Chapter Thirteen
Tobias
I haven’t set foot on clan land in six years, and driving up the familiar road toward Marlow’s territory feels stranger than I expect, like visiting a version of my own life I deliberately stepped out of, still standing exactly where I left it.
The land looks the same in almost every particular that matters, the same bend in the road where I used to race my cousins as a boy, same stretch of fence my father helped build before I was old enough to remember it going up,
and yet every mile closer feels like peeling back a layer of time I spent six years putting behind me.
Christa stayed home. We talked it through the night before, both of us agreeing that this first conversation with Marlow should happen between us alone, one old friction to clear before I bring her into a place still tangled up with six years of complicated history.
She didn’t love the idea of me going without her, I could tell, some of that old anxiety about being managed around flickering behind her eyes again before she pushed past it and told me to go, that she trusts me to handle this the right way.
I kissed her goodbye longer than the drive really warrants, some part of me reluctant to leave her even for an afternoon, even with tracker already quietly watching the roads near my land.
I trust myself too. Mostly.
Marlow meets me at the edge of his property before I even make it to the main house, like he sensed me coming the way I sensed Christa, some old bond between clan and leader that never fully fades no matter how much distance a person puts between themselves and it.
He looks older than I remember, more grey threads through a beard that had mostly been dark the last time I stood here, but his eyes haven’t changed at all, sharp and warm in equal measure, taking me in with an expression I can’t quite read.
“Tobias,” he says my name like it costs him something, some old guilt sits behind it that I didn’t fully appreciate until my mother mentioned it a few weeks back. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.” And it was, more than I expected it to be, some resentment I carried out of here six years ago dissolves faster that I once thought it would now I’m actually standing in front of the man again.
I’ve spent six years half expecting, if I ever came back, to feel the same raw ache I left with. Instead I mostly just feel tired, and a little sad for both of us, for all the years we spent apart over a misunderstanding that never needed to be one.
We walk together toward the house, I half recognise cousins that’s grown taller, a few new cubs I’ve never met tumbling in the grass near the porch, and I feel the strange, dislocating pull of a life that kept moving on entirely without me, patient and unbothered by my absence.
Nobody stares, nobody makes a show of my return.
It strikes me as I walk through it, that six years of imagining this homecoming as some kind of reckoning has been mostly my own invention.
Nobody here has been waiting to judge me. They’ve just been waiting.
Once we reach the porch, I tell him everything.
Christa, the bond, the six years of waiting finally ending on an ordinary night I still can’t fully explain to my own satisfaction, and then more soberly, the ex, the tracker, the assault I interrupted.
Marlow listens without interrupting, his jaw tightening at the parts that deserve it, and by the time I’m finished he’s gone very quiet, staring out at his own land with an expression I recognise from my own reflection more times than I want to admit these past few weeks.
“You should have come to me sooner,” he finally says. “Not about her. About the danger. I’d have sent people out immediately.”
“I know. I wanted to handle it myself first. Old habit I think, from six years of not having anyone to call.”
Something in his face softens at that, a complicated mix of understanding and regret.
“That’s partly my doing, and I know it. I pushed you into that solitude Tobias, whatever I told myself about my reasons at the time. I’ve had six years to sit with that.”
“You were trying to help. My bear wouldn’t have taken a chosen mate no matter how hard either of us tried. That’s not a thing you did to me. That’s just how it was always going to go.”
“Maybe,” he doesn’t look fully convinced, but he lets it go, some old weight easing off his shoulders regardless. “Tell me what you need. Whatever it is, it’s yours.”
We spend the better part of two hours working through it, trackers who can help monitor the roads near my land, a couple of the clan’s younger, sharper eyed members who Marlow trusts to keep watch without drawing attention,
contacts he has in the wider human world who might be able to track down where exactly her ex has gone to ground after running.
It’s more resource and manpower than I’ve had access to in six years of handling everything myself, and I feel something loosen in my chest as we talk through it, some tension I didn’t realise I was carrying alone until I’m not carrying it alone anymore.
Marlow asks careful, practical questions, the make and colour of her ex’s car, how far he had to travel to make it to my land, whether Christa had any idea what name he might be travelling under if he’s smart enough to avoid using his own.
I answer what I can, admitting where I don’t know, and watch him make mental notes with the same quiet competence I remember from my childhood, a man whose led this clan through worse crises than one frightened woman’s ex-partner and has never once, in my memory,
let a threat against his people go unanswered.
“He won’t get past this land again.” Marlow says at one point, flat and certain, and I believe him completely, the same certainty I’ve offered Christa myself, now backed by resources I didn’t have a week ago.
“Bring her,” Marlow says towards the end when the practical planning has wound down into quieter conversation. “Whenever she’s ready. I’d like to meet the woman who managed what six years and a clan’s worth of matchmaking couldn’t.”
“She’ll want that, I think. She’s been worried about being talked about instead of included. I told her this was different.”
“It is different,” Marlow’s goes firm. “Whatever guilt I carry about how things went before, that’s mine to sit with, not something I’d ever let colour how this clan treats your mate. She’ll be family here Tobais, the same as anyone born into it. That’s not a thing she needs earning. It’s just true,
the moment you decided she mattered to you.”
He pauses as he considers something and then adds quieter.
“You should know, I heard some of what she’s been through. Your mother mentioned it, carefully, the way she does. I want you to tell her, when the times right, that nobody here is going to ask her to explain herself, or prove she belongs,
or perform gratitude for a welcome she’s owed simply by being yours. She’s carried enough of that already, by the sound of it.”
I feel something in my chest settle at that in a way I didn’t expect some last, quiet fear I didn’t fully acknowledge even to myself, that bringing Christa here might mean reopening old wounds instead of healing them.
Marlow’s certainly puts that fear to rest more completely than I think he even understands.
I drive home as the light is starting to fade, replaying the whole conversation, turning over everything that has shifted in the space of an afternoon.
Six years of self-imposed distance, and it has taken less than two hours to remember exactly why I loved this place once, before grief and pressure had made staying feel impossible.
I find myself, somewhere on the long stretch of road back to my own land, already imagining Christa walking through that same clearing, meeting the cousins I walked past today, maybe holding one the cubs tumbling in the grass,
and the image settles something in my chest that has been unsettled for longer than I realise.
Christa is waiting on the porch when I pull up, and something in her face when she sees mine tells me she can read the outcome before I say a word.
“It went well.” I say climbing the steps toward her.
“Yeah?” Some of the tension I left her with that morning visibly eases out of her shoulders. “Tell me everything.”
I do, Marlow’s guilt, his offer, the trackers and the plan taking shape to keep her safe, the invitation waiting whenever she feels ready to accept it.
I tell her about the cousins I passed, the cubs in the grass, the strange, gentle realisation that six years of dreading this exact homecoming has mostly been fear of my own making.
She listens with the same careful attention she gives everything, and by the time I finish, something in her expression has shifted, some old wariness gives ground to something that looks, for the first time since I told her about clan matters at all, close to hope.
“I think I’d like to meet them,” she says. “Not right away. But soon. I want to see the place you came from. The people who made you.”
“They’re going to love you,” I say echoing the same certainty I offered her before the dinner with my parents and mean it just as completely this time. “There’s no version if this where they don’t.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
She smiles, small but real and reaches for my hand. We sit together on the porch as the last light fades, both of us feeling, for the first time in what feels like too long, the ground under us has finally stopped shifting.