Chapter 72
Aiden
Arms limp at my sides, I stare up at the house that’d been my home up until a few months ago.
Beyond the new pearl shade on the walls, it looks the same as always—same thick beams holding the porch up, same scent of rosemary wafting from where it grows under the kitchen window, same scuffed steps worn down from rushing in and out.
It’s the first time I’ve come back since the Coronation, and I haven’t missed it. So I don’t know why I expect to feel a sudden surge of longing or nostalgia to hit me. It doesn’t.
It’s just a house with memories I don’t cling to anymore than I do the people living inside.
I flex my fingers and walk up to the door. No point dragging it out. I knock.
The door opens, and my father stands there, his expression resigned, like he’s been expecting this. Like he’s already accepted whatever’s coming. I frown because I still don’t know how this is going to end, but he seems to.
“Come in,” he says, stepping aside. I wipe my shoes on the mat and enter without a word.
He shuts the door behind me, and I wait for him to lead the way to where I know Ma is waiting.
She sits on the couch with her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee.
Her sharp eyes lift to mine, but they’re void of their usual self-assigned omniscience.
There’s bags under them, and as I pay a closer look to my father, I find a matching set under his.
My frown deepens. He takes a seat beside her as she sets her mug down, his expression grim. I cautiously lower myself onto the opposite couch, and they both take a deep breath.
I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but I hadn’t expected this, whatever this is.
I just wanted to talk to them, make sure they know I don’t want their interference in the family I’m building with Julian. I gave up on them as parents a long time ago. And for now, I didn’t want them as grandparents either.
Maybe that could change. One day. If they did. But I can’t even start that conversation with the way they’re looking at me.
But they’re not really looking at me. They look at the floor and the walls. They look at the space between my eyes and my chin. They look at their clenched hands and mine, and everything else but me.
“Still too hard, huh?” I ask with a hollow chuckle.
“No,” Dad says, finally meeting my eyes for the first time. As always, he struggles to keep it without my shades there to smooth the way, but for once, there’s no shame. “It’s not that, Aiden.”
“What is it then?” I ask, tired of this weird shift and the way they’re sitting there as if someone died.
His expression cracks, and Ma’s too. I watch her eyes fill, and my frown deepens.
“It all went so wrong,” he croaks, “and I don’t even know how.”
Ma makes a soft sound, like a wounded animal. It’s damning, hearing it from her lips. She lifts a hand to stifle anything else from slipping free. Beside her, my father’s lips tremble, shaking before suddenly, he breaks. In that moment I see a man I don’t know.
My father was a harsh man—harsh voice, harsh eyes, harsh face, and a harsh, unwavering hand.
There was a time he wasn’t, but I could barely remember who he was then, or the family we used to be.
Sometimes, dreams offered me a mother who woke me up with kisses.
A father who took me out on his back for runs whenever he could.
I saw a boy who smiled more than he cried, and ran headfirst into everything because he hadn’t learned fear yet.
I used to think that child died with the rogues—and that when what was left finally came home, his parents did too.
We were the remnants. Me first, and then them, who must’ve moulded themselves to be the right parents for me, this new child that wasn’t theirs—the one with red eyes, a temper, and a habit of breaking his own fingers when he was scared.
They had to be harsh, especially my father. But he’s not harsh now as I watch him crumble.
He’s sombre. Sombre, like he’d been on the roof the last time I saw him, when he finally seemed to understand. Soft, like he used to be. But his tenderness is not comforting. If who he was before had found his way back to life, then seeing him now doesn’t feel like coming home.
It feels like watching a version of my father from another world through a looking glass, because I don’t know this man. He’s not my father. He’s not harsh, so this mildness is only disconcerting.
“We didn’t know what to do, Aiden,” my mother mumbles as she lowers her trembling hand. “We just—” she shakes her head as the tears spill. “We didn’t know what to do.”
I assume they mean with me. They must, because otherwise, what else could they be talking about?
I came here to speak about our future, but now they are randomly confessing past sins as if I were their priest, not their son.
“Nothing was ever supposed to hurt you,” Dad says, his voice trying to harden around that declaration, but it fractures and falls apart, like him. “Nothing. But then,” his gaze drops as he shakes his head, “they got you.”
Max whines softly, pained by the reminder of the torment I had to endure alone because he wasn’t with me yet, and neither were they. The sadness overwhelms him, and I can feel it, but it’s not mine. It’s separate, like an amputated limb that I keep expecting to feel the phantom pain of.
“We failed you in the very worst way, and we didn’t know how to deal with it,” he says, “how to keep them from knowing.”
I nod, relaxing as the familiar rhetoric surfaces. It stings as it always does, but I appreciate the familiarity of it.
“No, Aiden,” Ma groans as she shifts further up the edge of her seat. Her eyes are pleading as she looks at me. “We weren’t trying to hide it because we were ashamed of you. We hid it to protect you.”
“Protect me?” I echo as I feel my lips spread into a bitter smile. “And how did you work that one out?”
“Rogues had you for an entire month, Aiden. They changed you.” Her tears slip past her lashes, catching on the wrinkles beneath.
“If people knew, they might not have wanted you as alpha. The pack, maybe, but the Council? They would never have allowed it, and the one thing you always wanted was to be alpha.”
The skin over my heart burns—right where the Code is inked. It burns like it did the day I first got it done, then festers, spreading until it fills my chest and then my soul. The same soul that had been clawing towards that role from the moment I could put a name to it.
Julian told me that he’d never wanted to be alpha, but I couldn’t remember a day when I didn’t.
My parents knew that. Of course they did.
They were the ones who stayed up at late watching me try to memorise the Alpha’s Code.
Let me sit in on meetings even when I was too young to understand what was going on, because being there made me happier than any game they could’ve put in front of me. It was all I wanted, and they knew it.
I shake my head as the realisation takes root—its barbed edges tearing skin as it sinks deeper.
“Aiden,” my father tries, but I ignore the misery in his eyes, closing mine to escape it. “Aiden, listen to us.”
“Listen to you,” I breathe with another laugh, but this one withers as my throat tightens.
“Listen to you? You want me to listen so you can tell me you did this for me?” I open my eyes and blink quickly when my vision blurs.
“What? You saved me from hell just to make me live in another version of it by myself, so that I could be alpha?”
“We didn’t mean to,” Ma protests as she pushes to her feet, but I do the same and step away before she can get anywhere near me.
Her outstretched hands retract quickly as one rises to hover near her mouth, the other clutches her elbow. Her tears run freely now.
“We didn’t mean to, Aiden,” she mutters again, softly, like she’s afraid of scaring me off. “We … we didn’t realise how bad it got until it was already too late.”
“At the start, it was about keeping anyone from knowing,” Dad continues for her. “We put all our time into that when we should’ve been spending it with you.”
Days and nights alone, in an empty house.
“Then you started acting out, and we didn’t know how to deal with it,” Ma rushes out, the truth pouring out like a bottled confession now that the lid is gone. “We couldn’t ask anyone—we couldn’t trust anyone, and we didn’t know what to do.”
They keep saying that. We didn’t know what to do. It makes them sound like children, but they’re not. They’re adults—they’re my parents. They should’ve known what to do; they should’ve tried to do something.
“We thought talking about it would make it worse,” she rambles over sobs that force her to slow. “So, we never talked about it at all.” Her hands clench tighter as she shakes her head, over and over, “So we never asked … we never … we never knew his name.”
My mother completely falls apart.
The sobs crest now that the truths out, and her body shudders with them. Dad catches her, and she curls against him, crying heavily in his arms.
I watch my mother break next.
It’s like watching a scared child cry—real in a way I don’t want it to be. It doesn’t feel right.
I didn’t think anything could be worse than watching my parents pull away from me after I came home. But here, eleven years later, I discover that there is something worse—knowing that everything they’d done since had been for me.
Out of some fucked-up desperation to preserve the one thing I always wanted after they failed to protect me, they’d abandoned me when I needed them most. That had always been the difference between Julian’s parents and mine. Mine were absent.
“So, you’re sorry now,” I manage, voice breaking as my tears finally spill. “Now? When I’ve already learnt to live with it?”
My heart seizes in my chest, and no matter how many times I swallow, the lump in my throat refuses to move.
“When did this happen? After that day on the roof?” I say, looking at my father. “Was that when you finally realised how badly you fucked me up?”