Chapter 24 - Kit #2
My father. Standing there in the shadows like some bloody ghost made flesh.
The man who’d raised me to believe that duty came before everything—before happiness, before love, before your own beating heart.
The man whose disappointment had carved itself so deep into my bones that even now, over a decade later, it still ached.
He looked older. Thinner. The broad shoulders that had once seemed capable of holding up the entire Highland sky now curved inward. His hair had gone completely grey, and there were new lines carved around his eyes—deep grooves that spoke of pain I couldn’t begin to imagine.
But it was definitely him. The same stern mouth. The same piercing stare that had always seen straight through me, finding every weakness, every failing, every moment I’d fallen short of what a Thorne should be.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised. We’d gained intelligence, passed on from White, that Greywatch had him. That he was not in fact dead, buried deep in the ground where he couldn’t hurt us anymore.
But knowing something intellectually was different from seeing it. Different from having the demon of your childhood standing three metres away, wearing clothes that weren’t his own and staring at you like something that had crawled out of your worst nightmare.
My father—the man who’d commanded respect from every wolf in the Highlands, who’d never bent the knee to anyone or anything—had been reduced to this. A weapon in someone else’s hands.
I couldn’t bear the silence any longer. I forced myself to speak, a raspy, “Hello,” leaving my throat.
He didn’t respond. Just kept staring at me with those pale eyes that had haunted my dreams for years. They looked different now, though. Distant. Like he was staring through me rather than at me, as if I were nothing more than a projection on the wall behind my head.
The silence dragged on until I wanted to scream.
Until the wolf in me started pacing again, agitated by the wrongness of this entire situation.
When I’d left home, I’d severed my pack bonds—a necessary amputation that had nearly killed me.
But seeing him now, I could feel phantom echoes of what we’d once shared, like phantom pain from a missing limb.
A strangled sound escaped his throat. Not quite a whimper, not quite a growl. Something caught between human and wolf that made every hair on my arms stand on end.
Then, finally, he spoke.
“Chris-to-pher.”
The name rolled off his tongue in a voice that was his but wasn’t—vowels drawn out like toffee, consonants sharp as broken glass. There was something mechanical about it. Like his throat and tongue weren’t working properly.
Christopher.
For a moment, I didn’t even recognise it as my name.
The syllables felt foreign, like he was calling for someone else entirely.
Someone who’d died the day I walked out of our Highland home with nothing but a rucksack and the clothes on my back.
I hadn’t been called Christopher in… forever.
Even my mother had eventually given in to my insistence on Kit when I was fifteen.
But he’d never accepted it. Never called me anything but Christopher, no matter how many times I asked him.
It was childish, he’d said. A phase I’d grow out of once I stopped being so bloody stubborn and accepted my responsibilities.
“Da?” The word slipped out before I could stop it. “What did they do to you?”
Even as I asked the question, I knew I didn’t want to hear the answer. Because the man standing in front of me—this hollow shell wearing my father’s face—wasn’t the same person who’d raised me.
Whatever Greywatch had done to him, whatever they’d broken and rebuilt, he was something else now.
Something that made my stomach clench and my wolf whine in the back of my skull.
His mouth opened again, but nothing came out except that same strangled sound. A wet clicking, like his tongue was trying and failing to form words. His jaw worked uselessly, muscles twitching under skin that had gone grey-pale.
I’d seen plenty of trauma responses in my time. Soldiers who couldn’t speak after what they’d witnessed. Men who’d come back from missions with their minds shattered, their words locked away somewhere they couldn’t reach.
But this was different.
The way his eyes tracked me but didn’t see me. The mechanical quality to that single word he’d managed. The complete absence of recognition, even though he’d said my name—Christopher, the name he’d insisted on using like a claim of ownership.
My stomach went cold.
Rory had told us about Scotland. About what they’d done to Dev—his ex-boyfriend turned into a weapon. He’d attacked Rory without hesitation, without recognition.
Fuck.
This wasn’t just captivity. Wasn’t just imprisonment or even torture.
They’d done to him what they’d done to Dev. To all those other wolves Rory saved.
My father—the demon of my childhood, the man I’d spent years trying to escape—had been turned into a puppet. A weapon in someone else’s hands, with all the strings leading back to Greywatch.
I couldn’t remember if Rory had mentioned Dev speaking during the attack. I didn’t think so. Maybe speech was too complicated for whatever they’d done to them. Too many neural pathways to override, too much conscious thought required to form coherent sentences.
Or maybe they just hadn’t needed their weapons to talk.
My father’s eyes tracked my movements as I shifted my weight, but there was nothing behind them. No recognition. Nothing that suggested Malcolm Thorne still existed somewhere inside that shell.
A memory slammed into me. The shadow I’d glimpsed in the tunnel, just before everything went dark. Tall, broad-shouldered.
“Was it you?!”
The words exploded out of me, fierce and accusatory. As if he could answer.
“Was it you who attacked me? Who brought me here?” Who took me away from everyone I love.
I shoved him hard in the chest. His arm came up automatically. Pure conditioning. Muscle memory programmed by his handlers.
The sight of it broke something inside me.
“Answer me!” I shouted, panic and fury blurring together into something that tasted like copper and felt like drowning.
My father just stared, mouth still working silently.
“What kind of sick game are you people playing?” I screamed at the ceiling. I spun around, addressing the darkness beyond the doorway, the cameras I couldn’t see but knew had to be there. “Come out, you twisted bastards! What’s the bloody point of all this? What do you want?”
The silence that answered was worse than any threat they could have spoken.
Control slipped away from me like sand through my fingers. The wolf was clawing at my chest, desperate to shift, to fight, to do something other than stand here screaming at ghosts and puppets.
Fine.
The thought blazed through me as I dropped to my knees, muscles already beginning the familiar dance of transformation. If they wanted a show, I’d give them one. Let them see what years of their own training had created.
The dart hit me right in the neck before I’d even fully committed to the shift.
Heat blazed through my veins, chemical fire racing towards my heart. My legs gave out instantly, sending me crashing to the concrete in a tangle of half-transformed limbs. My vision blurred, then doubled, then started to fade.
Through the growing darkness, my father still stood there. Still staring down at me with those empty, terrible eyes.
Still saying nothing at all.