Chapter 13
Leo
I didn't take her back to The Hive.
The idea of taking Maya—pregnant, exhausted, and emotionally raw—back to a house filled with twenty testosterone-fueled shifters felt like a violation. I couldn't do it. I couldn't expose her to the noise, the questions, or the suffocating scent of the pack.
I needed silence. I needed to hear myself think, and more importantly, I needed her to hear the truth without the world interrupting.
I drove north.
The highway turned into a two-lane road, and the two-lane road turned into a gravel track that wound its way up into the dense, untouched wilderness of the Blackwood Reserve.
The snow was falling harder here, coating the windshield in a thick white blanket that the wipers fought rhythmically to clear.
Thwack. Hiss. Thwack. Hiss.
Maya was asleep. She had passed out about ten minutes after eating the sandwich, the adrenaline crash finally claiming her. Her head rested against the cool glass of the passenger window, her breath fogging the pane. One hand rested protectively over her stomach.
I glanced at her, and the tightness in my chest—the vice grip that had been there for a week—loosened just a fraction.
She was still here. She hadn't run. She had chased me down in a snowstorm and handed me a turkey sandwich and a second chance.
I didn't deserve her. That wasn't self-pity; it was a statistical fact. I was a genetic landmine. She was a cellist with a soul made of light. But for the first time in my life, I was selfish enough to keep something I didn't deserve.
I turned the truck onto an unmarked logging trail. The tires crunched over fresh powder. We bumped along for another mile until the headlights swept over a structure looming in the darkness.
The Cabin.
It wasn't the team party house on the lake. This was the Vance family retreat. A small, A-frame structure built of dark cedar, tucked away in a valley that didn't exist on Google Maps.
I hadn't been here in three years. Not since the night I dragged my father out of here in a straitjacket.
I killed the engine. The silence rushed in, heavy and profound.
I took a deep breath, smelling the dust and the cold and the memories.
"Maya," I whispered, reaching over to brush a strand of hair from her cheek. "We're here."
She stirred, blinking groggily. She looked around at the dark woods. "Where is 'here'?"
"A safe place," I said. "Come on."
The cabin smelled of abandonment.
I unlocked the door—the key had been hidden under a loose stone for a decade—and ushered her inside. The air was stale, freezing, smelling of woodsmoke that had died years ago.
"Stay by the door," I instructed. "I need to check the perimeter."
"Leo, there's no one here," she said, hugging her coat tighter.
"Humor me."
I walked through the small space. Living room, kitchenette, loft bedroom. I checked the corners. I sniffed the air. No scents of intruders. Just dust and mice.
Satisfied, I went to the massive stone fireplace. There was a stack of seasoned wood next to it, left by me three years ago. I built a fire with practiced efficiency, the dry wood catching quickly. Within minutes, warmth began to bleed into the room, chasing away the chill.
I found a dust sheet covering the leather sofa and whipped it off, sending a cloud of motes into the firelight.
"Sit," I said. "I'll find blankets."
I went up to the loft. The bed was stripped, but the chest at the foot of it held heavy wool quilts. I grabbed two and headed back down.
Maya was standing by the fire, warming her hands. She looked small in the vast, shadowed room. She was looking at the mantelpiece.
There were no photos. I had removed them all.
"This is your place?" she asked as I draped a quilt over her shoulders.
"My father's place," I corrected. "He built it before I was born. He used to say it was the only place where the Wolf could be quiet."
"It's beautiful," she said. "Lonely. But beautiful."
"Lonely was the point."
I sat on the rug in front of the fire, my back against the sofa. I patted the space beside me.
She sat, curling her legs under her, leaning her head on my shoulder. We stared into the flames.
"Why are we here, Leo?" she asked softly. "This isn't just about privacy, is it?"
"No."
I reached for her hand, interlacing our fingers. I stared at the scar on my own knuckles—the white line from where I’d punched the mirror the night I got the Captaincy.
"You said you wanted all of me," I said, my voice low. "The man, the wolf, the fear."
"I do."
"Then you need to know what you're signing up for. You need to know why I ran."
I took a breath. It felt like inhaling glass.
"The story I tell everyone about the scar," I said, touching the jagged ridge on my chest through my shirt, "is that I got into a territorial dispute with a rival Alpha from the North Shore pack when I was a freshman.
I tell them he challenged me for a piece of territory, and I won, but he got a lucky swipe in. "
Maya turned her head, looking at me. "That's not what happened?"
"No."
I unbuttoned my shirt. I had to expose it. I had to let her see the ugliness. I pulled the fabric aside, revealing the scar that ran from my collarbone to my solar plexus. It was thick, ropey, and raised.
"My father did this," I whispered.
I felt Maya flinch. Not away from me, but in shock. Her hand came up, hovering over the skin.
"He... he attacked you?"
"He didn't mean to," I said quickly. The instinct to defend him was still there, ingrained in me. "That's the terrifying part, Maya. He loved me. He loved my mother. He was a good man. But the Feral gene... it’s not a choice. It’s a degeneration."
I looked into the fire, remembering.
"It started when I was sixteen. He got moody. Aggressive. He started forgetting things. He’d snap at small sounds.
We thought it was stress. Being an Alpha takes a toll.
But then the shifts started happening without his permission.
He’d wake up in the woods, covered in blood, with no memory of how he got there. "
Maya squeezed my hand tight. "Oh, Leo."
"We tried to hide it," I continued. "The pack can't know the Alpha is weak. If they knew, there would have been a coup. My mother and I... we covered for him. We locked him in the basement during the full moons. We lied to the council."
I swallowed hard. "But you can't cage a disease."
"The night it happened... I was eighteen. Just got accepted to Blackwood. It was a celebration. We came here. To the cabin. Just the three of us."
I closed my eyes. I could still smell the copper tang of that night.
"He snapped over dinner. Someone dropped a fork. The noise... it triggered him. He shifted. Right there in the kitchen. But it wasn't a clean shift. It was twisted. Half-man, half-wolf. Confused. Terrified."
"He went for my mother," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. "He didn't recognize her. To him, she was just... meat."
"I jumped in between them," I said. "I didn't shift. I didn't want to hurt him. I tried to talk him down. I tried to reach the dad inside the monster."
I traced the scar on my chest.
"He gutted me," I said bluntly. "One swipe. Opened me up like a fish. I hit the floor. I was bleeding out. My mom was screaming."
"And that's when I realized," I opened my eyes and looked at her. "He wasn't in there anymore. My father was dead. The thing standing over me was just a biological weapon."
"So I shifted," I rasped. "And I took him down."
"I didn't kill him," I added quickly, seeing the horror in her eyes. "But I broke him. I broke his legs to keep him from moving. I pinned him until the sedatives my mom had in her purse kicked in."
I looked down at my hands. "I had to break my own father's legs, Maya. I had to listen to him whimper while I held him down, bleeding onto the floorboards of this cabin."
The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating. The fire popped, a spark flying up the chimney.
"He's in a facility now," I finished. "A secure unit for Shifters with cognitive decline. He doesn't know who I am. He just... paces."
I turned to her fully. "That is what runs in my veins. That is the heritage I just passed to our child. I didn't run because I'm a coward, Maya. I ran because when I look at you... I see my mother. And when I look in the mirror... I see him."
I waited.
I waited for her to pull away. I waited for the look of pity, or worse, fear. I waited for her to realize that the risk was too high, that she should terminate the pregnancy and run as far away from the Vance bloodline as possible.
Maya didn't run.
She moved closer. She shifted on the rug until she was kneeling in front of me, between my legs.
She reached out and placed both hands on my chest, directly over the scar. Her palms were warm.
"You aren't him," she said fiercely.
"You don't know that," I argued. "It's genetic."
"Genetics load the gun," she said. "Character pulls the trigger."
She leaned forward, her eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that burned.
"You said he snapped because of noise? Because of stress?"
"Yes."
"Leo," she said softy. "You live in a hockey arena. You live in a frat house. You deal with more noise and stress in a day than most people deal with in a lifetime. And what do you do?"
"I hold it in."
"No," she corrected. "You channel it. You discipline it. You have spent your entire life building a fortress around that wolf so that no one gets hurt. Your father didn't do that. He let it consume him. You conquered it."
"It's exhausting," I whispered. "The fortress... it's so heavy."
"I know," she said. "That's why you have me."
She leaned in and pressed her lips to the scar.
A jolt went through me. It wasn't sexual. It was spiritual. It felt like she was kissing a war wound, blessing it.
"You are not a monster," she whispered against my skin. "You are the man who saved his mother. You are the man who stopped fighting in the arena because I asked him to. You are the man who brought me a sandwich when he was falling apart."
She pulled back, framing my face with her hands.
"And this baby?" she said, moving one hand to her stomach. "This baby isn't cursed. This baby is lucky. Because their father knows exactly what the darkness looks like, which means he knows exactly how to fight it."
I stared at her. My vision blurred.
A single, hot tear escaped, tracking down my cheek. I hadn't cried in three years. Not since that night.
"I'm terrified," I choked out.
"Me too," she admitted, tears filling her own eyes. "I don't know how to be a mom. I'm still afraid of my own mother. But we'll be terrified together."
I surged forward. I wrapped my arms around her, burying my face in her neck, holding her so tight I thought I might crush her. But she held me back just as hard.
"Thank you," I sobbed into her hair. "Thank you."
"I love you," she whispered.
"I love you. God, Maya, I love you so much it hurts."
We stayed like that for a long time, rocking slightly on the rug in front of the dying fire. The ghosts of the cabin—the violence, the blood, the shame—didn't leave. But they receded into the corners. They made room for us.
Eventually, the fire burned down to embers.
"You need to sleep," I said, my voice rough but steady. "Real sleep."
"So do you," she said.
I stood up and lifted her into my arms. She weighed nothing.
I carried her up the ladder to the loft. The mattress was dusty, but the quilts were warm. I laid her down and climbed in beside her, pulling the heavy wool over us.
It was freezing in the loft, but under the covers, tangled together, it was warm.
"Leo?" she whispered into the darkness.
"Yeah?"
"What if... what if it's a girl?"
I smiled in the dark. "Then God help the teenage boys of Vermont. Because I will have a shotgun and a pack of wolves."
She laughed. It was a sleepy, happy sound.
"And if it's a boy?"
"Then we teach him," I said quietly. "We teach him that being strong doesn't mean being silent. We teach him to play the cello. We teach him to feel."
"I like that plan."
She snuggled closer, her head on my chest, right over the scar. Within minutes, her breathing evened out.
I lay awake for a while longer, listening to the wind howl outside.
The "Third Act" of my life was coming. The Draft. The baby. The pressure.
But as I lay there, holding my world in my arms, I realized that the fortress I had built wasn't a prison anymore. It was a home.
And for the first time, I wasn't guarding it alone.
I closed my eyes and let the silence take me.
The Next Morning.
The sun was blinding off the snow.
We drove back to campus in a comfortable quiet. The panic was gone, replaced by a steely resolve.
I dropped her off a block away from her dorm—we were still keeping up appearances, barely.
"I'll see you at the game tonight?" she asked, leaning through the truck window.
"Try and stop me," I said. "I'm going to score a hat trick for the peanut."
She rolled her eyes. "Please don't call the baby 'peanut'."
"Wolf pup?"
"Better."
She kissed me and ran toward her dorm.
I watched her go, smiling.
My phone buzzed on the seat.
I picked it up. A text from an unknown number.
Unknown: Nice performance at the recital, Leo. And the cabin. Very romantic.
My blood ran cold.
Unknown: Marcus Thorne isn't the only one watching. The North Shore pack has been waiting for you to slip up. And creating a human heir? That's not just a slip up. That's a breach of the Treaty.
Unknown: See you soon, Daddy.
I stared at the phone. The world tilted.
The North Shore pack. The rivals I had lied about. The ones who actually did want my territory.
They knew.
I looked up at Maya, who was just disappearing into her building.
I had thought the biggest threat to her was me.
I was wrong.
The war wasn't inside my head anymore. It was at the gates.
And it was coming for my family.