Chapter 337

Olivia

After standing outside for a little while longer, the stars offered no answers to my countless dilemmas. With a sigh, I decided to head inside. I slid the glass door shut behind me, my mind a whirlpool of frustration and concern.

Nathan had retreated to the house before me, his posture rigid, his words simmering with rage and pain. He hadn’t waited for me, and I knew why. I sighed as I locked the door, walking through the silent living room and turning off the lights along the way.

When I reached our bedroom, the door was ajar, a faint line of light cutting across the dark hallway. I pushed it open gently. Nathan was already in bed, his back to me, the covers pulled up to his shoulders.

Carefully, I changed into my nightclothes, deliberately quiet in my movements. When I finally crawled into bed, a comfortable distance apart, it felt like there was an invisible barrier between us.

For a moment, I considered reaching out to him, to bridge the gap with a simple touch. But as I shifted slightly, I felt his body stiffen and sensed the icy wall he had erected. So, I curled onto my side instead, my back to his, and blinked away tears that clouded my vision.

“He’ll come around, Olivia,” my wolf whispered to me, her voice tinged with a patience I was struggling to muster. “He’s not angry with you. He’s grappling with something that today’s therapy session has unlocked. Give him time.”

“I hope you're right,” I replied.

I closed my eyes and willed myself to drift off. And at some point, I must have succeeded, because the next thing I knew, I was jolted awake by a sense of emptiness beside me.

Blinking in the darkness, I stretched out my hand, finding only cool sheets where Nathan should have been. My heart rate kicked up a notch.

Sitting up, I glanced at the clock on the nightstand; the red digits blinked 3:17 AM back at me.

I slid out of bed, my feet meeting the cold hardwood floor.

“Nathan?” I called out softly, wondering if he had gone to the bathroom or maybe to check on the twins. But I was met with silence, and the baby monitor beside the bed showed Aurora and Elliot sleeping peacefully in their cribs.

Quietly, I moved through the house to look for him. The living room was as I had left it, the furniture bathed in the pale glow of streetlights filtering through the blinds. No Nathan. The kitchen, too, was empty; even the blinking clock on the oven seemed to taunt me with its normalcy.

A sense of unease settled in the pit of my stomach as I continued my search. The twins’ room was next; their innocent faces were relaxed in sleep, blissfully unaware of the tension that gripped the adults in the house. I sighed and gently closed their door behind me.

Last was the basement, a place that both of us rarely visited, but I had to check just to be safe.

But as I finally turned the handle and descended the stairs, the dim light revealed what I had already begun to suspect: he wasn’t there either.

“Where are you, Nathan?” I whispered to myself, fighting back a new wave of tears. Was he really so angry with me that he took off, or did something else happen?

My wolf was quiet, offering no comfort, no wisdom. Maybe she was as perplexed as I was, or maybe she knew better than to offer platitudes when none would suffice.

After a few moments, I climbed back up the stairs, softly closing the basement door behind me. I returned to our bed, its emptiness jarring. Crawling back under the covers, I lay there, staring up at the ceiling.

Thoughts swirled around my mind like leaves in a tempest.

Maybe Nathan just couldn’t sleep and went for a walk, I told myself. Maybe there were emergency Alpha duties at the Council building that he had to attend to.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I felt my eyelids grow heavy. However, just as I was teetering on the edge of sleep, a loud bang jolted me upright. My heart leapt into my throat.

That was the front door. No doubt about it.

“Nathan?”

I jumped out of bed and sprinted downstairs, my feet barely touching the ground. My wolf was awake too, her senses sharp, ready for whatever awaited us. But nothing could’ve prepared me for the sight that met my eyes.

Nathan stood in the doorway, his face flushed, eyes wide with what looked like... fear? He was breathing heavily, as if he had sprinted all the way home. The door was ajar behind him, the cold night air pouring in like a dark river.

“Olivia, we need to get you to the hospital. Now. We have to check on the baby,” Nathan blurted out, charging forward to grab me by both shoulders, his eyes scanning me from head to toe as if expecting to find something gravely wrong.

“Wait, what? Hospital? I’m fine, Nathan. What are you talking about?” My eyes narrowed as I looked at him, taking in his disheveled appearance. His words made no sense, and yet the urgency in his voice sent shivers down my spine.

“Olivia, please, just—”

“No, Nathan. Start making sense now. You vanish without a word, you come back looking like you’ve seen a ghost, and now you’re talking about rushing to the hospital? What’s going on?”

He sighed deeply, his shoulders slumping as if the weight of the world had just settled on them. “Sit down, Olivia. We need to talk.”

The atmosphere in the room grew heavy, like the air before a storm. My heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. My wolf was silent, bracing herself.

“Talk? Talk about what, Nathan? What could possibly be so important that you left in the middle of the night without telling me, then returned looking like this?”

His eyes met mine, and for a moment, the man I knew seemed to flicker in the depths of his gaze, shrouded by something darker, something terrified.

“Just sit down, please. I’ll explain, but you need to sit.”

“Fine,” I muttered, perching myself on the edge of the couch, my eyes never leaving his face. “Okay, I’m sitting. Now talk.”

Nathan looked at me, his eyes meeting mine, and I saw it—the fear, the weight of whatever secret he was carrying. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but then closed it again, hesitating.

“Olivia, I—” He stopped, took another deep breath as if gathering the strength to continue.

I sat there, staring at him, my own body a bundle of nerves, my mind racing with a thousand questions.

What could be so grave, so urgent, that it had shattered the man standing in front of me? And as he looked at me, his eyes filled with a myriad of emotions I couldn’t begin to decipher, I braced myself for whatever words were about to leave his lips.

“I did something tonight,” he finally said, his voice barely more than a whisper, laden with a gravity that made my stomach churn. “And I shouldn’t have done it…”