Mated To The Crippled Alpha-Chapter 386: Vito, You crazy Liar

Whitney couldn’t shake the feeling crawling up through her chest. Vito had always sworn, in every way a person could swear something, that he would never let her go. Last night he had framed it as a temporary visit home. But standing there at the dock, hearing him speak, the words had landed differently final, and deliberate, like the closing of a door.

Before she could untangle any of it, he stepped back and put distance between them, his voice hard again. "Go. Before I change my mind."

She looked at him really looked and something in her face went still and confused, like she was staring at someone she used to know. Her hand lifted instinctively toward him, and her lips parted, but nothing came out. What was there to say? What could she possibly do?

This was the freedom she had spent twenty years wanting. It was right here, finally real and within reach. It should have felt like breathing again.

Instead, Whitney pressed her hand to her chest and walked onto the ship with an ache she couldn’t name and couldn’t explain.

As the boat began to pull away from the dock, Vito’s figure grew smaller and smaller through the gray morning light. Whitney passed close to where I was standing, and I saw it one tear still sitting on her cheek, refusing to fall or dry, just clinging there. She probably told herself it was temporary. She probably believed that someone like Vito, with all his possessiveness and all his reach, would find her again no matter where she went. She didn’t yet understand that this time, he meant it.

But I knew. Vito had spoken to me the night before, quietly and without ceremony. He had entrusted Whitney to my care and told me he intended to follow the Commander’s trail to finish what the Blackwells had started and make sure none of their sacrifices had been wasted. The feud between the Morrigans and the Blackwells was done. Whitney had earned her freedom from it. But a man with Vito’s history, with the weight of everything he’d done pressed into his hands, was better off disappearing into the dark alone. He had kept Whitney untouched from all of it deliberately, making sure she would never have to carry what he carried.

Her worst day had been the one when Silas brought me back barely alive, soaked in blood, with almost nothing left. The transplant had needed to happen before time ran out, and my heart had been Vito’s only option for Whitney. Her body had been rejecting everything else. There had been no other path. When she found out, she couldn’t accept it but it was already done, and it couldn’t be undone. Vito told me once that even if he could go back, he would make the same choice. Every time. Without hesitation. I had every reason to hate him for what he’d done to me. But looking at Whitney alive, breathing, standing on this deck I found I couldn’t hold onto it.

Yael appeared at my side, holding out two small straw dolls he’d made himself, shaped like tigers. He rubbed the back of his head with his free hand, looking genuinely awkward. "I was going to do a stone carving, but Vito said that was weird. He’s probably right. Stone’s too heavy anyway, so." He shrugged and held them out.

I stepped forward and hugged him properly, both arms, no hesitation. "Thank you, Yael. Take care of yourself."

"Okay." He hugged me back with the kind of enthusiasm that only people who don’t hug often ever manage. "Stay happy, Elena. Or I’ll come find you."

I laughed quietly against his shoulder. "Deal."

The Blackwells still had their own road ahead. I knew that much. Whatever was coming for them, they would walk into it as they always had together and alone at the same time, bound by blood and history and the particular kind of love their family seemed to run on.

Amber was nearby, fussing with the collar of Lewis’s jacket with the focused energy of someone who needed to do something useful with her hands. "I can’t follow you everywhere, you know," she muttered, smoothing the fabric down. "That family of yours is unhinged on a good day. Without me there to keep them in line, they’ll absolutely fall apart."

I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling. Lewis, impressively, kept a completely neutral expression.

"Damian is a good one," she said, not looking up. "He’s been by your side through everything, never once turned on you. If he’s still breathing, treat him right."

"I will," Lewis said.

She finally stopped fussing and opened her arms, and Lewis stepped into them without a word. She held on tight. "You silly boy." Her voice came out thicker than she’d probably intended. "Your mother would have loved seeing you like this. It’s a blessing you look more like her than that stubborn old man."

Lewis’s eyes went slightly soft at the edges. "Take care of yourself, Aunt Amber."

"I will."

"And don’t let chances slip away from you," he said, pulling back just enough to look at her properly. "Once someone’s gone, you don’t get them back. Don’t live with regrets."

She absorbed that quietly for a moment. Then she looked over at me and told him, as if I weren’t standing right there, "Just grow old with this stinky girl. That’s all I ask."

Lewis smiled. "Already planning on it."

Amber released him and turned to me, pointing firmly. "You. Take care of him. And don’t let him crawl out of bed at midnight to make you juice. That man does not know his own limits."

I laughed. "Understood, Aunt Amber."

Before she could launch into anything else, I pulled her in myself. She stiffened slightly, then relented. "This time, I actually mean it," I said against her shoulder. "When I call you that."

"I don’t need your sincerity."

"I know. I’m giving it anyway."

She pulled back and looked at me, and I could see her working up to something sharp. "If you have time to worry about my boys, just go ahead and have two of your own. It would make my sister so happy, even from wherever she is now."

"Only if you’ll help me with them when I do."

She flicked me on the forehead, harder than strictly necessary. "Dream on. If you have kids, I’ll be the auntie who shows up before sunrise and makes you cook breakfast for everyone. You will not rest. I will personally ensure it."

I was still laughing when the goodbyes finished, one by one, each of them landing in a different part of my chest.

The shore shrank behind us as the ship moved out into open water. Whitney stood at the railing near the stern, her gaze drifting back toward the tree line on the island’s edge. Something in her posture said she felt it that particular feeling of being watched by someone who was letting you go against every instinct they had. She stood there for a long moment, then made a quiet decision and turned away, walking back toward the cabin.

She pushed open the door and stopped.

Malcom was inside, his injuries wrapped and bandaged, very much alive.

"Dad... you’re alive..."

Everything she had been told, everything Vito had performed for Dominic’s benefit, rearranged itself in an instant. The lie. The act. All of it had been protection brutal and dishonest and done entirely for her.

I crossed the cabin and pressed a small bottle of white pills into her hands. "Vito wanted you to have this. He said taking it would erase everything. Five years of something good, twenty years of pain he thought maybe it would be kinder to let you start clean."

Whitney’s fingers closed around the bottle. She stood very still for a moment. Then she turned and walked straight back out to the deck, moving fast, gripping the railing at the stern with both hands and staring out at the island still visible in the distance at the tree line, at the faint shape of a figure she might or might not have been imagining standing there.

She pulled in a breath from somewhere deep, and then she screamed it out over the water.

"Vito, YOU LIAR!"

"I hate you! I hate you!"

Her legs gave out and she slid down to the deck floor, her whole body shaking, but her eyes never left the shore. Never stopped searching. The distance between them stretched wider with every passing second, and still she looked.

When her voice finally came again, it was barely there at all.

"Vito..."