Chapter 34 Mo
Mo
Darius is back.
I’m at the kitchen table, two days later, eating breakfast, when the front door opens, and he walks in. He looks rough. Thinner than before, stubble thicker, dark circles under his eyes like he hasn’t slept in days. His clothes are dirty, and there’s sawdust in his hair and on his arms.
He stands in the doorway and looks at me.
Nobody moves for a second. Archer lowers his coffee. Elias stops mid-chew. Silas is still watching from the counter.
“I need you all to come with me,” Darius says. His voice is quiet. Not commanding, not ordering, just pleading.
“Where?” Archer says.
“The woods. There’s something I want to show you, Blue.”
I put down my spoon. Everyone is looking at me, waiting for my reaction. There’s something in Darius’s face I haven’t seen before. Not the usual hard alpha mask. Not the brooding—he looks nervous. Darius, the pack leader who killed men at sixteen and stared down an entire coup, looks nervous.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods and turns back toward the door. We follow him out, all of us, trailing down a path I haven’t been on before. Nobody talks. We walk for about five minutes. The path curves around a ridge, and then the trees open up.
I stop walking.
A lake. Small, maybe a hundred yards across, ringed by birch and pine. The water is dark and still, reflecting the trees and the sky so perfectly that it looks like two forests stacked on top of each other.
And on the near side, set back just enough from the water to be sheltered by the trees, is a cabin.
It’s small. One room, from the look of it, with a sloped roof, a little porch, and windows that face the lake.
The wood is old, weathered to grey in some places, but there are patches of new lumber where someone has replaced boards and reinforced the frame.
The porch has been rebuilt. Fresh wood, still pale, not yet darkened by the weather.
Darius has stopped ahead of us, standing at the edge of the treeline. He’s looking at the cabin, not at me, and his shoulders are tight.
“This was my parents’ place,” he says. “My mother was an omega; she used it during her heats. My father built it for her when they first mated, so she’d have somewhere private. Somewhere that was just hers.”
He pauses. Swallows.
“After they died, nobody came out here. I couldn’t. The roof caved in a few years ago, and the inside was a mess. Animals got in. Water damage. I figured it was gone.”
He turns to look at me, and his eyes are tired and raw and completely open.
“I’ve been fixing it up. That’s where I’ve been this past week. I know the cabin with all of us is…” He stops, searching for the word. “A lot. And I know that’s my fault. The chain, the way I handled everything. I can’t undo that. But I can give you this.”
He takes a breath. “If you’d rather have your own space instead of staying in the cabin with us, this is yours. For as long as you want it. No chains. No locks. No one comes in without your permission. It’s yours, Blue.”
I stare at him. Then, at the cabin. Then back at him.
“Can I see inside?” I ask.
Darius nods and walks to the porch. He opens the door and stands aside, letting me go in first. He doesn’t follow. He stays on the porch with his hands at his sides, watching me walk through the door.
One room, as I guessed, but it doesn’t feel small.
A large bed takes up one corner, made up with thick blankets and more pillows than any reasonable person needs, which means it’s exactly the right amount.
A small kitchen along the back wall, just a counter, a sink, and a camp stove, clean and simple.
A bathroom door to the right, standing open to show a tiny shower and a toilet. A wood stove in the corner.
But that’s not what stops me.
On the windowsill, arranged in a neat row, are rocks. Different shapes and sizes, some rough, some smooth, some with stripes and veins of colour running through them. They’re not the ones I collected with Silas. These are new. Darius went out, found them, and placed them here—one by one.
I stand in the middle of my cabin.
My cabin.
“Thank you, Darius,” I say.
There’s a lump in my throat that won’t go away, no matter how many times I swallow.
He nods. “Maren replaced all the bedding, and there are some basic supplies in the cupboards.” He puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs, “I’ll leave you to it, then. Give you some privacy to settle in. It’s yours.”
His footsteps move off the porch and onto the soft ground. The others leave with him, heading back up to the main house.
I pick up one of the rocks Darius chose for me.
It’s smooth and grey, with a vein of white running through it.
I turn it over in my hands, the way I’ve turned over a thousand rocks in the last three years.
But I didn’t find this one. I didn’t carry it home in my pocket.
Darius did. He went into the woods, looked at rocks, and chose one he thought I would like.
He picked them up and carried them here for me, lining them up on this windowsill, one by one.
Darius doesn’t know about the names I give my rocks. He doesn’t know about the meeting circles or the arguments between Charly and Rocky or any of the embarrassing, lonely, stupid things I’ve done because I had no one else. But he knows I love them.
Ordinary, worthless rocks that nobody else would ever think to collect. Darius noticed and went out of his way to bring me something that he thought would make me smile. Maybe he isn’t the complete knucklehead I thought he was.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress is firm, and the blankets are soft and layered thick—the kind you could burrow into and disappear.
I pick up one of the pillows and hold it against my chest, and look out the window at the lake.
His thoughtfulness has thrown me for a loop, and a small ember within me, that I’d thought was cold and dark, sparks to life.
Darius sees me, and he’s meeting me where I am.