Chapter 9
Brenna
Cameron waits until Willow leaves. He’s patient about it—sits on the edge of the bed in my old room, hands between his knees, watching Willow and me finish a conversation that was more ceasefire negotiation than family reunion.
When my niece finally goes, pulling the door shut behind her with a firmness that communicates everything she’s holding back, Cameron lifts his head and looks at me.
I know that expression. I raised it. The rigid shoulders and the level gaze and the careful control that means something’s about to break loose underneath.
“Okay,” I say. I pull the wooden chair from the corner and sit facing him, close enough to touch if he wants it, but not so close he feels cornered. “Go ahead.”
“Go ahead, what?”
“Whatever you need to say. I can take it.”
His hands grip each other between his knees, knuckles white. He’s working up to something, building it brick by brick the way he’s always done—Cameron doesn’t erupt, he constructs—and I wait because this is his to build.
“They told me you burned.” His voice is controlled. “The night of the fire. Greta held me back. I could see the outbuilding, the whole thing going up, and I was screaming, and she had her arms around me, and she kept saying, ‘She’s gone, baby, she’s gone.’”
I don’t look away. I owe him that. But his words gut me.
“Cam…” My voice abandons me, but it doesn’t matter. He’s still talking.
“I tried to go in. Did you know that? I shifted and tried to get through the fire, and Arlen tackled me. Pinned me in the dirt while I howled.” He swallows. “I was fifteen.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I need to make sure you actually know what that was like. Not the rational version. Not the I made a hard choice for the greater good version. I need you to know what it was like to be fifteen and watch your mother burn and smell the smoke for weeks afterward in your own hair and wake up every morning forgetting she was dead and then remembering.”
His voice cracks on the last word. Just a break, quickly masked. But I hear it, and it hurts so bad.
“I know,” I say again, because it’s the only honest answer. I do know. Not from his side; from the side of a mother who walked into the dark and heard her son screaming behind her and kept walking.
“You could have told me.” He stands up. Moves to the window. His back is to me, and his shoulders are stiff. “You could have found a way. A message, a sign, anything. I’m not stupid. I can keep a secret.”
“Cameron, baby—”
“I was taken, Ma.” He turns around, and the composure is cracking.
“Six months. They had me for six months in that place, and the whole time—the whole time—I thought you were dead. And there was nothing to get me through, you know that? Nothing. Not the hope of you coming for me. I just survived because my body kept going after my head gave up.”
The words hit me in a place beyond pain. These are words a mother never wants to hear. But the worst part is that I deserve it.
“If I’d known you were alive,” he says, “I would have had something to hold onto. One thing. Just one thing that wasn’t concrete and needles and—” He stops. Breathes through his nose. Resets. “But you decided I couldn’t have that.”
“If you’d known,” I say, and I keep my voice level now because one of us has to, “and they’d broken you—and they would have broken you, Cameron, because that’s what they do—then they would have had my location within a week.
And they would have come for me. And they would have used me to find every family I’d relocated, every safe house, every contact in the network.
The people I was protecting would have died. ”
“So I had to suffer so strangers could live.”
“So your family could live.” It sounds empty as I say it, so I go on, reminding myself of the reasons as I speak.
“The Hendricks in Louisiana… Lizzy Hendricks, she’s six years old.
The Dunns in the hill country. Old Thomas in Kentucky, who taught you to whittle when you were nine.
Those aren’t strangers. Those are your people. Your pack.”
He knows this. I can see him knowing it, the logic finding its footing even as the hurt rejects it. That’s the cruelty of being seventeen. You can understand something perfectly and feel the opposite of it at the same time.
“You didn’t trust me,” he says.
“I trusted you completely. I didn’t trust what they’d do to you.”
“Same thing.”
“It isn’t.”
“It felt the same. It feels the same.” He sits back down on the bed. The anger is still there. I can see it in the set of his mouth, the way his hands grip the mattress edge. But the initial wave has passed, and underneath it is something rawer.
“You know who came for me?” he says. “When I was in that place. When nobody knew where I was. When you were off saving everyone else.”
I go still.
“Merric.” He says the name with a weight that tells me it’s been accumulating since the day the alpha pulled him out of Aurora’s medical wing.
“He didn’t know me. He didn’t owe me anything.
But I said your name, and he helped. He drove past his own territory, brought his whole team, and brought me home.
” He looks up at me. “A stranger did what my own mother couldn’t. ”
The silence that follows has a physical quality. It sits on my chest.
He doesn’t understand. He can’t, not yet.
Can’t see the full picture of what I was doing and why, can’t measure the cost of my absence against the lives it saved.
He’s seventeen, and his frame of reference is six months of hell followed by a man who showed up when I didn’t.
Of course Merric is the hero of his story. Of course I’m the one who left.
He’s wrong. And he’s right. And I can’t untangle which is which because I’m his mother, and his pain undoes all the good I’ve ever done.
“He’s a good man, Ma.” Cameron’s voice has lost its edge, settled into something I find harder to swallow. Not defending Merric; building a case for him. “He didn’t have to do any of this. He just did it.”
I hear what’s underneath the words. My son has attached himself to Merric Rourke.
Not casually… deeply. An attachment that comes from being rescued by someone reliable when your whole world has been anything but.
I’ve seen it before, the way a broken thing bonds with the first source of safety it encounters.
But this feels like more than trauma bonding. The way Cameron orients toward Merric, the way his body settles when the alpha is nearby… There’s something instinctive in it. Something that bypasses reason and operates at the level of blood and bone.
I wonder if Cameron feels it without understanding what it means. The pull toward a man he’s known for days that shouldn’t be this strong, this fast, this certain.
I wonder if Merric feels it too.
“I’m glad he was there for you,” I say. And I mean it, even though the words burn. Even though every syllable is an admission of my own absence.
“But you don’t like him.”
“I don’t know him. Not anymore.”
“You knew him once.”
“A long time ago. People change.”
Cameron studies me. He’s too perceptive for my comfort, always has been, even as a small child. He’d watch people with those intense eyes and see things they didn’t want seen.
“He didn’t change the way you think,” Cameron says. “He’s just quiet about who he is. Like you.”
I don’t have a response that doesn’t open a door I need to keep shut, so I don’t respond.
“I’m still angry,” he says after a moment. “I need you to know that.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad you’re alive. But I’m angry. And I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”
“As long as it needs to. I’m not going anywhere.”
He nods. Stands. Walks to the door. Pauses with his hand on the frame. For a second, he looks young again. Not the scarred, sharp-eyed survivor, but the boy who used to linger in doorways at bedtime, stretching the day out because he didn’t want to let go of it yet.
“Goodnight, Ma.”
“Goodnight, baby.”
“I’m not a baby.” He leaves. The door clicks shut.
I sit in the chair for a while. The house creaks around me, settling as night falls. Through the floor, I can hear Greta moving in the kitchen below, the soft sounds of a woman putting a household to bed the way she’s done every night for decades.
I stand and cross to the window. The yard is dark below, lit only by the glow from the bunkhouse and the thin wedge of porch light.
I scan the outskirts out of habit—the tree line, the fence posts, the angles where the hills meet the cleared ground.
Then I push my awareness outward, feeling for the ward lines the way my mother taught me and her mother taught her.
They hum at the edge of my senses, faint blue threads woven through the earth along the property boundary.
Intact. Holding. But thin. Thinner than they should be, thinned by years without a strong magic-user to feed them.
Something else to fix. Something else to carry.
My eyes drift back to the yard, and I see him.
A shape on the bunkhouse steps. Elbows on knees.
Head bowed. I’d know that silhouette in pitch dark, in a crowd of a thousand, from a mile away.
The width of the shoulders. The line of his neck where it meets his back, exposed now, with his head bent forward, vulnerable in a way he’d never allow if he knew someone was watching.
I remember pressing my mouth to that exact spot.
The skin was always warmer there. He’d go still when I touched it, the way a man goes still when he’s concentrating on not losing control.
My body heats at the memory. Faint. Persistent. A warmth that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t respond to logic.
I clamp down on it. Hard.
A figure emerges from the bunkhouse behind him. The auburn-haired woman—Sienna. She sits beside him on the steps. Says something. He lifts his head. In the thin light, I can see the exhaustion in the line of his back, the way he leans slightly toward the sound of her voice.
I pull the curtain shut.
I stand in the dark room, one hand on the fabric, my heart doing something I don’t like at all. Not jealousy. I refuse to give it that word. I don’t have the right, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want it.
She’s his pack. She sits with him when the day is done. She stitched his wounds, brought him coffee, and handled the hard conversations. That’s loyalty. That’s what you build over time.
I didn’t have time. That was taken from us. But I got through it. Got stronger. Got to the point where I didn’t care.
So why does the image of a woman on a porch step feel like a verdict?
I lie down on the bed. Press my hands against the mattress where Cameron’s warmth is already fading.
My son is alive and angry. My pack is broken and wary. There’s a man in my yard whom I haven’t spoken to properly, and I’m going to have to. Soon. There are things between us that can’t be handled through briefings and assessments, no matter how much I’d prefer it.
But not tonight.
Tonight I lie in the dark, listen to the old house breathe, and try to remember the last time I slept somewhere that felt like mine.
It was here. This room. This bed.
Before the fire. Before the running. Before I turned myself into a ghost.
I close my eyes.
Sleep doesn’t come for a long time.