Chapter 41 #2
Rennick’s leaning against one of the large boulders decorating the shoreline when I find him.
His boots are unlaced and planted in the damp dirt, and the faded jeans hang low on his hips with the button undone.
He looks like he dressed without thought after his patrol shift, just pulled on whatever he’d left on the back steps before heading out, and didn’t bother to fasten them properly before wandering down here to… brood, apparently.
Or plot a murder.
I honestly can’t tell—could go either way.
His eyes are fixed on the big house above us with an expression that borders on accusatory and the muscles in his jaw are tense enough I worry for the health of his molars.
He sensed me coming minutes ago, through the bond and with his enhanced senses, so I don’t bother pretending I need to announce myself.
“You know,” I tell him casually as I step right up into his space. “Just because I can be apart from you now without it causing actual physical pain doesn’t mean I want to be.”
The tension in his face and body ease the moment I press myself against his bare chest and wrap my arms around his middle.
He gathers me closer without hesitation, his arms closing around me and holding me in that desperate, almost too tight way he does that still makes my knees wobble.
The angry hum that has been coming from his side of the bond quiets for a moment.
Not because the storm inside him has passed, but because he’s stopped feeding it for a moment. Which still feels like a small victory.
His breath leaves him on a long exhale and, bit by bit, his muscles relax further beneath my palms.
“You need to stop glaring at the house like it’s the thing you’re mad at, Ren,” I murmur against his sternum after a minute of us just breathing each other in.
I stay right where I am, letting our bond do what it was made to do, stripping away any illusion that I can’t feel how he’s allowing this to eat him alive from the inside out.
“It’s not who you’re pissed at, and we both know it. ”
“I’m mad at what it represents,” he admits after a drawn-out pause where I started to think he really might not answer.
I nod against him, even though he can’t see it.
That much had been crystal clear to me since the moment we woke up with our memories restored and we were left standing in the wreckage the truth brought with it.
I stay quiet, silently encouraging him to keep going, to let it out before it drags him deeper into this spiral.
He inhales a breath that sounds like it might hurt.
“My fath—Merritt—is one of the reasons Thalassa saw the need to start the Nightingale program,” he says, each word bitter, each one clearly costing him something to say aloud.
He keeps going anyway. Good. “He’s one of the reasons you’ve spent years holding broken omegas in your hands and helping put them back together.
And he’s the reason there are so many who didn’t survive at all.
Omegas who vanished, leaving their families to question and then to mourn. No bodies. No closure.”
His voice roughens, fury grinding through gravel. I tighten my arms around him, wordlessly reminding him that he isn’t alone in these emotions.
“Their pain paid for that house,” he goes on. “The remodel and expansion of it, at least. I’ve been living there for months, calling it mine—imagining a future with you where it becomes ours—never knowing its foundation is stained with innocent blood.”
A low, vibrating sound rolls through his chest as his wolf pushes closer to the surface. I rub my chin along his sternum, drawing my scent across his skin in a slow, deliberate motion. It steadies him enough to take full control of the reins and push his wolf down.
“And it’s not just the fucking house,” he adds, quieter now, more of the fight draining out of him.
“It’s everywhere. Additions or upgrades made around the territory, paid for with money he earned by trafficking omegas for that coven.
I don’t know how we’re supposed to keep living in a place built on that.
” By the time he reaches the final sentence, he sounds lost more than anything else.
I turn my head, resting my chin against his chest and staring up at him. He dips his head so our eyes can meet.
“Then what do you want to do?” I ask gently, placing the choice where it belongs.
“What’s a solution that you can live with?
” I let the question sit between us for a beat before I continue.
“Are you talking about leaving? About abandoning the land altogether?” I offer first, knowing he needs the options laid out where he can see them and weigh each one.
“You could walk away. We can. If you truly think you can willingly leave this place, or this pack. But you have to know most of them—maybe all of them—would follow you. That means buying new land and building everything again from the ground up.” I exhale, a thin edge of humor threading through it.
“That’s not a particularly logistical plan. ”
Asking the entire pack to move—children, elders, all of them—would be a nightmare. And devastating for most since this is the only home they’ve ever known. This doesn’t even factor in the cost of rebuilding everything again in a new location.
Also, wolves aren’t especially keen on giving up their territory. Goes against the very primal nature in their bones.
His head shakes, a tired sigh coming with it. “No. We can’t just abandon it. I couldn’t ask the pack to leave their home behind like that.”
“No,” I agree with a solemn curve at my mouth because I’m relieved he’s come to the same conclusion but also heartbroken we’re having this conversation at all.
“Okay. Then do you want to go around and tear up everything you think was paid for with the dirty money? Rip out every addition, every update, and rebuild it all over again?” This idea doesn’t sound any better to my ears, but I offer it anyway.
“That will take time and money, too. It’s also wildly inefficient, not to mention wasteful, but again, if it means you can sleep at night, I’ll get on board. ”
I picture it anyway. Taking a jackhammer to the updated schoolhouse. To the little pack café that I’ve learned actually makes a decent latte. To the updates that’ve been made to the cabins where the pack members live that make life out here in the mountains more tolerable.
We’d be destroying things on principle.
Rennick is already shaking his head, seeing the ridiculousness in it himself before I’ve even finished the thought.
He shifts, lowering himself to sit on the rock so we’re closer in height, and when he pulls me with him, his cheek drops to rest on the top of my head.
“I still don’t understand why he did it,” he says, his voice going distant, his mind dragged back toward the memory. “My fath…” The word catches for a second time. He swallows it down and corrects himself. “Merritt didn’t need the money. That’s something my family has never been short on.”
I know. Everyone does. The Fallamhains have been wealthy longer than most packs have kept official records.
It’s generational wealth that predates some of the oldest trees on this land.
Over a hundred years ago, Rennick’s ancestors sold off their mineral mines in the region.
Sold them before government regulation became the standard, sold them at peak dollar and then wisely invested every dime.
The money’s been multiplying through the decades.
Merritt didn’t sell omegas because he was desperate.
He did it because there’s never enough money for people who already have too much. Because excess breeds entitlement and the world consistently rewards men like him. Enough money, enough influence, and suddenly morality becomes optional.
There was a sick kind of pleasure in it for him too.
I saw it in his eyes—the way he got off on it.
He truly believed omegas existed to serve alphas.
To be claimed. Knotted. Used at an alpha’s convenience.
And in his mind, selling them wasn’t cruelty.
It was a correction. It was him putting them back were they belonged, filling the role nature intended for them.
“You’re waiting for it to make sense, Ren,” I tell him gently, fingers tracing a swirl across his tanned pec. “It never will. Not when greed was the motive.”
“You’re right,” he relents, still sounding a little distant.
This isn’t something he’ll be able to process all at once.
It’ll take time. His relationship with his father was already an ugly, warped thing, where affection and approval came with strings attached.
But now he knows the truth—that the cruelty didn’t stop there.
It reached far beyond, further that he ever thought possible.
The truth of the past isn’t settling easy in either of us.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all, still grappling with my own quiet guilt and regret.
Mom cut her life short, tying it to Merritt’s diseased one in one last, desperate measure to save me from being killed—or worse, sold to the coven of dark witches.
A coven I now know I share blood with, a truth that makes my stomach twist every time I think about the psychopathic natures of the triplets who’d descended on Ashvale.
I’m learning to live with the harsh truth that all of it could have been avoided had I not gone out to the helicopter pad that night to see if what I saw in Merritt’s mind was real. That one reckless decision had a price and it was paid in blood.
But then again, Merritt had already decided I needed to die so I couldn’t mate with Rennick. No matter how it unfolded, there was never a version of this where we avoided a fight with the late Alpha.
But we could have possibly avoided everything else—this is a what-if scenario I’m positive will haunt me till my last breath.