yet there it was, the thing in her chest that she did not like and could not seem to put down. Having started this thing with Bellamy was making her feel so good, and safe. She didn't want it to stop. She liked him, and after those weeks she could not picture herself being away from him and what they were doing. But there was something that was bothering her, and she could not push it away.
"Just… I know that you used to do this with Bree and Roma, and I…" She took a deep breath. "I'm not like them. That's all I wanted to say."
Bellamy nodded silently, handing her the shirt. Lily was unsure of what he might be thinking in that moment, and for an instant she was sure he'd send her away from his tent. She observed him put his shirt on, fixing it against his body, his hands moving with that methodical calm he had when he was thinking. Lily felt paralyzed. Was he angry? Had she ruined everything? A part of her was desperate at that thought, but another — quieter, steadier — felt that it had been the right thing to say. She was not Bree or Roma. She was not up to do what they had done, not up to be what they had been to him. She silently stood up, putting on her clothes. And when she was about to take her bag, he spoke again.
"Why are you taking that?"
Lily frowned, looking at her bag, confused. "I'll bring it back to the dropship," she said, almost unsure. But he shook his head.
"We're going to shoot, you don't need it," he said, putting his jacket on. He crossed to her, his eyes searching for hers.
"You can leave it here, and you can put your change of shirt there." He pointed at the side of the tent. Lily went still. She looked at him properly, the way she was not always able to when he was this close.
"You can stay here, if you want. This place is too big for one person." Then he looked at her intently, taking the bag from her hand. "I've told Bree that we won't be seeing each other anymore." Lily's eyes widened in surprise. "I hope you want it to be a next time."
Before he could move, Lily reached out, her hand touching his face, so that she could lean forward and kiss him. She felt him exhale against her — the full, releasing kind of breath, the kind that meant something had been let go — his hands moving around her waist as hers moved to his shoulders. Their lips moved against each other with sweet passion, as their bodies got so close that there was no space between them.
The shooting sessions had been going for two weeks now, and Lily had developed a complicated relationship with them. Bellamy had organized the groups himself — rotating, methodical, working through the basics in the clearing just inside the east wall — and the camp had improved in ways that were visible and practical and that she was glad for, which did not make standing with a rifle in her hands feel any less strange. She had grown up believing that the answer to violence was never more violence, and she still believed that, mostly, and yet she was also standing here, correcting her stance, which seemed to contain a contradiction she had not entirely resolved.
"Relax your shoulder," Bellamy said from beside her.
"Or I'll feel the kick harder." She adjusted, remembering what he had told her. "Right."
"You're doing good." He said, and she could feel his lips turn up. "Just breathe a little. You look tense."
"I never thought I would shoot anything," she admitted, keeping her eyes on the tree line. "Let alone anyone."
"It's a precaution." His voice was even, patient. "In case the Grounders attack, I'd prefer you to know how to defend yourself."
She glanced at him sideways and felt, despite herself, the particular warmth that still caught her off guard sometimes.
"Thank you," she said. "And I know you're right, just… it's a bit out of character for me."
He shook his head, "I don't think that's true."
She frowned, as she turned towards him. "You think I'm violent?"
"I think you're stronger than you realize." He said looking at her, but she found herself glaring at him.
"Rifles are not strength, Bell."
He smiled at the nickname — she had started using it without noticing, somewhere in the past weeks, and now it simply came out. "Never said that."
Lily observed him feeling herself relax.
There was a particular ease to being beside him like this — outside, in the morning light, with the camp moving around them and neither of them needing to explain anything. She had not known that ease was something she had been missing until she had it, and now she was aware of its absence on the days when they were busy in different directions, when the camp needed things from both of them separately and she went a whole day without seeing him properly.
"How have you learnt how to shoot?" she asked.
Something shifted in his expression. Not the old closure — not the way it used to go when she asked something that reached past the surface — but a cloudiness, like weather moving in. "I've been a training soldier on the Ark," he said. "For some time. Learnt some basics."
She turned to look at him fully. "What? Really?"
He nodded, and said nothing else for a moment, his eyes going somewhere distant.
"I thought you were part of the working class," she said carefully.
"Yeah." He let out a breath as he nodded. "Yeah, I was."
The silence that followed was the kind she had learned not to fill too quickly. She waited, keeping her eyes on the tree line, giving him the space she knew he needed to decide whether to let her in.
"Lily…" he said after a bit. "I'm sorry for what I said, about you and about your mother. It's just… I've seen my mother accepting… she did things for me." He stopped and she was glad he did. He didn't need to finish the phrase for her to understand, and she really didn't want for him to think about it. She knew that some women did that to get favours from the guards, she didn't knew that Bellamy's mother did it too. It must have been horrible for him to see it.
"I assumed that was what had happened to you too. And your mother." He kept saying not looking at her. "I put it on both of you, and it wasn't right."
"Bellamy—"
"My mother wanted to help me," he said quietly, his eyes still on the middle distance. "She wished to give me a better life. And then there was a masquerade party, and I thought…" He paused, jaw tightening. "I thought nobody would have noticed Octavia. That she could have one evening that was different." He took a breath. "They found her there. They took her, and the next day my mother was floated."
Lily moved closer without thinking about it. Her hand found his face, gently, the way she had learned he could receive it — not as something that asked anything of him, just as something that was there.
"It's not your fault, Bellamy."
But he shook his head, "I should have protected them."
"You did." She kept her eyes on his. "For years you did nothing but protect them. You have no fault in anything — the same goes for Octavia. And your mum." She felt him hold very still under her hand. "The Ark and its laws have nothing human in them. They just wanted an easy way to keep order, but in time they could not see what they were doing to their own people."
He looked at her in silence, and she could see the tears he was not letting fall, and the effort it cost him, and she did not look away.
"That's why you hate violence?" he said, after a moment.
"I want to believe that there could be other ways to handle the breaking of a law," she said. "Death hidden behind justice — it's just hypocrisy to me. They dropped us here because they needed more oxygen. They don't do it for the people, they only want to buy themselves more time. They always wanted more time." She could feel the anger rising in her.
"They tried to keep order, but they stopped being able to see what they were doing to their own people."
"You're talking about your father?"
She looked down. "He believes in order," she said. "And that strict rules are what will keep people alive on the Ark."
"And what do you believe?" He asked observing her.
Lily thought about it for a moment, but she had no clear answer to that. "Sometimes I'm sure of what I believe." She said. "Sometimes I'm not."
"Down here sometimes violence is the only way out," Bellamy said with no harshness in his voice. And Lily nodded.
"Maybe." She nodded. "But I don't want to believe it."
He stepped closer, and she felt the shift in him. "See?" His voice had dropped to that lower register. "You are strong. Your stubbornness speaks more than a rifle."
"If we are talking about stubbornness," she said, and felt her lips curve despite herself, "that is something we have in common, it seems." She reached out and pulled him closer, and his arms came around her. "I'm sorry about what happened to your family."
"Thank you," he said, and leaned forward, and they kissed — not the urgent kind, not the careful kind, but something in between that had its own particular weight, the kind that came from knowing someone well enough that the kiss carried everything you had not said out loud.
She was still close to him when she heard footsteps at the edge of the clearing, and had just enough time to register their particular purpose before Clarke's voice reached them.
"Lily." Her expression was careful in the way it got when she was managing something. "Kane's on the radio. He's asking for you."
She felt Bellamy go still beside her.
"I'll go see what he wants," she said, and his hand closed around her arm before she had taken a step.
"It's too dangerous," he said quietly. "Remember Jake—"
She turned to him and kept her voice low, away from Clarke's hearing. "He's my father. What should I do if he wants to talk to me?"
"He should be less forward about it." His jaw had set as he looked at her. "Have you told him? About Jake?"
"Are you out of your mind, Bell?" She dropped to a murmur. "Who knows what he'd decide to do to him once he's down here."
"Probably it wouldn't be such a bad idea." Bellamy said and she looked at him steadily.
"This is my burden to carry. I'll deal with it." She said.
Bellamy frowned at that, "So, I should step back?"
"I want you to trust me, Bell. That's all." She insisted. "Please."
He was silent for a moment, and she watched the muscle in his jaw shift, and waited. Then he let out a breath. "I don't agree," he said. "But I'll do as you want on this."
She glanced across the clearing. Jake was at the edge of it, and for just a moment his eyes moved in their direction before he looked away, and she felt Bellamy notice it too — felt the way his stillness changed quality beside her.
"If I catch him come close to you," Bellamy said, his voice flat and even in the particular way that meant he was completely serious, "I'm bringing him away myself and leaving him for the Grounders. He just needs one time."
"Bell—"
"One time." He released her arm. "Now go. I'll see you later."
The communications tent smelled of equipment and the particular warmth of machinery that had been running for hours. Lily sat down and put on the headset and found him already on the screen, and there he was — the same lines of his face, the same stillness, the same quality of presence that had always made rooms feel smaller. She had been looking at that face her whole life and still could not read it. She was not sure she ever would.
"Lily," he said.
"Marcus."
He paused as if he was thinking of what to tell her, which made her frown. "The Council has finalized the plan for the first Exodus ship. It will launch within sixty hours." He said formally, like always. "I will be on board."
She waited in silence, without taking her eyes away from him. She was not understanding his behaviour. He had been calling more frequently since the radio was restored — more than she had expected, more carefully than she knew what to do with. She was still learning what it meant, still deciding how much of herself to spend on trying to understand it.
"Why are you telling me?" she said. "I'm not in charge here. That's Clarke's territory. You should be telling her."
Something moved in his expression — not quite a shift, more like a settling into a different kind of stillness. "I just wanted you to know," he said.
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Why are you so eager to talk to me all of a sudden?" she asked. Her voice came out sharper than she inteded to.
He seemed to be about to say something, but then he seemed to decide against it. She watched his face, and waited. He was acting really strange.
"It is the Unity Day," he said.
The particular weight of the silence that followed was familiar. She had grown up learning that silence, the one that meant there was something he was not going to say.
"Of course," she said.
She moved to stand, but then she stopped.
She thought of Bellamy's face, and the fact that he was now safe from the Ark. Then she looked at Marcus on the screen.
"I don't know if you've kept your promise to help Bellamy," she said quietly. "But if you did — I'm thankful."
He held her gaze. She held his. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then she said, "Happy Unity Day, Marcus."
She pulled off the headset and set it down and walked out into the light, and did not let herself think about the expression on his face until she was far enough away that it no longer felt like it could reach her.
***********
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Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 27
The camp was still moving when Lily sat down.
She could hear it through the canvas — the voices, the footsteps going in all directions, Bellamy's boys calling to each other across the clearing. Someone had suggested search parties. Someone else had said the wall needed reinforcing before anyone went anywhere. The argument had been going on for ten minutes, and Lily had stopped following it around the time Raven had pressed her firmly onto the crate and told her to stay there.
"You're not going anywhere," Raven had said, in the voice she used when she was not discussing things. "Sit."
So Lily sat.
Her wrist was wrapped, her cheek cleaned and dressed with a strip of cloth she'd soaked in willow infusion. The swelling had started — she could feel it now in the particular tightening heat along her cheekbone, the way the skin felt too small for what was underneath it. It would bruise properly by morning. She knew the shape of bruises.
She pressed her fingers carefully along the edge of the dressing and made herself stop.
Outside, someone was shouting about the east wall. Someone else was answering. The panic had a particular sound — not loud, exactly, but dense, layered, every voice carrying the specific frequency of people who had already seen enough bad things to know that the next one was always possible.
The Grounder was gone.
She turned that over in her mind. Someone had left the hatch open — deliberately or carelessly, she didn't know yet, and it probably didn't matter, because the result was the same. He was out there, and they didn't know what he would do, and the camp had decided that whatever it was, it would be terrible.
She wasn't sure they were wrong.
But her mind kept pulling back to Jake.
She had left him with Miller. Had helped carry him back, had given Miller enough of an explanation to satisfy the immediate questions — the fall, the slope, the bad terrain past the berry patch. Miller had looked at her face and then at Jake and had not said everything that was in his expression, which she was grateful for. Jake had not spoken. Had not looked at her again after that first moment in the undergrowth, his eyes finding hers and then moving away.
She understood it. She did not feel good about understanding it, but she did.
She pressed her wrapped wrist lightly against her ribs and made herself breathe.
Then suddenly tent flap opened.
She turned too quickly — the bruised cheek pulling in a way that made her flinch — and then Bellamy was there, and Clarke behind him, and Lily was on her feet before she'd decided to stand. Relieved crushed even more than she expected, but then she noticed his face.
"Bellamy—" His name came out as barely a whisper. She crossed to them, and the light was dim but it was enough to see the cut above his brow, the dark smear of dried blood along his jaw. Her hand moved before she could stop it, hovering near his cheek. "God. What happened to you?"
His eyes had found her face the moment she moved, and his expression changed. He stepped closer, his gaze going immediately to the dressing on her cheekbone, the swelling beneath it.
"What happened to you?"
"Miller told us," Clarke said from behind him. She was watching Lily with that careful attention that meant she was already building a picture. "Are you alright?"
"It's nothing." Lily kept her eyes on Bellamy. "I'm fine. Don't worry about it." She reached toward his face carefully, not quite touching. "We need to clean those. There's blood."
"You can manage it?" Clarke asked.
"Of course."
Clarke looked between them for a moment with the particular expression of someone deciding not to say something, and then she nodded. "Alright." She looked at Bellamy. "I'll come find you when they're ready."
"Ready for what?" Lily asked, turning.
Bellamy's jaw shifted. "I'm going to tell the Council who asked me to kill Jaha."
Lily stared at him. Then — she couldn't help it — she felt something loosen in her chest. "Really?"
He gave a single nod, and she felt her lips turn up into a relived smile. But then she remembered that he had still to be forgiven. And she knew that the Ark did not forgave easly.
"Clarke," she called the girl, before she could left the tent.
"If Kane is there — tell him to remember his promise."
Clarke's brow creased. "What promise?"
"He'll know." Lily held her gaze steadily. "Tell him exactly that."
Clarke looked at her with that same careful expression she often wore, but then she gave a small nod. "Alright." She moved toward the exit and was gone, the tent flap settling behind her.
The space went quiet.
Lily turned to find the cloth, the bowl, the things she needed. Bellamy had settled onto the crate without being asked — she heard the shift of his weight, the particular sound of someone who was more tired than they were letting on. She poured water, checked the temperature, came to stand in front of him.
"You didn't have to do it," he said. His voice was even, but she knew the different registers of his evenness by now.
"I did." She considered the cut above his brow. "I don't trust Marcus on his word. Not without witnesses." She dipped the cloth. "Hold still."
"What happened to your face, Lily?" He asked and she felt her body tense.
"Nothing, don't worry," she said, not quite able to hide the tension in her voice. And he picked it up, because as she moved to clean his cut, he touched her wrist. Holding it enough to stop it from moving, but gently enough that if she wanted to move back, she could have.
"I've got my secrets and I know you've got yours." He said quietly, searching for her gaze. "But if I'm going to be honest with you, so are you."
She went still for a moment, not able to look away from his eyes. And even if she still felt tense, the warmth of his hand give her the strenght to nod.
"Alright," she whispered.
"Alright," he said with a nod.
Then there was a moment of silence, before she spoke again. "You first."
He let out a breath through his nose that was almost, not quite, a laugh. "The man who asked me to shoot Jaha — he wanted me dead too. Wanted to tie off the loose end. He send one of the boys in the woods to kill me."
"Oh my god, Bellamy." She felt the cold move through her chest. "Where is he now?"
"I killed him." He said it the way he said things he had already finished deciding about — flat, direct, but she could see the suffering behind his eyes. "It's done."
She looked at him. At the line of his jaw, the set of his eyes. She almost asked if he was okay, but then she remembered what he had told her weeks ago in the cave that he could not afford to be weak. And she wasn't sure he would have spoken openly about how he felt about what happened.
"I'm sorry that happened to you." She decided to say instead, as she cleaned his cheek.
Something shifted in his expression, briefly. And then he nodded. "It's alright." He observed her for a moment. "Your turn."
She set the cloth down. She was not sure she was ready to talk about what had happened. Then she took a deep breath. "I... um..." she muttered, then cleared her throat. "One of the guys... Jake. He..." Bellamy frowned as he observed her, his body already tensing. "He had seen me talking to Kane on the radio. And apparently you're not the only one who knows that he helped me with my station placement on the Ark."
Bellamy's jaw shifted. His eyes had gone dark in the way she had learned to read, he was getting angry.
"What did he do?" His voice was quiet and even, which was worse than if it had been loud.
"Bellamy." She shook her head. "Nothing—"
He reached up slowly and moved her hair back from the side of her face. She winced before she could stop it, the motion pulling at the bruise along her cheekbone, and she heard the small sharp breath he took through his nose.
"Is that nothing?"
She held his gaze. "Listen." She kept her voice steady. "I get it. That's why I never wanted anyone to know—" She let out a breath. "Marcus. He... he has done terrible things. To so many people." She pressed on before he could speak. "I can't blame Jake for wanting to get back at him in some way."
"Why are you protecting him, Lily?" He asked her with wide eyes. "This guy attacked you."
"And Marcus floated his parents, Bellamy." The words came out quiet and certain, but her eyes stung with tears. "Like he floated your mother. Like he floated Clarke's father. Like he floated people whose names none of us even know." She held his eyes. "I get why someone would want to kill me for that."
"I don't." He looked at her — really looked, the way he did sometimes when he was working something out, following a thread back to where it started. Something moved in his expression. "Why do you feel responsible for what he does?" His voice had shifted, gone quieter, almost careful. "Lily—"
"Bellamy." Clarke's voice came from the entrance. They both turned. She stood in the gap of the tent flap, her expression carrying the particular gravity of someone who had been waiting for the right moment. "They're ready."
He looked at Lily for one more second. Then he stood, and let out a breath, and became the version of himself that walked toward difficult things. "I've got to go."
"Hey." She reached up and turned his face toward her, carefully, just enough that he had to look at her. His jaw was set, his eyes tightly controlled. She held his gaze. "It's going to be alright. They'll pardon you."
"Yeah." He said letting out a breath. "Maybe."
She held his gaze. Then, because she meant it and because he needed to hear it as much as she needed to say it, she leaned forward and kissed him. His hand came up to her face, careful around the bruise, and he kissed her back, and for a moment neither of them was thinking about anything else.
When he pulled back his eyes were open, looking at her.
"You're not off the hook," he said quietly. "I still have questions."
Lily found herself smiling, "Do your things first."
He gave her a look that was almost, briefly, a smile. Then he kissed her once more — short, deliberate. "Wait for me in my tent."
"Alright," she said, observing him as he moved to the exit of the tent. Then she saw him stop and take something out from his pocket.
"Before I forget," Lily frowned as she saw him leaving the ten vials on her table. But she did have no time to ask, he gave her a last little smile and then walked out.
She didn't know how long she sat in his tent.
Long enough for the camp to quiet into its later rhythms — the fire settling, the voices pulling back, the night pressing in on the canvas walls. She had found his blanket and pulled it around her shoulders without thinking about it, and now she sat on the edge of his cot with her wrapped wrist held against her ribs and her eyes on the tent entrance.
The pardoning could go wrong. She knew that. Kane had said yes, but Kane always said things carefully, in ways that left room for them to mean something else later. And the Council might not care what Kane promised a girl they'd sent to the ground to die. Bellamy had shot the Chancellor. That was the shape of it, stripped down.
People like me don't get pardons that easily.
She pressed her hands flat against her thighs.
Outside, footsteps moved past the tent and then away. Someone called a name. Silence.
She thought about Jake. About his face in the undergrowth, looking at her for one moment and then away. She thought about the stone in her hands, the sound it had made.
Dull and solid and wrong.
She pressed her fingers to her lips.
The tent flap shifted.
She was on her feet before he had come fully through it.
"What happened?"
Bellamy stood in the entrance, and she read him — the set of his shoulders, the quality of his stillness, the way he was holding the thing he was about to say.
Then he let out a breath.
"They pardoned me."
She crossed to him. She didn't think about it: she just moved, and her arms were around him, and she felt him exhale fully for what she suspected was the first time in hours, his hands coming up to her back, holding.
"Bellamy." She pulled back enough to see his face. "That's — that's great."
"Yeah." Something tired and relieved moved through his expression. "I told them about Shumway."
"Shumway." She frowned, settling that name in. "It was him?"
He nodded. "He told me to do it — said it was the only way to get on the dropship with Octavia." He took a breath. "He didn't tell me why he wanted Jaha dead."
Lily shook her head slowly. "I’d never thought he would do such thing…"
He observed her in silence for a moment, before he spoke again, "You know him too, huh?"
She did. She had spoken with him sometimes. He worked with Marcus, so it happened that she would meet him in the corridors. He never seemed a person able to do such thing.
Bellamy didn't seem surprised when she nodded. His eyes were quiet on her face. "But you don't feel responsible for what he did."
She understood what he was doing. "Bellamy—"
"You know…" He said taking a breath. "I’ve heard and thought many things about your relationship with Kane," Lily looked away at those assumptions. "But nothing is enough to make you feel so much pain over his actions." He leaned forward, the moviment made her lock her eyes with his. "You’ve learnt my secrets," he said with no harshness in his voice. "If I’m going to be honest so are you."
The tent was small and close and the fire outside threw moving light through the canvas and there was nowhere left to go.
She felt her body tremble, and her eyes water. She had kept this secret for so long, that it almost hurt to let it out. But after a long silence Lily finally let out a breath.
"You called me Kane's pet once," she said quietly. "But I'm not his pet." She met his eyes. "I'm his daughter."
The stillness that came over him was complete as he listened.
"Illegitimate," she kept saying. Then a humorless chuckle left her lips. "Councilor Marcus Kane is always dignified and righteous. He didn’t want for anyone to know so we didn't tell anybody." Then she bit her lips, trying to keep her tears from going down her cheeks. "But he owned my mother. So he helped me after she passed."
A confused frown appeared on Bellamy's face, "So all this time—"
"I didn't want anyone to know. I still don't." She pressed on, because if she stopped she wouldn't start again. "I wanted to come down here and be no one. But I still feel linked to him." She took a breath as some tears ran down her cheeks. "Every time he pushes that button or he agrees on it, I feel like I’m doing it too. Like it's my fault."
Bellamy shook his head, "It’s not your fault."
A sad chuckle left her lips, "I can't help it," she said with honesty. Her voice trembling. "Every time I look any of you in the eyes, talking about how the Ark had hurt you, how much you’ve been through, I cannot help to… to see Marcus behind it all. And…" She looked down, biting her lips again.
"You’re afraid to be like him…" At his words she let out a sob, nodding her head.
"Hey." His voice was low. He stepped forward and his hands came up to hold her face, careful on both sides, thumbs brushing her cheekbones. "Look at me."
She did.
"You're nothing like him." He said it plainly, without decoration. "I have watched you fight for people's lives since the day we landed. "You would never have pushed that button." His eyes were steady on hers, but it didn't make you less scared.
"What if this world pushes me to be?"
"You are not him." He spoke as if he wanted for her to understand every word. "Whatever this world asks of you — whatever you end up having to do down here — those choices are yours. Not his. Yours."
She breathed. His hands were warm against her face.
"I'm glad you're safe," she said, and her voice came out soft and a little broken and entirely honest. And she saw him smile at her. She observed his face, before she moved forward and kissed him. And she closed her eyes when she felt him kiss her back. His hand sliding from her jaw to her hair, and she felt the shift in him like a change in pressure, something that had been held in check for a long time releasing all at once. She pressed closer and he drew her in, and the tent and everything outside it lost its edges entirely.
She had been kissed before — briefly, carefully, the kind that stayed on the surface. This was nothing like that. This pulled at something beneath her ribs, made her forget what her hands were supposed to be doing, made her forget everything except the warmth of him and the way he was looking at her when he finally paused, his forehead resting against hers, both of them breathing unevenly.
"Lily." Her name in his voice, that low quiet register she'd only heard a handful of times.
She answered him by pulling him back down.
Lily felt his arms bringing her closre to him, and her hands found his hair. At some point — she couldn't have said exactly when — they had moved, the cot finding them, the world narrowing to the dim warmth of the tent and the sound of the camp fading to something distant and irrelevant. His hands were gentle around the bruise, careful in a way that made her chest ache, and she had never in her life felt so entirely present in her own skin.
She found herself touching the skin under his shirt, trailing them up until she helped him take it off. Her eyes looked at his body and something shifted inside of her and she brought him back to her lips as soon as he threw his shirt away. Her hands touching his back, loving the feeling of his skin under her fingertips.
"Bellamy..." she let out a quite moan as he moved to kiss her neck. Lily closed her eyes, shifting her legs so that he was resting in between her tights. Another moan escaped from her lips when she heard his hardness rub against her through his pants.
They kissed again as she pushed up enough to have space to take off her own shirt. Bellamy's eyes went on her body as she did so and his gaze only gave her the courage to go on, reaching back unclasping her bra.
"Are you sure?" he asked, just before she nodded, throwing her bra away and reaching out to kiss him again.
It didn't take long for them to get rid of both their pants as they kept touching and kissing.
“Have you ever done this before?” He asked, moving from her lips just enough so that he could look in her eyes.
Lily put her hand into his black locks, gripping it making him groan.
“Please, just keep going,” she said against his lips, before kissing him again. He responded hungrily, shifting in between her legs. She kept kissing him as she felt him moving his hand so that he could position himself against her entrance. She felt extremely hot, feeling him against her, starting to push inside of her. They both let out a moan, and she took a deep breath, as she felt him entering her inches by inches. It was a foreign sensation, feeling herself stretching around him and feeling strangely full, but as he moved she could not help her hips push against him, as if her own body wanted for him to be inside her. Her mouth was ajar as he completely set inside her, her fingers digging into his arm, scratching his olive skin. He kept kissing her neck and every inch of skin he could reach as she took deep breaths, getting used to the different sensation.
“I’m gonna move,” he whisper in her ear, his hot breath made her shiver, “Can I?”
Lily nodded her head, out of words, too overwhelmed by all those new sensations. She observed him getting more comfortable above her, and he suddenly moved his hips forward, the movement made her let out a little groan, feeling him move. And the more he moved, the more she couldn’t control those sounds she was making, until her body was rocked by his thrusts.
“Oh god,” she moaned as he hit something inside of her. He smirked observing her expression, they just looked at each other. He angled his hips so that he could keep hitting that spot that made her gasp and mewl.
“Bellamy, god!” She found herself moaning, as he let out heavy sounds that just made her feel more eager each time. Her body was tensing in some kind of anticipation, she had never felt like that, but she just wanted more.
“Please…” she gasped not even sure what she was pleading for.
“You feel so good,” he said, his hips moving faster and faster as he grabbed the side of her face to pull her closer in a kiss.
She kissed him back as passionately as he was doing, but the feeling of her body, the need of air and their skin touching was overwhelming. He then let out a little growl, moving away from her lips so that he could focus on moving his hips and at that point Lily felt even more overwhelmed. Her head fell back, as her hands clenched around his arms to feel at least a bit grounded, the sounds left her mouth louder and more frequent and her body tensed and tensed. She could feel him move, and she was growing desperate and desperate as her lower body tensed. He seemed to feel the same, because he was becoming erratic and his moans were louder as well. Then finally, her upper body moved forward against him, as she felt like her lower part had became so tense that she was squeezing him. He moaned again, as she felt like she could not see for a moment. Then she felt something liquid, filling her just before Bellamy gave a few last pushes, then he stopped his movements.
Lily was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened, her breaths were heavy, but her body felt lighter, like it had never been. The sweet ache in between her legs and in her limbs only making her feel more alive than she had ever been.
When she opened her eyes, she immediately looked for Bellamy’s. He was already looking at her, with a gentle smile an his face, just before he leaned forward to give her another kiss.
“Stay here tonight,” he said, and her lips broke into a smile, then his lips touching hers once again. But Lily wasn’t sure she wanted to go to sleep yet.
***********
Taglist: @bellarkeselection
If you want to be add to the taglist just let me know.
If you liked it, please leave a ♥️, a comment and reblog!
Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 26
She had been staring at the same jar for ten minutes.
Lily was sitting at the small worktable in the medical tent, a cloth folded in her lap, and her hands weren't doing anything with it.
The camp sounds drifted in from outside. Voices, the knock of wood against wood, someone laughing somewhere near the wall. Ordinary sounds. She should have been out there — Jasper had mentioned berries, Monty had mentioned more than they'd thought, the rations were getting thin. There was work to do.
She pressed her fingers lightly to her lips, remebering the feeling of the kiss.
He kissed me, she told herself, still not sure it really happened.
She moved her hands to the cloth instead, spreading it flat against the table, smoothing out a crease that didn't need smoothing. It had been — she counted back — not even two hours since he had walked out of this tent. Less than two hours, and she had reorganized the jars twice and ground bark she didn't need and wiped down a surface that was already clean. Her mind refused to stay where she put it.
I do trust you, he had said to her.
She let out a breath and picked up the cloth again, turning toward the row of small metal boxes where she kept the vials — the prepared tinctures, the things she'd labeled carefully and kept sealed. She reached for the nearest one to check the inventory, and stopped.
The latch was open.
She frowned. She never left the latches open. She was very careful about it. With a frown she lifted the lid.
The vials inside were arranged in their usual rows, small and stoppered, catching the light. She counted them quickly, then counted again.
Ten missing.
She sat back, the box in her hands, and looked at the empty spaces. They weren't scattered — the vials were gone from the front rows, the ones most accessible if you were reaching in quickly, if you were in a hurry. If you didn't want to be seen.
Who would take ten vials? And of this particular preparation — the antiseptic tincture, yes, but also the stronger infusions, the things she kept for emergencies. Whoever it was had taken a range.
But who'd do it? No one had left the camp but Bellamy and Clarke. Who else would take them and keep them for themselves. She looked out and she noticed Raven walking back to the tent she shared with Finn.
Maybe it was her, Lily thought. Maybe Finn had been in need of something to ease the pain. Maybe Clarke had given them to her. But why didn't she tell Lily?
Probably she just forgot, she guessed. Clarke had been very busy lately.
She closed the latch, pressed it shut, and set the box back in its row.
But she looked at the empty space in the row for a moment longer than she needed to.
The tent flap moved, and she turned too quickly. It was Jake. She made herself relax. He was standing in the entrance with his hands in his jacket pockets — he had that slight looseness to his posture she'd noticed in people at the end of a long day, though it was still morning. His expression was easy, pleasant even.
"Sorry to bother you," he said, before observing her face. "You okay?"
"I'm fine." She put a small smile in it. "What do you need?"
"Miller said you might come with me." He shifted his weight slightly, glancing back over his shoulder at the camp. "Jasper and Monty found a good patch of berries outside the east side. More than we thought, apparently — enough to actually help with the rations if we can get them all in." He looked back at her. "I don't know plants and I need someone who does, so I don't bring back a bucket of something that'll put twenty people in the ground. What do you say?"
Lily thought about it for a moment. She had been meaning to go out — had been telling herself for an hour that she should move, that sitting still in this tent thinking about Bellamy was doing nobody any good. And he was right: it wasn't as simple as picking the red ones and leaving the rest. She looked at the open latch of the box again. Then she pulled her bag toward her and began to pack it. "Give me a moment."
She added her knife to her belt, a folded strip of clean cloth, the small leather pouch with the dried identification samples she carried when she foraged. Jake waited in the entrance, patient, watching her move around the tent with that same easy expression. There was nothing strange about him. There was nothing strange about this. She tied the bag shut. "Ready."
They left through the east gap in the wall, where two of Bellamy's patrol stood with spears. One of them gave Jake a nod. She noticed that — the familiarity of it — and noted it and let it pass. The forest here was different from the sections she knew best. The undergrowth was denser, the light filtering differently through the canopy. Her boots found the ground with the particular attention she always paid outside the wall — each step measured, eyes moving between the path ahead and the middle distance, scanning. Jake walked beside her, slightly behind, hands still in his pockets.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asked. His voice was conversational, unhurried.
"What?" she asked turning to him with a little frown.
"Medicine." He said, "You know... your plant stuff."
"I worked as a medical technician on the Ark." She held a low branch aside and let it go carefully. "Mostly synthetic compounds and far more advanced machines."
"Mm." He was quiet for a moment. She heard his boots on the soft earth, his breathing unhurried. "You are Lily Hale, right?"
At the question she felt her body freeze, she never liked when someone brought up her life in the Ark. She didn't answer, but he seemed to take it for an affrimation.
"I've heard you've changed station." Jake kept saying, his voice was calm and pleasant, but she didn't like to talk about that.
"Yes, six years ago," she answered forcing a smile.
Jake nodded in silence for a moment, before he spoke again. "Is it true that Marcus Kane set that up for you? The moving? And job?"
She kept her eyes on the ground ahead. "Why do you want to know?" she found herself asking and Jake let out a chuckle.
"Just wanted to know if he really had been that generous," he said, but Lily didn't feel relaxed buy his laugh.
"He is not a generous man," she said carefully. "He does things for reasons."
"Yeah," Jake said. Something in the flatness of the word made her look at him — just briefly, just a glance. His expression was still easy. "People like that always do."
They walked in silence for a few minutes. The trees thickened. She could see the patch Jasper must have meant — a low, shaded stretch where the undergrowth thinned and the soil was darker, good for berry growth. She oriented herself by the position of the sun and the shape of the hill to the northeast. She knew how to get back from here. That knowledge steadied her. She crouched beside the first bush and began to look. The berries she remembered were here — dark, fat, clustered close to the main stems. She reached for one and pressed it gently between her fingers to check the texture.
"These are safe," she said. "The ones with the matte skin. You see how the surface isn't shiny?"
Jake crouched beside her, looking where she pointed. "Right."
"The glossy ones, smaller, slightly more red in the center — don't touch those. They grow in the same conditions." She moved along the bush, scanning. "And there's a vine that sometimes grows through these — thin, pale green stems. If you see it, leave the whole section alone."
"Got it." He began to pick from the bush she had cleared, his movements slow and methodical.
She moved further along, working in silence. The light had shifted — the morning was burning off, the shadows shortening. She concentrated on the task, her hands moving from bush to bush, her mind genuinely engaged for the first time since she'd sat down at that table. This was what she knew. This was the work she could do without second-guessing. She didn't notice it immediately — it came in pieces. The way Jake had stopped picking without saying anything. The sound of his boots on the ground, closer than they had been. The slight change in the quality of the silence around them — not the usual forest quiet, but something with intention in it.
She straightened slowly and turned.
He was standing a few feet behind her. Not in a path position. Not at the angle of someone moving toward the bush she'd just cleared. His hands were out of his pockets now.
"Jake?" she said.
His expression had changed. The easiness was still there — the particular kind of ease that had no relaxation in it, that was held deliberately, like a door held shut from the inside. His eyes were different. She had noticed them before — that quality of contained feeling — and now she understood what it had been containing.
"How well do you know Kane?" he said.
Her spine went very still. "Why are you asking?" She did her best to keep her voice even.
"He wanted to talk to you specifically." Jake took a step forward. It was not fast, but somehow Lily felt the need to take a step back. "Out of all the hundred."
"I told you." She said, trying to keep her voice from shake. "He knew me on the Ark."
"Right." His head tilted very slightly. "He helped you. Gave you a job. Made sure you were taken care of." Another step. "That's what you said."
"Jake." She didn't move back. She measured the distance between them, the angle to the nearest tree, the way the undergrowth lay between her and the gap she'd used to come in. "What are you doing?"
"My mother worked in environmental," he said, conversationally, still that same easy tone. "My father was in maintenance. You know what those people have in common?" She said nothing. "The Council doesn't care about them. They work the jobs that keep the Ark running and they follow the rules and they do everything right. And when the Council decides to cut oxygen because the numbers don't add up, because one is too sick, do you know who fills those numbers?" His voice was still level, still almost pleasant. The worst part was how almost pleasant it was. "I watched them. I was sixteen. I watched them take my mother away, and years after she was floated I found my father hanged. And the people who made that decision — the people on the Council — they're still up there. Still running things. Still untouched." His eyes moved over her face. "And then you."
He moved before she could finish his name.
There was no warning beyond the one she had already ignored — the shift in his weight, the slight tilt of his body — and then his hands were on her, both of them, seizing her by the front of her jacket and throwing her backward with a force that knocked the air from her lungs when she hit the ground. The impact drove through her shoulders and the back of her skull, not hard enough to black out but hard enough that the world went white at the edges for a second, her vision stuttering. She tried to push herself up and he was already over her, his knees coming down on either side of her hips, his weight pinning her before she could find her footing.
She opened her mouth and he pressed one forearm across her throat — not crushing, not yet, but enough that her next breath came in wrong, shallow and catching.
"Kane asked for you," he said in her face. The pressure on her throat increased slightly. Lily's hands found his arm and pulled, her fingers scrabbling for purchase, her heels pushing uselessly against the ground. "That makes you pretty important for him."
"I'm not—" She forced the words out through the pressure on her airway. "I'm not what you think I am to him—"
"It doesn't matter what you are," Jake said. "It matters what it would do to him to know you're gone."
He had planned this, had walked her out here with purpose, had waited for the right moment in the right section of forest, and she had followed him because she had looked at him and seen sadness and exhaustion and the ordinary grief of the hundred. She had looked at him and not seen this.
She stopped pulling at his arm and she moved her fingers on his face, using her nails enough to make him cry in pain. His head snapped back and the pressure on her throat released for the fraction of a second she needed — she twisted hard to the side, bucking her hips, and got one leg free and then the other, scrambling to her feet before he had recovered his balance.
She ran.
The undergrowth was thicker here than it had looked from the path and it tore at her — branches across her face and arms, something catching at her ankle that made her stumble without falling, the ground uneven and treacherous in the low afternoon light. She could hear him behind her, his footsteps faster than she expected, and she pushed harder, her lungs burning, her throat aching where his arm had been.
She almost made it.
She came around the wide base of a beech tree and the root caught her — a thick, raised thing half-buried in the leaf litter, completely invisible — and she went down hard, her hands barely catching her before her face hit the ground. The impact drove through her palms and up her wrists and she heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize, something involuntary and animal, and then he was on her again.
He grabbed her by the hair this time, a fistful of it, hauling her up and spinning her around, and before she could find her feet he slammed her back against the trunk of the beech with enough force that her vision went white again, properly this time, the bark raking across her cheekbone and temple as she hit. The pain was immediate and specific — a burning line from her cheekbone down toward her jaw, the particular heat of broken skin — and she felt the warmth of blood starting before she'd fully registered what had happened.
He pressed her there, his forearm against her collarbone now, his face close to hers.
"I don't want to do this," he said, and the terrible thing was that she believed him. "I spent weeks telling me it was not you. But then he called your name." His jaw tightened. "And I have to do it. I have to. So he will finally understand what he makes us go through." His eyes were bright and too wide. His pupils wide and black.
"You understand? It's not you. It's what he'd feel. That's all I have left to take from him."
Lily looked at him. The blood was reaching her jaw now, warm and slow. Her palms were scraped raw from the fall. Her throat hurt. She looked at Jake's face — at the grief behind the calm, at the boy who had been sixteen when they took his mother, who had found his father after — and she thought clearly, with the part of her mind that stayed cold when everything else was afraid: I am not dying here. I am not dying in this forest for Marcus Kane.
She brought her knee up.
He twisted just enough that she caught his thigh instead of what she'd aimed for, but the impact loosened his hold and she shoved — both hands, every bit of her weight — and got free, spinning away from the tree. This time she didn't run straight. She went sideways, cutting between two close-standing trees where his broader shoulders would slow him, and she heard him curse behind her as he had to turn his body to follow. She bought herself five seconds, maybe six, and she used them to scan the ground.
The stone was half-buried near the roots of the nearest tree — not large, but the right size, solid, with a good edge. She bent without stopping moving and grabbed it and kept going another three steps before she turned.
He was coming fast. His expression had finally broken from that terrible calm into something rawer, and he was not calculating anymore — just moving toward her, and that was what she needed.
She waited until he was close enough that she didn't have to throw it.
When he reached for her, she stepped to the side the way she had not done the first time, and she swung the stone with both hands, putting her whole weight behind it, the way you would if you never wanted to have to do it again.
The sound it made was dull and solid and wrong.
Jake dropped.
He went down in sections — first his knees, then sideways, his hands going out to break the fall and not quite managing it. He was not still. She could see him moving, his hands working against the leaf litter, a low sound coming from him that she didn't let herself listen to. He was not getting up. Not yet.
She dropped the stone.
Her hands were shaking. Her face was bleeding, she could feel it on her jaw now and on her neck, and her palms were scraped nearly raw and there was something wrong with the wrist she'd landed on — not broken, she made herself assess, not broken but deeply unhappy, sending a specific sharp complaint up her forearm when she moved it. She pressed it against her body without thinking.
She did not look at Jake again. She turned toward the light coming through the canopy in the direction that meant east, and she ran.
The wall appeared in the amber evening light, and Miller was the first person she saw.
He turned from where he was standing near the inner side of the wall and stopped moving entirely.
"Lily, where were—" He took one step toward her and stopped. "Hey."
"Miller," she called.
"What happened?" He crossed to her quickly, his hand on her arm, steadying. "Are you alright?"
"I'm alright." Her voice came out more even than she expected. "I'm alright."
"What is it?" Miller asked in panic as he started to scan the dark woods, "Was it a Grounder?"
Lily looked up at him, and she wanted to tell him what Jake had tried todo to her, but then she thought at the boy he was and what he had to endure because of the Ark, because of her father.
"No," she said. "No — I fell. And I dragged Jake down with me. The terrain was worse than I thought past the berry patch, he went down a slope." She looked at Miller. "We have to bring him back. I don't know how bad it is. He hit his head."
Miller's expression tightened into focus. "Okay. Where exactly?"
"East, past the patch — maybe a quarter mile from the wall, at the base of the big ridge." She had counted her steps coming back. She had made herself count. "I can show you."
"Not like that." He looked at her wrist. "What's—"
"It's fine. I can show you."
Miller let out a groan of frustration, "With everything that is going on!"
Lily looked at him with a frown, "Why? What's going on?"
"People are behaving strangely," he said showing the people in the glade. They were indeed acting wierd. It was like they were drunk. Real drunk. They would laugh, and fall, and yell.
Lily eyes moved to the berries, that many of them were still eating. She put the pain of her head aside for a moment just to walk to where they were keeping the berries. And she realized what was happening as soon as she got one in her hand.
"God..." she muttered, looking up at Miller that had followed her. "Are these the berries Monty and Jasper found."
"Yes, they brought them here this morning." Miller explained, and Lily let out a breath.
"Stop eating it, we can't... we can't eat those," she said, and Miller looked at her with a frown. "They're mildly opiate."
His eyes grew larger as he looked around, "Are you serious?"
"I wish I wasn't," she said touching her forehead, still feeling the blood. "We have to go take Jake, Miller." She said moving to take one of the torches. "It's too dangerous out there."
They found him where she'd said — sitting against the base of the ridge, his hand pressed to the side of his head where the blood had dried to a dark line above his ear. He looked up when they came through the undergrowth, and his eyes found her face. He held it for one moment. Then he looked away.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she moved forward to help.
When they got back, the camp had settled into its late rhythms. She left Jake with Miller and two others near the medical tent and went to wash her hands at the water barrel, her face next, the cold water stinging against the scrape along her cheekbone. The blood had dried. The mark would bruise by morning — she could feel the swelling beginning, that particular tightening heat. She wrapped her wrist herself, checking the joint carefully, then flexed her fingers and accepted the result.
She was tying off the wrap when Finn appeared, moving with that careful gait of someone with a healing wound. Raven was beside him.
"What happened?" Finn asked, looking at her face.
"I fell outside the wall." She kept her hands moving. "I'm fine."
Raven's eyes moved over her with a sharpness that didn't let anything pass. "You sure?"
"Yes." Lily tied off the wrap. "Finn, you should be sitting down."
"I've been sitting down for four days." He said getting closer to her. "Have you fallen from a cliff?"
Lily was about to answer when they heard shouting from across the camp.
All three of them turned. Someone was running from the dropship entrance. One of Bellamy's boys, still half-breathless, his eyes scanning the camp.
"The Grounder," he called out. "He's gone. Someone left the hatch open — he got loose—"
The news settled over the camp the way bad news always settled — first the hush, then the rising voices, then the controlled chaos of people who had always known something would go wrong and had only been waiting for the shape of it. Lily stood very still. She looked at Raven. At Finn. At the camp organizing itself around this new fact, someone already moving toward the dropship.
"We need Bellamy and Clarke," Lily said sharing a look with Finn that was standing next to her.
Please, come back soon, she thought as she pressed her rewrapped wrist lightly against her chest. Outside the east wall, in the direction they had not checked tonight, the forest was dark and entirely silent.
***********
Taglist: @bellarkeselection
If you want to be add to the taglist just let me know.
If you liked it, please leave a ♥️, a comment and reblog!
Sent to Earth with ninety-nine others, Lily Hale carries more than a criminal record — she carries a secret no one is meant to know. The hidden daughter of Councilor Marcus Kane, she’s spent her life in the shadows of power, unseen and unacknowledged.
Now, on a planet where the rules of the sky mean nothing, Lily must learn how to survive — not just the dangers of Earth, but the weight of everything she left behind. In a camp ruled by chaos and fear, she walks the line between what she was taught… and what she truly believes.
《 Previous - Next 》
CHAPTER 25
The days after the storm passed in the way hard days passed when there was work to be done — slowly at first, and then all at once.
Finn was recovering. Lily had watched him silently for three days, making sure that he was not sweating, and that his skin wasn't getting paler. But he wasn't. The morning after they gave him the antidote he had woken up, and the day after he had moved back in his tent. He was walking, but slowly and he couldn't make big or rush moviments, but at least he was alive.
Octavia of course had recovered faster. The antidote had worked immediately on her, and even after at the beginning she didn't want a medication on her arm, Clarke had been able to convice her to let her bandage her.
Lily had been observing both Octavia and Finn with a fear she couldn't entirely reason away. The Grounder had indicated the vial — his eyes moving toward it, that small nod — but she had lain awake two nights wondering if it had been a lie. If he had pointed them toward something that would finish what the poison had started. But Finn had improved. And Octavia had healed. And eventually, Lily had accepted that the Grounder had told the truth.
She had thought about that, in the quiet moments between tasks. Why?
He had held silence through everything, had given them nothing, had endured what he endured without breaking. And then Octavia had knelt in front of him with blood running down her arm, and something had changed. Lily couldn't explain it. She had turned it over a dozen times and hadn't arrived at an answer that satisfied her, it only managed to make her think again at what they did to the man. So eventually she had surrendered that for some reason the Grounder cared about Octavia.
They are humans too, after all, she told herself.
The practical work had helped. In the aftermath of the storm there was an enormous amount to do — fallen branches, uprooted stakes, tents collapsed or torn, the wall in several places needing repair, the path to the river blocked by a tangle of debris that took most of a morning to clear. Lily had thrown herself into it with a gratitude she hadn't expected to feel. Her hands had blisters by the second day. Her shoulders ached. She slept those nights with a heaviness that left no room for anything else — no dreams, no spiraling, just dark and then morning. She was grateful for that too.
The communications tent had been Raven's doing. She had rigged the equipment herself — repurposed components, careful wiring, a setup that had taken two days to get working reliably — and now there was a schedule. Slots for each of the hundred who had someone to speak to. Slots for those who had lost someone, where the Ark's representatives offered what little they could. Clarke spent more time there than anyone, working through the ongoing problem of the Grounders with Jaha and the Council.
Lily had not requested a slot.
She stood outside the tent sometimes, listening to the low murmur of voices from inside, the occasional crackle of static. She knew Marcus must had been told they were alive. She had imagined, despite herself, what he might have done with that information — whether he had stood very still, whether he had let anything show on his face, whether the knowledge that she was alive had moved him at all.
He'll never reach out, she told herself, doing it meant that he had to ask for a slot to someone else. Even if Marcus had given her a job, he rarely wanted to be seen with her. So Lily was sure that this time was not different. Marcus had his precious Ark to make work, that was all he cared.
She turned away from the tent and went back to work.
It was Jasper who found her later that morning, wandering into the medical tent with his hands in his pockets and the expression of someone looking for something to do. She put him to work immediately — grinding bark, measuring water, holding things steady while she strained infusions through cloth — and he submitted to it cheerfully, peering into the bowls with an expression of professional interest.
"This is not different from making moonshine," he said, studying the mixture with narrowed eyes.
Lily looked up from the cloth she was wringing. "No," she said. "This is just a little more useful."
"Useful?" He drew back, mock-offended. "Giving my friends a way to have a good time is useful."
"My bad," she said, laughing despite herself. "You're right."
He grinned. "And besides, Monty and I found some berries just outside the wall. We'll go get them once he's done talking to his parents."
Lily's hands slowed for a moment. She thought of her mother, of how she talked when she was tired but still wanted for Lily to listen to a story before sleeping, the way she would sit at the edge of Lily's cot when she had nightmares and speak very quietly until the fear went away. She thought of how she had always manged to make Lily see things from another perspective. Lily wished once more for her mother to be alive. She needed her voice, her arms around her, she needed to know what she would have made of all of this. Whether she would have had words for it that Lily hadn't found yet.
She set the cloth down.
"Have you talked to your parents?" she asked, looking at him.
Jasper's smile faded. He looked down at his hands. "No, I... I don't have anyone anymore."
"I'm so sorry, Jasper." She touched his arm lightly. "I know what it means."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked up, and she could see him reaching for something — some version of himself that could hold the weight of it without collapsing under it. "But we've got each other now, right?"
Lily nodded her head. "Right," she said, and meant it.
He seemed to hold onto that. "So you'll have some moonshine tonight?"
"Alright." She rolled her eyes. "Just a sip. And I'm not going to pretend I like it if I don't."
He laughed, and they went back to work, and for a little while the tent smelled of crushed bark and warm water and something almost like an ordinary afternoon.
When Monty appeared at the entrance, Lily could tell from his expression that his conversation with the Ark had gone as well, he had a relieved smile on his face, and there was not pressure in the way he carried himself.
She began gathering the empty jars while Jasper reached for his jacket.
"Miller is coming with us?" she heard him ask to his friend.
"No," Monty answered with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "He's busy talking to the parents of who died." Lily turned at those words, and she noticed Jasper doing the same.
"Bellamy not going to talk to the Diggs family?" Jasper asked, glancing toward the communications tent.
Monty shook his head. "Apparently he's guarding the Grounder."
Jasper seemed surprised. "I thought he'd be the one to go."
"Apparently no," Monty said simply, and there was something careful in his voice, the way there was when someone was keeping the full shape of a thought to themselves.
Lily said nothing. But she heard it, and she thought about it after they left — about the way Bellamy had been moving through camp since the storm, or not moving, really. Retreating. He was still present, still giving orders when orders were needed, still showing up where the work was hardest. But the third level of the dropship had become something like a retreat for him, and there was a quality to his stillness up there that had nothing to do with vigilance. Clarke had tried to convince him to speak with Jaha, but he refused each time she asked. Lily knew what fear looked like on him now, and she knew he was scared.
She packed up the last of the infusions, filled two cups with water, and went to find him.
Jake was standing near the dropship entrance when she arrived.
"Do you know where Bellamy is?" Lily asked with a little smile.
"Third level," he said. "With the Grounder."
"Thank you." She was about to go, when she noticed a kind of shadow in his eyes. "Hey, is everything alright?"
Something passed across his face — not quite pain, but adjacent to it. A small, tired smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Just a bit sad that's all," he said, glancing at the tent where they put the radio and Lily didn't need to ask anything else. Her heart sank when she observed him turn and walk away.
She stood there a moment, watching him go. She thought of all the people she had seen carry that particular expression — the one that came with loss that the Ark had caused and the Ark would never account for. It was so common among the hundred that sometimes she almost stopped seeing it. And then she saw it again, fresh, on someone's face, and it hit her all over again.
Marcus, she thought, with the familiar heat rising in her chest. How did you not see it? How could you look at all of this and call it order?
She pushed the thought away, tightened her grip on the two cups, and started up the ladder.
The hatch was open. She came through it slowly, not wanting to startle him, and found Bellamy sitting on a crate facing the Grounder. He wasn't doing anything, he was just sitting. His elbows were resting on his knees and his gaze fixed somewhere that had nothing to do with the room. His eyes were bright in the dim light. There was not anger in them, she noticed, but she could see he was thinking.
"Hey," she said softly.
He turned. He didn't try to mask what she had seen, which she took as something. "What are you doing here?" in his voice there was no harshness which pushed her to go.
"I thought you might use some company." She held up the cups. "I brought you some water. And — for him too," she added, nodding toward the Grounder.
Bellamy looked at her for a moment, then gave a small nod. She crossed the space and held out his cup, and he shifted on the crate to make room. She sat down beside him. For a while neither of them spoke — they looked at the Grounder, at the walls, at the water sitting still in their cups.
"Bellamy," she said finally, turning toward him. "Are you alright?"
"As good as we can be, right?" He lifted one shoulder in a shrug that didn't convince either of them.
She thought for a moment about how to ask the next question. "Is it about Jaha?"
He didn't answer immediately. She waited patiently for some moment, and then she decided to press on, gently. "What happened between you two?"
"You're here to know why I shot?" He asked, his fingers gripping the cup harder, as he turned to her. He was trying to keep his face steady, but she knew he was worried.
"I'm here to understand what happened." She held his gaze steadily. "Bellamy, you are many things. But I don't believe you'd kill without a reason."
"I hated him," He shrugged his shoulders. "Is that not reason enough?"
"You hate the elite," she said not believing him. "But you didn't kill Wells. Or Clarke. Or me." She looked at him in silence for a moment. "I know you wouldn't kill for hate."
"Then why do I kill for?" He asked with a glare. "Since you've got it all figured out—"
"You're not a bad person," She said firmly looking in his eyes, that widened as she spoke. "Look, I know you're afraid--"
He went still. Just for a moment, and then he looked away, fixing his eyes on some point across the room. "I'm afraid of nothing, Lily."
"Are you sure?" She didn't move back.
He said nothing. She waited — not with pressure, not with prompt, just with presence, the way she had learned worked with him. Giving him the space to decide whether to let her in.
"Bellamy," she said quietly. "Please, tell me what happened."
His legs bounched in stress, and he turned to her, "Why do you care so much?"
"Because maybe I can help you." She said quietly, not backing away from him.
But he shook his head slowly. "You can't, Lily." He said in a whisper. "Nobody can. I'll get the blame for what happened."
She frowned, turning toward him more fully. "You'll get the blame? What does that mean, you'll take the blame?"
But before he could answer, footsteps sounded on the ladder, and they both looked up as Miller and Jake came through the hatch. Miller stopped when he saw her, visibly surprised.
"Oh — Clarke was looking for you," he said.
Lily frowned. "For me?"
"Yeah. Apparently there's Marcus Kane that wants to talk to you."
The air went out of her lungs.
She sat very still for one second, then stood, catching the edge of Bellamy's expression before he could smooth it into something unreadable. She held it for just a moment — that flicker of something raw and unfinished between them — and then she climbed down the ladder.
She stood outside the communications tent for longer than she should have. Part of her — a part she recognized and wasn't proud of — wanted to go in immediately. Wanted it so much that she was ashamed of the wanting. He had sent her here. He had watched her dragged out of her cell without a word. He had looked at her like a prisoner number and she had screamed his name until the corridor turned. And still, some traitorous part of her had been waiting for this. Had kept a corner of itself open, against all evidence, against all reason.
She stepped inside.
He was on the screen. She had forgotten, in some abstract way, that he would look like himself — the same lines of his face, the same stillness in his eyes, the same posture that had always made rooms feel smaller. His expression changed when the screen showed her. She sat down and put on the headset before she could read too much into it.
"Lily." His voice was careful, measured in the way it always was. "I thought — are you alright?"
Lily was confused by the question, "My answer won't be different from the others." That was all she could give him. She could never say that she was fine, because she wasn't, but she didn't even want to show him how scared she was to be on Earth. That would only make her angry.
He looked down briefly. "I wasn't sure you wanted to talk to me."
Something in her chest moved against her will. Her legs were trembling faintly under the table. She pressed her feet flat against the ground and made herself breathe. "Yeah," she said. "I'm still not sure that I want to talk to you."
A silence stretched between them, longer than it should have been. Lily was even avoiding to look at the screen.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked after what felt like hours.
A humorless chuckle left her lips as she looked at everywhere in the room but his face. "I think you've done enough, thank you." She heard the edge in her own voice and didn't try to file it down. There was nothing he could do for her from up there. The Council had no way to help them. Then suddenly, Bellamy's face came to her — on that crate, eyes too bright, the misery of someone waiting for a punishment they expected and was only waiting to arrive.
I'll get the blame for what happened, that was what he told her.
"Wait," she said quietly, before turning to Marcus. "Actually — there is something. Something you can do."
"Tell me," he said, and there was something in the way he said it, a kind of careful attention, that she tried not to feel anything about, but she noticed. Why was he so open with her?
But Lily decided to avoid reading into that, and she took a deep breath before she spoke.
"It's about Bellamy Blake."
Marcus' expression shifted, becoming harder. "The shooter?"
Again that word used against Bellamy made her heart clench, but she did her best to keep her voice even.
"I need you to vouch for his pardon." She said looking at Marcus in the eyes.
His face closed down, the way she had watched it close a hundred times before. "And why would I do that? He tried to kill Jaha."
"Because I think there's more behind his actions than you know." She insisted and she heard him let out a breath.
"You think—"
"Marcus, please." She leaned forward. "I know there's something behind it. You have to help me on this."
"Why would you do so much for a criminal?" The question made her freeze for a moment. She just wanted for Bellamy to be safe. He was doing so much for them, and she knew he could be an asshole but he didn't deserve to die.
"We're all criminals here, aren't we?" She held his gaze. "You sent us here for a reason. But Bellamy found a way onto that dropship with a uniform and a gun. Someone must have helped him in doing so." She saw the slight widening of Marcus' eyes — that particular stillness that meant she had told him something he hadn't known. "He did what he did out of desperation, Marcus. He just wanted his family back. A family the Ark took away from him in less than a day. It wouldn't hurt to show some compassion."
The silence that followed was long and heavy. The kind she knew too well. She felt the anger rise — the old familiar shape of it, the one that came when she remembered Grace, when she remembered all the small cruelties dressed in the language of necessity. And somehow he'd always looked at her in the same way.
"It's no use with you," she said quietly pushing her hair back. "Fine. If I'm right — if I can convince him to tell you what really happened, who was behind it — would you at least consider my request?"
Marcus kept quiet for a long moment, and the anger in Lily was growing but she tried all she could not to snap. Then suddenly he spoke.
"I… yes. Lily—"
"Alright," she said, "I have to go." She pulled off the headset, stood, and was out of the tent before he could finish the sentence.
The medical tent was dim and smelled of dried leaves and something faintly bitter — the white willow infusion she had left steeping since morning. She pulled the flap closed behind her and stood in the middle of the small space, pressing her hands flat against her thighs, and let herself shake. It was too much to hold all at once — her father's face on that screen, careful and unreadable. And she thought about Bellamy, and the fact that if they didn't find a way, once the Council was on the ground he would have been floated.
She pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes. She would not cry about Marcus Kane. She had already spent too much of herself on that. But the tears came anyway — not only for him, not exactly. For the version of this she had wanted. For the conversation she had rehearsed a hundred times in the skybox that had gone nothing like she had imagined. For Bellamy's voice, surrendered like he had long forgotten how to expect anything better. And then she thought about Finn, and Wess, and Charlotte and Murphy and all those who had lost their life on the ground. And again it was too much
She was wiping her face with her sleeve when she heard the tent flap move.
"Hey."
She turned. Bellamy stood in the entrance, not quite inside, not quite out. She straightened quickly, pulling herself together.
"Hey." She cleared her throat. "What are you doing here?"
His eyes moved over her face as he entered the tent. "Are you crying?"
"It's alright, it happens sometimes." She said trying to sound calmer than she was. Then she forced a smile. "Do you need anything?"
Bellamy didn't seem convinced, but he decided not to push her, which she was grateful for. "Have you made more disinfectant?"
"Mm — yeah, sure." She moved toward the row of sealed jars, keeping her hands busy. "Did you hurt yourself?"
"No, I'm alright." He assured observing her as she moved.
"I'm going with Clarke to find some guns. Apparently the Ark has records of a hidden cache — could be useful. We could use a couple of those ampoules, in case anything happens out there."
"Sure." Lily said going towards the table where she kept the ampouls that she had ready to use.
If they could find guns they could really improve their defence, and maybe they could defend themselves better. That was actually a good news, finally.
Then Lily moved towards him, so that she could hand him four ampouls. He took it from her hand and she decided to ignore the feeling in her chest when their fingers brushed each other.
"When are you going?" she asked after clearing her throath.
"In... um... in ten," he said putting the vials in his pockets. "Why?"
"I was hoping," she said looking up at him, "We could talk before you leave."
He took a breath closing his eyes, but he didn't move away, "If you want to convince me again to talk to the Council, don't." He said with no harshness. "I told you that."
He was stubborn, so stubborn that was almost unnerving. But she was not surprised by his reaction.
"I've talked to Kane," she admitted as their gaze met.
On his face appeared a confused frown, before she noticed his eyes getting sharper. "He won't help me."
She shook her head, as she took a step towards him. "I've asked him for help."
Bellamy seemed to think again at what she had just said, as if he wasn't sure he had understood her words.
"You..." he muttered, "You ask a favor for me?" His eyes were wide, but she could see a spark of anger in his gaze. Why was he being so proud?
"Of course I did," she said firmly, "I want to help you."
His eyes went still in that way that meant something had hardened behind them, and his hands went on his hips. "And what does he want in return?"
He didn't have to be more specific than that, to make her understand what he was implying. And her eyes widened.
"What — nothing."
A humurless lough came from his lips, and if possible his gaze hardened again. "Yes, of course," he said quietly, not believing her. He was about to move when Lily's hand shot forward to take his arms in between her fingers, so that he'd look at her.
"Bellamy." She said as their eyes met. "I don't know what you've heard about me and him. But this is not what you think."
"Nobody does anything for nothing," he said with a shake of his head. "Especially not the elite." He held her gaze for a moment, something unreadable moving through his eyes. "And you don't have to do this for me."
"Hey." She said almost desperate for him to listen to her and she gripped his arm a little bit more, feeling the tension beneath her fingers. He looked down at her hand, then back up at her face. "I can help you, alright? Trust me that I can help you fix this. Please — just tell me what happened for you to shoot—"
"People like me don't get pardons that easily, Lily." Bellamy said, "Whatever he promised, he won't follow through. He will just use you."
She shook her head, "Bellamy, please, just trust me. I can help you. If you just—"
Then without warning, he leaned forward and his lips found hers. His hand coming up to her face, his mouth warm and certain against hers, and she kissed him back before she understood she was doing it, her hand moving to his jacket without her deciding to move it there. It lasted only a moment and when he pulled back his eyes were open, looking at her.
"I do trust you," he said quietly as their eyes met.
"Bellamy..." she whispered, just before he moved away from her, making his way towards the exit of the tent. She noticed him stop for a moment there and for a moment she thought that he might turn again, but he didn't.
The tent flap shifted behind him, and she heard his footsteps in the dirt, moving away, and then nothing at all. She stood exactly where she was, alone with the warmth of his palm still against her cheek.
And she could hear only the sound of the camp around her, ordinary and indifferent, and the small, strange weight of what had just happened settling over her like something she didn't yet have a name for. She pressed her fingers lightly to her lips. Outside, his footsteps had already faded.
***********
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