Chapter 3
ASHES IN THE BLOODLINE
RONAN
I'd been living in the apartment Daniel had given me without asking for rent or explanation or anything except time.
The apartment was small. One bedroom, kitchen barely big enough to turn around in, bathroom with tiles that had seen better decades. But it was mine. Or close enough to mine that I could pretend I belonged somewhere instead of just occupying space between one disaster and the next.
I woke up there every morning. Made coffee I barely tasted. Stared at walls that didn't hold memories because I hadn't been here long enough to make any. Then I went to work at whatever manual labor job would take someone with no references and a gap in their employment history.
Construction, mostly. Demolition.
It helped. Some days.
I stood in the kitchen with cold coffee going colder in my hand and stared at the phone Daniel had given me. His number was already programmed in. All I had to do was call.
The phone buzzed before I could make myself dial.
Daniel's name on the screen. Like he knew I was thinking about him. Like pack bonds still worked even when one half of them had spent decades being someone else.
I answered. “Yeah.”
“Ronan.” His voice was careful. Always careful, like he was talking to an animal that might bolt if he moved wrong. “You got time today?”
“I've got time.” I had nothing but time. Time and coffee and a growing certainty that pieces of me were broken in ways I didn't know how to fix.
“Can you come by the pack house?”
“When?” I asked.
“Now, if you can. Or later. Whenever works.”
Now was better. Later meant more time to think, more time to talk myself out of it, more time for the voice to wake up and start whispering things I didn't want to hear.
“I'll be there in twenty,” I said, and hung up before he could change his mind or I could.
I dumped the coffee in the sink. Grabbed my jacket. Checked my pockets for keys and wallet and the silver knife I'd started carrying everywhere because paranoia was just pattern recognition when you'd survived what I had.
The pack house sat twenty-five minutes outside town, and the last stretch ran through the Evernight Forest on a road that got narrower the deeper it went.
Old growth pressed in on both sides, the trunks so thick three men couldn't wrap their arms around them if they tried.
Sunlight filtered through the canopy in a green haze, and the air got heavier with every mile, saturated with pack magic that had soaked into the ground over generations.
I'd driven this road enough times in the last month that my hands knew the turns. Slowing for the gravel. Taking the left fork. A lightning-struck oak marked the final curve, its blackened trunk split down the middle, and I was already easing off the gas before I thought about why.
Body memory. Muscle and instinct filling in gaps my brain couldn't access.
The forest watched me pass with a stillness that felt deliberate, like it was holding its breath. Waiting to see if I'd remember what I'd forgotten, or if the compulsion would drag me under again before I figured out what Silas had buried in my head.
Even the trees had moved on without me.
The pack house emerged from the forest like it had always been there, like it had grown from the same roots as the trees surrounding it. Timber and stone, built to last centuries, windows reflecting green light back at the forest that cradled it. It was bigger than I remembered.
I parked in the driveway. Sat there with the engine ticking as it cooled, hands on the steering wheel, breathing through the weight settling in my chest.
This was going to hurt. Whatever Daniel wanted to talk about, whatever he needed to say, it was going to open wounds that hadn't healed right the first time.
But running didn't help. Running just meant you carried the weight somewhere else.
I got out of the truck.
The front door opened before I reached it. Daniel stood there in jeans and a flannel that made him look more human than Alpha, though the weight in his eyes said he hadn't figured out how to separate the two anymore.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, stepping back to let me in.
I nodded and walked past him into the house that smelled like coffee and old wood and pack that made my wolf stir with recognition even when my human brain couldn't place the details.
The living room was exactly how I didn't remember it. Furniture that looked lived-in but cared for, pictures on the walls showing faces I should know, a fireplace that probably got used in winter. Normal. Domestic. The space people built when they had lives instead of survival.
I stood in the middle of it and felt like an intruder.
“You eat yet?” Daniel asked, already heading toward the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
“No.”
“Good. I'm making breakfast. You still like your eggs scrambled or did thirty years change your taste in everything?”
“Scrambled's fine,” I said.
Daniel nodded and started pulling things out of the fridge. Eggs, cheese, butter, bread that looked homemade. He moved through the kitchen with the ease of someone who'd done this a thousand times, and I stood there watching him cook like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Maybe for him it was.
“You remember Mom used to burn toast every single morning?” Daniel asked, cracking eggs into a bowl. “Like clockwork. Didn't matter how many times Dad adjusted the toaster settings. She'd get distracted talking and next thing you know the smoke alarm's going off.”
I tried to picture it. A woman at a stove, smoke rising from a toaster, the sound of an alarm piercing through morning quiet.
The image wouldn't form. Just blank space where a memory should have been.
“No,” I said.
Daniel's hands stilled on the whisk. Then he kept going, beating the eggs harder than before.
“She'd just laugh it off. Scrape the burnt parts into the sink and act like she'd done it on purpose. Said it added character.”
I leaned against the counter. Watched him work and tried to feel anything except empty where those memories should have lived.
“You remember the time you tried to climb the oak tree out back?” Daniel asked, pouring the eggs into the pan. “The big one with the branch that went horizontal about fifteen feet up?”
“No.”
“You made it about ten feet before you got stuck. Too scared to go up, too scared to come down. Just hung there yelling for help until I had to climb up and talk you through getting back to the ground.”He glanced at me, half-smiling.
“You were pissed at me for a week after. Said I made you look like a coward in front of your wolf.”
“That sounds like me,” I said, which wasn't the same as remembering but was the best I could offer.
Daniel's smile faded. He turned back to the stove, stirring the eggs.
“You used to steal my flannels,” he said after a moment. “Drove me crazy. I'd go looking for my favorite shirt and find it in your room, smelling like your wolf instead of mine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And when I'd call you on it, you'd just shrug and say mine were more comfortable. Like that justified grand larceny.”
The corner of my mouth twitched despite the weight in my chest. “Did I give them back?”
“Never. I had to physically take them back. Which led to wrestling matches that usually ended with Mom yelling at both of us to take it outside before we broke something.”
He plated the eggs. Added toast that wasn't burnt, poured coffee that smelled better than anything I'd managed in my apartment. Set it all on the small kitchen table and gestured for me to sit.
Daniel took the chair across from me, and for a few minutes we just ate in silence.
The eggs were good. Perfectly seasoned, cooked just enough that they were still soft.
The toast was warm, butter melting into the grain.
Normal breakfast. Normal morning. Like we did this all the time instead of just now, just today, just this fragile attempt at being brothers again.
“You remember the summer we found that cave system in the north woods?” Daniel asked, breaking the silence. “Spent three days exploring before Mom figured out where we were and nearly had a heart attack?”
I tried to pull it up. A cave. Darkness. The smell of damp stone and earth. The feeling of being underground with Daniel somewhere nearby.
The fragments wouldn't connect into anything whole.
“Bits,” I said. “Not enough to make a complete picture.”
“We got lost on the second day. Took a wrong turn and ended up in a section that went deeper than we'd planned. I was trying to act like I knew where we were going, and you just looked at me and said, 'You're full of shit, but I'll follow you anyway.'”
Despite everything, I felt my chest tighten with recognition. Not the memory itself, but the feeling underneath. The certainty that Daniel would get us out, get us home, get us through whatever we'd gotten ourselves into.
“That sounds right,” I said.
Daniel's hands tightened on his coffee mug. “You trusted me completely. Never questioned it. Even when I was making it up as I went along, you just... followed.”
I looked up at the shift in his voice.
“I didn't deserve that trust,” Daniel said quietly. “Not then. And definitely not after.”
“After what?”
“After I stopped looking for you.” His voice went flat. “After I let them convince me you were dead and I gave up.”
The room went quiet except for the sound of wind pushing at the windows.
“They told me there'd been a raid,” Daniel continued. “During a scouting mission near the eastern border. Rogues hit the patrol. There was a fight. Bodies everywhere. They found someone burned beyond recognition and decided it was you.”
My hands stilled on my coffee mug.
“They had a funeral,” Daniel said. “Burned what was left. Told me I needed to stop searching because you were gone and I was going to destroy myself if I didn't let go.”