Chapter 27
Jason
The forest is too quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet, the haunted kind. The kind laced with old memories and old wounds and breaths that come too sharp in the lungs.
Froggy’s trail winds erratically through the trees. He’s panicked. Running wrong. Running with his weight off-balance, claws deep, leaving trenches in the dirt.
A wolf running for his life.
“Froggy!” I shout, voice echoing through the trees.
The forest swallows it.
My wolf pushes forward, pulling me faster. My knees burn, lungs ache, branches whip my face. I ignore all of it. I follow the scent of fear and resentment, and something worse—hopelessness.
I find him in a clearing.
He whips around at the sound of my steps, eyes wide, whites showing too bright. His fur is ragged from shifting too fast, from snapping in and out of human shape. He stumbles backward until his heels hit a fallen log.
He shifts back. “Jason. Jason, please don’t.” His voice cracks in the human shape, too high and too desperate. “The alphas… they said if I came back they’d—”
“I’m not the alphas,” I say quietly.
His breath comes out in ragged bursts. “You’re gonna kill me. I know you are.”
I step forward slowly. “I’m not here to kill you.”
He snarls in fear, not anger, and launches himself at me anyway.
The fight is fast. Messy. It breaks my heart.
He slashes wildly, every movement screaming panic rather than technique. I dodge the first swipe, block the second. He catches my arm on the third, nails raking shallowly, but enough to sting.
“Stop,” I bark.
He doesn’t.
I grab him by the scruff of his shirt, or what’s left of it, and slam him down just hard enough to pin him, not hurt him. My knee presses into his shoulder. His chest heaves.
“Stop,” I repeat.
His voice breaks. “Are you… are you gonna finish it? Like the alphas would’ve?”
“No,” I say firmly. “I’m not them.”
He trembles. “Then what are you gonna do?”
The thing I never wanted to do. The thing he forced me to do. The thing that breaks my heart even more.
“Look at me, Freddie.”
He lifts his head, eyes wild, wet, terrified.
“This is exile,” I say softly. “The real one. Not what the alphas did. This one means something.”
His breathing stops. Just stops.
“No,” he whispers. “Jason, please… you can’t… you can’t…”
“I have to.” My voice cracks. It physically hurts to say it.
“If you never change, never learn the true meaning of being a wolf, you will live with this mark forever.”
His lip trembles as he shakes his head violently, like he can deny reality if he moves fast enough.
“You still don’t get it,” I say. “You betrayed us. You put Violet in danger. You brought death to our door. That mark on your shoulder? That was supposed to remind you of what we survived. What we lost.”
I extend one claw. Just one.
His eyes go huge. “Jason… don’t.”
“This will remind you,” I continue, the words burning my throat, “of who we are. Of what we’re building. Of the pack we could’ve been together.”
My claw glows faintly with heat as I lower it to his shoulder, right where the exile brand lies. I press the claw into his skin, and a scream rips out of him.
I grit my teeth and deepen the mark. Smoke curls up from the wound.
The air fills with the sharp scent of burned skin and wolf magic.
Magic I never knew I was capable of. Froggy thrashes, crying, cursing, begging.
But I don’t stop. Not until the mark is bone deep.
Not until every line is carved with meaning. Not until it’s true.
When I pull my claw back, the wound is fresh and bright.
A real exile mark.
Froggy collapses onto his side, sobbing, clutching his shoulder.
“You…” he gasps, “you think you’re better than me.”
“No,” I whisper. “I never did.”
He sucks in a shaking breath, tears streaking through dirt. “Does this make you a hero now?”
“No.”
“You think Violet made you good?”
“No,” I repeat softly. “She made me honest.”
His pupils shrink into pinpoints.
I stand slowly.
“I didn’t mark you to punish you,” I say. “I marked you because you refused to take responsibility. Because you refused to stop running. Because you won’t see.”
He snarls, scrambling up to his knees. “I hope you rot! I hope you—you…”
I turn away.
He screams after me, a broken, wounded-animal scream that tears something open in my chest.
I let myself cry until the shaking stops, but I don’t turn back.
I walk. And walk. And walk. Until a familiar scent hits my senses: tear-salt, fear, pine, and cheap deodorant.
Beau.
He sits on a rock at the edge of the trees, knees pulled to his chest, Fiona draped around him in wolf form, trying her best to soothe him. She licks his cheek once, but he only sobs once.
His head snaps up when he hears me.
“Jason?” His voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it. “Is… is it done?”
I nod.
He actually collapses forward, arms open, desperate and shaking. I catch him, hauling him into a hug. He clings like he might drown without the contact.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I whisper fiercely. “It’s okay. You did the right thing by telling me. You’re here. You’re with me.”
Fiona shifts back into human form and pats his back. “It wasn’t your fault, Beau.”
Beau sniffles. “Is… is it time to go home now?”
Not yet.
“One more thing,” I say.
He stiffens. “What?”
“We need to finish what we started.”
We don’t say much on the drive. Beau sits hunched in the truck’s passenger seat, staring out the window like the trees might rearrange themselves into answers if he looks hard enough. Fiona insisted on riding in the back in wolf form, tail thudding the bed every time we hit a bump.
The inn rises ahead of us like a bruise on the roadside, familiar and ugly in a way that makes my stomach knot. This is where it started. The bar. The bikes. The bad decisions that snapped into worse consequences.
The sign creaks overhead. The smell hits me next: beer, fryer oil, old wood, stale sweat. It’s all the same, and I’m not.
We pull around back.
The innkeeper is already waiting by the rear door, arms crossed, a branding iron resting beside him. It’s an old-school piece of work, heavy, dark, with a fresh head fitted on the end.
He eyes us with an expression somewhere between annoyance and reluctant respect. “You sure you’re the one who wants to do this?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, stepping out of the truck.
His gaze flicks to Beau, then back to me. “Talon said you could call him if you changed your mind.”
“I’m not changing my mind,” I say. “I’m an alpha. Pain’s supposed to run through me first.”
Beau looks up at me.
I glance at him. “Got a problem with that?”
He shakes his head quickly. “No. I’m just still getting used to it.”
“Me too,” I admit.
The innkeeper grunts and crouches by a small fire pit, turning the iron. Embers glow. The metal begins to darken, then redden. The smell of heating iron threads through the air.
Beau swallows. “That’s for… me?”
“It’s for us,” I correct.
He startles. “Us?”
I nod toward the metal. “We designed the mark together. That makes it ours.”
He nods rapidly.
The innkeeper lifts the brand partially from the coals, checking the temperature. “Tell him what it looks like,” he says. “He earned that much.”
I take a breath, trying to picture it as I saw it on paper yesterday, when Beau and I sketched it on a napkin between arguments and apologies. He didn’t see the finished design, though.
“It’s a circle,” I say. “But not closed. There’s a gap in the ring at the top, like an open door. Inside, there’s a stylized wolf head. Not snarling. Not bowing. Just awake and alert. Looking out.”
Beau’s eyes shine.
“Around the outside of the circle,” I continue, “are three small marks. Equidistant. Like stars.”
“Three,” Beau croaks.
“Three,” I confirm. “Always three. No matter who comes or goes, that’s what we started with. That’s what made us.”
The innkeeper grunts again. “And the placement?”
“Over my heart,” I say. “Over his exile mark.”
Beau makes a sound that’s half sob, half protest. “Jason—”
“Yes,” I cut in. “We’re not erasing what happened. We’re rewriting it.”
The innkeeper lifts the brand fully from the coals now. It glows faintly, heat shimmering off the metal. He nods once at me.
“Shirt off,” he says.
I obey, the cool air hitting my skin. The old scars across my chest catch the light, scratches from old fights, burns, one half-moon bite where a pack wolf tried to make a point.
This will be the first mark I choose.
“Last chance,” the innkeeper says.
“Do it,” I answer.
He presses the iron to my skin, and I grit my teeth against the white-hot, blistering pain that’s so intense my knees buckle. My wolf howls inside my skull, the sound silent to the world and deafening to me. The smell of burned flesh and magic mixes into something sharp and metallic.
I don’t pull away.
Not an inch.
When the iron lifts, my chest is on fire. I’m shaking, breathing hard, sweat pouring down my back. The world swims for a second, then slowly returns.
The innkeeper looks mildly impressed. “You took that better than most.”
“I’ve had worse,” I rasp.
Beau stares at me like I just walked through flames and came out a god. His hands are shaking visibly.
“Your turn,” I say gently.
He backs up a step. “I—I don’t know if I can.”
“Yes, you can,” I say. “You survived everything else. You can survive this.”
His eyes well up. “What if I’m not… good enough for it?”
There it is.
The rot at the center of him.
“Beau,” I say softly, “all your life you thought you were too stupid and too soft and too much of a screw-up to have a pack. And all your life, you had one.”
He swallows.
“It was us,” I continue. “It was me and Froggy and you, stealing food and sleeping under porches, and keeping each other alive when we had no right to be. You were the heart of that pack. The dumb, loyal, golden heart that refused to stop beating.”
A tear rolls down his cheek, carving a clean track through the dirt.