Chapter 19
Olivia
The second knock was even harder.
Housekeeping, I thought. Or the wrong room.
Could’ve been a stranger. I kept the chain on. As a travel nurse, I’ve had my fair share of people trying to rob or harass me. That’s why, when I opened the door, I only did so by a crack, with the bolt-and-chain still firmly in place.
What I didn’t expect was who I found there.
“Jake!”
The exclamation left me before I could stop it.
Jake stood outside in a jacket that was too light for the weather. The blanket I always saw wrapped around him at the estate was nowhere in sight. Dark circles under his eyes. He looked worse.
“Hey, Olivia,” he said, smiling softly.
I didn’t know what to say.
“What are you doing here?”
Jake’s smile grew a little wider. That same smile — warm, like he was letting me in on something. He lifted his hands. Two styrofoam cups with coffee sleeves.
“I told them I was going out for a walk,” he said. “Thought you might need some proper coffee. Highway caffeine is lethal business.”
I sniffled. Jake said nothing, but I knew he noticed.
“Coffee sounds great,” I said hoarsely.
I sat on the bed while Jake made himself at home in the monoblock chair next to the plastic table. We didn’t immediately speak, choosing to drink in silence. We both needed a second. Especially since I had no idea what to say to him, or what he was going to say to me.
He spoke first. “How are you doing?”
I almost laughed in irony.
“I’ve been better,” I settled on. “And you? Pains getting any better?”
“Actually, yeah,” he said. “I might get used to this whole wolf thing. Being able to sprint at superhuman speed on all fours after you’ve been bedridden forever is very cathartic.”
I managed a smile.
A notification lit up on my phone screen. Daisy from the agency, asking how the contract was going. I turned it face-down.
Jake glanced outside to where my car was, then at the bags by the door. “So,” he said. “Where were you thinking of going? After, I mean.”
“I haven’t gotten that far.”
“Right.”
The conversation lapsed. Outside, a truck hissed and honked as it pulled into one of the empty gas station pumps. Jake turned his cup in a slow circle on his knee, watching his own hands. He didn’t have the blanket to fiddle with anymore, and it showed. He exhaled.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Jake, you don’t have to—”
“I do!”
I didn’t think I’d ever seen him that adamant.
“I should’ve told you,” he murmured. “I knew and I…”
“Jake.” I kept my voice even. “That wasn’t your call. It was Caleb’s.”
Saying Caleb’s name out loud came with no anger this time. I didn’t know if it was because I’d already turned it over all day, or if Jake’s company had just softened the edges of it again.
Jake finished his coffee and set the styrofoam cup on the table. It tipped. He steadied it.
“I know,” he said. “That doesn’t change how bad I feel about it.”
“It’s okay, Jake.” I breathed out. “What’s done is done.”
The quiet between us shifted. This one stayed.
“I missed you,” I said. “For whatever that’s worth.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
Jake began tapping the table slowly, looking out. The sky outside had gone darker. Then he straightened, and the lightness dropped out of his voice the way it did when he meant business.
“Okay,” he said. “I also came here to say something else. I’m not here to beg, and I’m not here to guilt you into going back. Whatever you decide after this is yours. I just want you making it with the full picture.”
“People keep saying that to me.”
“I know.” He slid his chair a little closer to the bed, the way he used to close the distance when we were going over his charts and he wanted to see. “You know me. You can trust me. I have nothing to gain from hiding anything from you.”
I thought about it.
Jake may have kept Caleb’s secrets, but there was one thing he’d never managed: hiding how he actually felt.
Not for long. His worry showed up on his face.
His relief did, too. His happiness practically announced itself from across the room.
I’d been able to laugh with him, listen to him, and feel whatever was between us as something real — not managed, not performed.
I swallowed and nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “You can tell me.”
Jake told me about the other side of the bond.
When Caleb had explained it to me the morning after the attack, he’d described what proximity did for both of them — the strength, the awareness, the way the connection deepened the closer they were. I’d never asked what happened on the other end of that. I hadn’t wanted to.
“When you left,” Jake said, “it hit him hard. He’s not just missing you. He’s losing the life force he put into you seven years ago. When you two were apart before, the drain was slow. You didn’t know about any of it, the bond was never fully acknowledged, so the connection was… muted. But now?”
He shook his head.
“It’s draining him.”
I pressed my hand against my forehead.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “After everything, he’s still hiding things from me.”
“He did it because he didn’t want you to feel guilty,” Jake said. His voice didn’t waver. “He’d rather die with you free than live with you there for the wrong reason.”
“Well, he shouldn’t be deciding for me beforehand!”
I sounded angry. The only thing I could actually feel was my heart doing something unsteady in my chest. Without even seeing Caleb, I could feel my body tighten the way it had the first morning I’d found him in the grass.
Is it the bond? I thought. Or is it just me? I couldn’t tell anymore. I wasn’t sure that distinction was as clear as I’d wanted it to be.
I tried to slow my breathing down.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” I asked. “About the drain, about what leaving would do to him — why didn’t he just… say it?”
Jake looked at the wall. He thought about it, the way he took most things seriously underneath all that warmth. When he answered, the words came slowly.
“Because it would’ve felt like asking you to stay.”
The words sat there.
I thought about every time Caleb stepped back when he could have stepped forward.
The story at the fireplace, the wolf who kept his mate without ever asking what she needed.
The morning in the kitchen when he’d passed close enough to touch and chosen not to.
Every exit he’d quietly left open for me, all the way up until the moment he’d told me I was free to go knowing it might kill him.
It should have made me angry.
I couldn’t find the anger.
“That’s not all,” Jake said.
He gave me the rest of it then — the Voss pack, the mobilization, how they’d figured out I’d left and were drawing in across the estate while Caleb was vulnerable.
“They know we’re weaker without him,” Jake said. “Donovan and Stella are already with him. I’ll be joining them shortly. But they’re banking on using Caleb’s condition to win, and the Voss pack knows as long as they haven’t technically crossed the line yet, our hands are tied.”
“What about allies? You mentioned them before.”
“Not fast enough,” he said. “Even if I could reach them tonight, they wouldn’t make it in time.”
He paused.
“It will be dangerous if you go back,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”
“It’s… a lot,” I murmured.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t fix what happened,” I said. “I can’t just go back. How do I know things will actually be different this time?”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not asking you to. I can’t promise they will.”
He reached into the satchel he had wrapped around him and pulled something out. The mythology and lore book from the Ashwood library.
“You left it behind,” he said. “I saw it on your nightstand.”
“But that’s from the library,” I said.
Jake smiled. “It’s yours now. Footnotes and all.”
I took it and held it to my chest.
Jake cleared his throat. “You know, there’s something all those stories taught me.” He turned the empty styrofoam cup slowly between his palms. “Things don’t change unless someone moves first. I think having you at the estate was slowly teaching my brother that.”
He glanced at the window. The light had changed while we’d been talking — not brighter, but different, the flat grey that comes just ahead of dawn.
He stood slowly.
“I need to get back,” he said. “Traffic’s going to be awful. And they’ll need me soon.”
“Of course.” I stood too. “You’ll be careful?”
“I’d hate to get myself injured and give my favorite nurse a reason to come back out of professional obligation,” he said. The joke landed a little unevenly, the way jokes do when both people know the stakes underneath them.
I walked him to the door.
We stopped in the frame, and neither of us said anything for a moment.
I looked at him — the circles under his eyes, the jacket that wasn’t warm enough, the boyish way he’d always carried himself even when he was in pain.
He’d been the easiest person in that house to be around from day one.
He’d made the whole thing survivable, and I didn’t think I’d ever told him that.
“Take care of yourself,” I said.
“You too.” He stepped out and turned back once, the way he always did, like he wanted to make sure the moment closed right. “I hope me coming here wasn’t a bother.”
“It was the best thing all day.”
Jake smiled one more time.
He paused.
“I just thought you should know who you’re leaving,” he said.
My throat closed.
The door clicked shut.
I stood there and listened to his footsteps go down the hall, the push of the exit door at the end of the corridor, and then his car pulling out of the lot and back onto the road. The sound faded.
Then nothing. Homesickness hit hard.
I sat back down on the bed.
The laptop was still in my bag. I pulled it out and set it on my knees, the staffing agency page still open from earlier. Four cities. Contracts available. The cursor blinked in the search field.
My fingers didn’t move.
I knew how to leave. I’d done it enough times that it felt automatic.
I couldn’t stay in this motel room forever.
And I can’t go back, I reminded myself. No matter how much it hurt, whatever obligation I had to them was over.
I looked at the book Jake had given me, still in my hand. I lifted it to my face without really deciding to.
It smelled like the fireplace. Wood smoke.
Paper. I’d read aloud to Jake from books like this one on the nights when he was in too much pain to sleep.
He’d listened with his eyes closed and corrected my pronunciations of the local names, and I’d pretended to be annoyed, and it had been one of the better things I’d done in a long time.
I set the book on the nightstand. I tidied Jake’s empty cup next to it.
I thought about what choosing meant.
Not drift into it the way I’d drifted into every city since I was eighteen.
Not let grief make the decisions while you keep your hands busy with the practical work of moving.
Not stay somewhere because leaving got complicated, or leave because staying required something you weren’t sure you had.
An actual choice — both hands on it, clear-eyed about the cost, no future version of yourself left to say you didn’t know what you were walking into.
When did I ever actually make a choice for my own life?
I picked up assignments because they were available. Left cities when contracts ended, one clean handoff to the next, no gap wide enough to fall into and actually feel anything. I’d kept moving because motion had felt, for a very long time, like the same thing as being okay.
“Seven years,” I murmured.
I thought about what I wanted to do with the next seven.
I looked at the state I’d been in before Jake knocked. The soggy pillow. The laptop I’d opened without being able to type a single destination into it.
I’d told myself I had nothing here.
I looked at the book.
I thought about what Jake had said.
That wasn’t true. There was something. The question was whether I was too scared to go back and reclaim it.
I closed the laptop. I lay back on top of the covers without unpacking. I stared at the ceiling in the dark for a long time.
I didn’t sleep. But the restlessness I’d felt all night had changed quality. It was the kind that kept you up because you’d already figured out what you were going to do, and you were just waiting for it to be morning.