Chapter 2 #2
The forest tears past, wet earth flying under my paws, branches whipping at my flanks.
I push harder, faster, until my lungs scream and there’s no room left in my skull for anything but the next stride.
This is the only quiet I ever get. The wolf doesn’t grieve.
He just runs. For a while I get to be only him: four legs, breath, the dark.
Daniel’s face tries to surface. Hannah’s.
The things I walked into ten years ago. I can leave all of it behind me if I run fast enough.
But my paws know this ground better than I do, and they take me where they always end up.
I slow at the tree line, and I stop.
The house waits in the clearing ahead, half swallowed by ten years of growth.
Vines have climbed the porch rail and split the steps.
The windows are dark, empty holes where the glass used to be.
Grass stands waist-high where Daniel used to park his truck.
The path to the front door has vanished under weeds and moss.
I’ve never set foot inside, not once, not since that night.
I stand at the edge of the woods with the drizzle beading on my coat. I look at the house, and everything I outran catches up at once. Ten years, and the loss still sits in my chest like the night it happened. I can’t make myself cross the clearing. I never can.
The wolf in me goes still. A low sound builds in my throat before I know it’s coming.
I tip my head back and let it climb out of me, long and raw, breaking into the wet dark over the trees.
Grief, maybe. Or something older with no name to it.
From across the territory, the pack answers, one voice and then a second, then a third, the sound lifting until the whole valley hums with it, until I’m not howling alone out here.
I never am. That’s the one mercy of a pack.
You don’t face the worst of it by yourself, even when you want to.
I turn to go before the ache can root any deeper.
A big silver wolf eases out of the trees behind me, gone gray at the muzzle, amber eyes catching the dark. He presses his shoulder against mine, solid and warm, and I lean into the contact before I can think better of it.
We shift together, bone folding back into a man’s frame. Uncle Nathaniel is sixty now, silver through and through, still broad across the chest, moving with the easy authority of an alpha who’s held the seat a long time. That warm, crinkle-eyed look I’ve known all my life settles on me.
“You rarely go to that side,” he says.
“Felt like it tonight.” I drag a hand down my face. “Couldn’t make myself go in, though. Don’t have the strength for that part.”
He follows my gaze to the dark hulk of the house. “You shouldn’t let it fall to ruin like this. Say the word and I’ll send a few of the pack to keep it standing. It’s no trouble to me, Marcus. It never has been.”
I don’t answer. I just look at the dark windows.
“Bella will want to come up here one day, you know. To see where she came from.”
“No.” The word comes out hard. “I don’t want her anywhere near this place. I don’t want her smelling her parents’ blood. It might have dried, but the smell still lingers.”
He lifts his hands, conceding the point without pressing it. “All right. All right.”
We turn from the house and start back through the trees, the drizzle ticking against the leaves above us.
For a while, neither of us speaks. The clearing falls away behind us.
He walks close, his shoulder near enough to brush mine, and I let the quiet stretch, glad of the company even when I won’t say so.
Then he breaks it, his voice gone softer. “She’s growing up faster than you want to admit, that girl. She needs a mother, Marcus. A girl her age needs one.”
“She has me. I’ve been mother and father both to her for ten years. We’ve done all right.”
We have done all right. Still, there are nights she asks about Hannah, soft questions I don’t have a good answer to, and I hold her until she falls back asleep. I keep that to myself.
He sighs, the sound heavy with affection, and settles a hand on my shoulder.
“I know how much you love her. I’d never ask you to let a stranger walk into Hannah’s place.
But there are things a girl turns to a woman for, things you and I can’t give her no matter how we try.
Let me make some introductions. Good women. Our own.”
“No. Thank you.” I reach past him for my clothes as we reach the placed I’d left them and begin pulling them on. “I don’t have room in my life for a woman, Uncle. Bella is my whole world. Every hour I’m not coaching, I’m hers, and that’s how I want it.”
He shakes his head. “You need a mate at some point, Marcus. You need a woman of your own. You can’t keep living like this.”
“I gave up being alpha, despite being born to it. I handed the seat to you for Bella’s sake without a second thought. If I can live without that, I can live without a mate.”
“And when she’s grown?” he presses, gentle as ever. “When she finds her own life and leaves you to rattle around that house alone?”
“Then I’ll deal with it. For now, it’s all Bella.”
His brow furrows, worry threading through the warmth. “You can’t go that long untouched, son. You know what it does to one of us. A wolf left too long on his own starts to come apart at the edges. I’ve watched it happen to better men than you.”
“I get what I need.” I roll my shoulders. “From you. From the pack.” A beat. “From women who want exactly as little from me as I want from them. Our females want a mate, a claim, a forever I can’t give. Human women don’t ask for any of that. They’re simpler about it.”
He doesn’t care for that answer. I watch it cross his face, the quiet disapproval he’s much too gracious to speak aloud. But he holds his tongue, only clapping my shoulder once before he steps back toward the trees.
“Bring Bella over this weekend,” he says. “I miss her.”
I smile at that. “I can guarantee she’s missed you more. You’re her favorite grandfather.”
He laughs, low and warm. “If your father were alive, I doubt I’d hold that title for long.” He says it lightly, no weight to it, already turning for the dark.
I head back toward the house alone, the drizzle cooling on my bare skin. Somewhere between the tree line and my own door, a pair of furious brown eyes rises in my mind, narrowed at me over a curb full of ruined groceries, the woman soaked through, snapping at me for the simple crime of helping her.
My mouth tugs up before I catch it.
I let out a breath, shake my head at myself, and go inside.
Raising a child isn’t easy. Especially when their confidence isn’t all that great.
Bella hates coming to the park because nobody will play with her.
Shifter children play rougher, and she doesn’t like it.
That leaves the human kids. But some part of them senses the predator lurking dormant inside her, and they keep their distance.
Leaning against an oak tree, I watch her drift toward the swings, and I feel like a monster when I catch her downcast face.
I know she doesn’t want to be here. But I want her to learn to fit in with kids her own age.
She loops a dandelion chain around her wrist, content enough on her own, and something in me aches at the sight.
I’d take on anything for that kid. I just don’t know how to hand her a friend.
Then a girl in a red jacket trots up to her.
I straighten off the tree. Bella goes still, wary, slow to trust a stranger. The girl says something and holds out her hand. For a long moment, Bella only looks at it. Then she takes it. The two of them bolt for the swings, and I’m left blinking at the space where my lonely niece used to be.
I stay against my tree, arms crossed, and let myself enjoy it. Bella pumps her legs, laughing, real and loud, chasing the other girl higher. I can’t remember the last time I heard her sound like that.
“Attagirl,” I whisper proudly. “See? That wasn’t very hard.”
She falls.
One second she’s twisting off the swing, the next she’s down in the wood chips, clutching her knee. I’m already moving, three strides in, when a woman beats me to her.
I freeze as she drops into a crouch, a long coat pooling around her, her back to me.
The other girl hovers at her elbow. There are too many kids screaming across this park for me to make out a word she says, but I watch her dig something out of her bag, take Bella’s knee in one hand, and clean the scrape with a careful sweep.
It’s nothing, a graze, gone by morning. She doesn’t know that, and she wipes it gently and thoroughly, careful with a stranger’s child.
Then she stands, takes both girls by the hand, and starts walking them off.
My feet move again. I don’t like a stranger leading Bella anywhere. But they only go as far as the ice cream cart, where the woman buys two cones and crouches to hand them down. Bella’s grinning so widely I can see the gap in her teeth from here.
The woman turns, and my wolf makes a small sound.
It’s the woman from the road. Jessa.
She’s laughing at something one of the girls said, and my breath catches at how mesmerizing she looks.
My gaze snags on the soft pink of her mouth, the crease at the corners of her brown eyes, the loose strands the wind has pulled across her cheek.
I want to close the distance just to stand near her.
I cross the grass over to them. Bella spots me and lights up. “Dad!”
Jessa glances up at the call, and then she sees me, and whatever was on her face falls away. Something flickers behind her eyes, close to fear, and she pulls her daughter in against her hip. I don’t know what to make of it. I pretend I don’t see it.
“We meet again.” I slide my hands into my pockets and stop in front of her.
Her gaze cuts quickly between Bella and me.
Bella comes to stand by me, and I ruffle her hair as she licks her cone.