Chapter 5 Rory #2
My heart stopped. Then restarted with a painful thud against my rib cage, sending me lightheaded. My fingers froze over the screen, suddenly numb.
Edina Thorne.
Otherwise known as “Mother” if I was feeling polite, which I definitely wasn’t.
I blinked, convinced I was hallucinating. Maybe the hangover was worse than I thought. Maybe I was still asleep in Maxwell’s bed, drooling on his shoulder. But no—her name remained on the screen, stark and unmistakable.
She hadn’t contacted me in years. Not when I was sleeping rough in Glasgow. Not when I moved to London. Not even a text on my birthday.
Why now?
There was no voicemail. Did she… butt dial me? The thought was almost laughable. Edina Thorne, with her calculated movements and rigid self-control, accidentally calling her disappointment of a son? Not bloody likely.
My thumb hovered over her name. I could call her back. Find out what she wanted after all this time.
My stomach twisted into knots. Had someone else died? What if she’d finally decided to apologise? What if—
No. I couldn’t think about her and what she may or may not have to say to me. I had an ex-boyfriend to find. Dead or alive, Dev was out there somewhere, and I was sitting in my car staring at my mother’s name like a lost puppy.
I tapped Priya's name.
be ready in 10, I’m picking you up
Priya replied almost immediately.
it’s a saturday and I don’t operate before noon
I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel, considering my options. Flynn would be up for adventure, but he’d tell Seb straight away, the little snake.
A lump formed in my throat as Issac’s face flashed through my mind.
My partner in crime would have been all over this—already formulating some fabulous plan involving disguises and possibly explosives.
But Issac was gone. Dead. No matter how many times I insisted otherwise, the reality was that I’d never again get one of his three a.m. texts with some half-baked scheme.
I swallowed hard and started the car. Kit it was, then.
My brother had just gotten back from his Saturday run when I walked in the door, still in his ridiculous compression leggings and sweat-wicking top. Healthy bastard.
After the turbulent events of last night and this morning, it was a relief to be back with him.
Our bond hummed between us, subtle but present.
When I’d left my pack, all the bonds with my family members and everyone else had snapped like dry twigs, painful and final.
But the thread between Kit and me had somehow survived, stretched thin but never breaking.
Not a proper pack bond, but something else—fragile yet surprisingly resilient.
From the way Kit’s eyes widened, I must have looked a state. His gaze travelled from my dishevelled hair to Maxwell’s oversized shirt hanging off my frame.
“Maxwell texted me last night,” Kit said, crossing his arms.
I groaned, slumping against the wall. “What the fuck did he say? That I was a fucking moron, and he hates me?”
“No, that your phone was dead, and he’d brought you back to his flat because you were unwell.” Kit raised an eyebrow. “I can see he sugarcoated it. I take it spending an evening together hasn’t magically fixed your feelings towards him?”
I thought about waking up wrapped around him, how warm he’d been, the scent of his skin. My stomach did a weird little flip thing that had nothing to do with the hangover.
“He still despises me, yeah,” I muttered, looking away.
“Hold on… is that his shirt?”
“I lost my one, so I borrowed his. He’s making me wash it for him. Because he hates me.”
“Rory, you’re the one who talks to him like he’s a piece of shit.”
“But he—”
“Stop. We’re not rehashing the night he arrested you for the millionth time. I’ll go grey.” Kit ran a hand through his hair in frustration.
“You’re already turning grey.” I pointed to a grey hair nestled in his beard.
“Well, whose fault is that?” Kit shot back, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Anyway, how did it go?”
I filled him in on everything, including the fact that Maxwell said I now had to wait for him to ring Seb, adding in an eye roll for good measure.
“But I want to go to Meridian this morning. Just to check it out.”
Kit’s expression darkened. “Rory, no. What do you mean ‘check it out?’ It’s not like we’re going to be able to see Dev banging on the attic window shouting for help.”
“I just want to stand on the road outside it,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “To see what CCTV cameras there are, and stuff.”
“We can just ask Felix for that!”
I shook my head, wincing as my hangover protested the movement. “It’s Saturday. Seb says we’re not allowed to make him do stuff for us on Saturdays.”
That was true, but not the whole truth. The reality was more complicated, more gut-level than I could articulate. I needed to see the building with my own eyes, feel its presence. Maybe then I’d know if Dev was in there. Wolves have instincts about these things, after all. Probably.
Kit let out a groan that seemed to come from the depths of his soul. “This is a terrible idea.”
“Fine. I’ll go alone, then.” I straightened up from the wall, summoning what little dignity I could muster in my borrowed shirt and day-old jeans.
“You’re still half drunk.”
“Am not.”
“Your eyes are bloodshot, and you smell like a distillery exploded inside a nightclub.”
I gave him my best pleading look. “Kit, please. I need to do this. For Dev. I promise I’ll shower first.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then his shoulders slumped in defeat. “Fine. We’ll take my motorcycle. It’ll be quicker.”
The thought of the roaring engine made my temples throb preemptively. “God, no. The noise will murder my headache. How about you drive my car?”
“Go shower and change your clothes. You look like you’re cosplaying as Theodore Maxwell’s one-night stand. It’s disturbing.”
Twenty minutes later, I found myself a passenger in my own car again.
Kit always preferred taking the wheel rather than experiencing what he called my “fairground ride” driving style.
The radio hummed with some indie rock station, and I tapped my foot to the beat, partly because I liked the song, partly to channel the anxiety buzzing through me.
Kit wouldn’t tell me off for fidgeting. He never did.
My thoughts drifted back to the nightmare I’d had this morning, before I’d woken up in Maxwell’s bed.
It had been the same one I’d had for years—trapped in our manor house basement in Scotland, Dad looming over me, belt in hand.
The air damp and cold, my heart thundering so hard I thought it might burst through my ribs.
Kit hated talking about our childhood. Sometimes I wondered if he was actually even more traumatised than I was, and it was all just repressed under those fluffy cardigans and that perfect posture.
Growing up, Kit had been the golden child. The perfect one. Setting standards that I couldn’t hope to meet in my wildest dreams with my chaotic brain and inability to sit still for more than thirty seconds.
I had hated him for it. For the entirety of our teenage years, our only interactions consisted of me hurling abuse at him while Kit never replied, never retaliated, never even looked at me—pretending I was invisible.
Kit had told me years later that our father had ordered him to act that way, to “not encourage my behaviour.”
Now, Kit refused to talk about that time, quickly changing the subject or flat out refusing, saying “let’s not dig all that up now” with a tight expression that meant the conversation was over.
I took a deep breath. “I had a nightmare this morning. I was with Dad in the basement. He was about to punish me again.”
Kit grunted, sucking in his lips.
“Did he ever punish you down there?” The question had been burning inside me for years.
“Sometimes,” Kit said, his voice flat.
He reached forward and turned the radio up, drowning out any possibility of further conversation.
Annoyance prickling through me, I reached over and turned the radio down. Something about the morning—maybe the hangover, maybe the worry about Dev, maybe too much time with Maxwell—had cracked something open in me.
“Kit, do you remember the moment you found out Dad was dead? How did you feel?”
His head whipped around, his eyes wide with shock. The car swerved slightly before he corrected it.
“Can you just leave all that stuff?” he snapped, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. “It’s early and I’m trying to drive.”
Resisting the urge to tell him I had a missed call from Mum, I turned away, staring out the window at the grey London morning. Buildings blurred past as we drove, my reflection ghostly in the glass.
I remembered so clearly the day Kit left home at twenty-three to join the military as part of a small, highly classified shifter unit. Mum had screamed, Dad had roared. Our father had explicitly forbidden it, but Kit went anyway. Broke his pack bonds by doing so.
He never said goodbye to me. Just… vanished.
For a while, I’d been happy. With perfect Kit out of the way, having disappointed and betrayed them so thoroughly, surely my parents would finally see me? Love me? Accept me as I was?
I was wrong.
Everything got worse. Suddenly I was the future alpha of the pack, the only son left. They needed me to finally buckle down and be the wolf they knew I could be. No more “ADHD rubbish,” no more acting out, no more being myself.
It went so badly that eventually I left too, after my father threatened that if I did so, I’d never be welcome back again.
Barely twenty and sleeping rough in Glasgow, trying to find a new pack that would take me in.
No one wanted the Thorne pack rebel, though.
I’d snapped the tethers that bound me to my family, and found nothing to replace them with.
Until Kit found me, and whisked me off to London. Until Killigrew Street. Until Seb. Until Issac, Priya, and now Felix and Flynn.