Chapter Thirty-Five – Whatever Happens Here, We Remain #3
After hugging her, her grandmother hugged each of us tight for a full minute. Her mates smiled and shook our hands one by one, firm and strong.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, son,” Albert, one of them, told me.
I know ‘son’ is just something people say, but the last time someone called me that, I was nine years old. So yeah, it got me. Jay and Shane were no different. I saw it in their eyes, the shine every time one of Jo’s grandfathers said it.
That weekend, Jo’s uncles came from Mountain Home to Idaho City with Solange, Jo’s aunt, their three sons and their daughter Susie. Susie was ecstatic to see Jo and us. She’d spent too much time watching the romanticized version of Jo’s kidnapping on TV and was in love with our story.
She admires Jo, maybe a little too much for her fathers’ comfort. She talked nonstop about college. Like every nyra but Jo, she’d been homeschooled, but she had a plan .
“I found out about something called the GED,” she told Jo excitedly. “It’s a test you can take if you’re homeschooled. If I pass, I’ll get a high school certificate, and then I can apply to college like everybody else!”
Jo barely managed to smile at her, her face sad and tense. Later, when we were alone, she told us why: all those kinds of educational tests require valid human identification to take them.
“I don’t think she’ll be allowed to do it with her gregalis ID,” Jo says, her voice heavy with sadness. “But I don’t have the heart to tell her.”
We slept in Jo’s uncles’ old room, wrapped around her every night in the small nest, holding her thigh while we slept.
We spent a full week there. It was one of the best weeks of my life.
Jo’s grandfathers took us fishing. We didn’t catch anything. Jo kept jumping into the water to swim, and they said she scared the fish, but we didn’t care. We ended up jumping in with her before sunset, soaked and laughing.
We ate together at the big table every night, everyone talking over each other.
Jo’s grandmother called us sweetie all the time. My mother used to call me that too. I thought about her a lot after learning what really happened. It still hurt, but less than before. I finally did right by her. I found the truth. I put the man who took her in prison.
I spent hours talking with Jay and Shane before making the decision to call my fathers. They didn’t push, just helped me figure out what might give me peace, whether that meant making the call or letting it go.
In the end, I decided to call.
It felt right, calling them while I was in Idaho, surrounded by family, feeling like I finally belonged.
I called Fontes first, gave him the names and an hour later, he sent me the number.
I walked out to Jo’s grandparents’ backyard to make the call, and my brothers followed me.
They didn’t say a word, just stayed close.
One of my fathers picked up on the third ring.
I thought I wouldn’t recognize the voice, but I did. I knew it was Paul the second he said, “Hello.”
“Hi, Paul. It’s Kory.”
Silence. Then: “Kory? I—I can’t believe it. Is it really you?!”
He told me he’d seen me on the news. That only when they saw the name — Larsen — that he and my other fathers realized who I was.
They’d looked for me for years under Williams, thinking they’d find me in a precinct somewhere.
But much later they found out packs from the Strays Program take the pack leader’s surname, so they assumed I’d taken a new one.
It never occurred to them I might’ve taken my mother’s name.
I told him everything I had found out about my mother. I don’t know if I told him because I believed he deserved the truth, or because I wanted him to know I’d done what they couldn’t. That when my nyra was taken, I didn’t sit back and wait. I tore the world down to get her back.
Maybe it was both.
He asked if I wanted to talk to my other fathers. Asked if he could see me. Asked for a lot of things. But I cut him off, made a vague promise to call again sometime and hung up.
That was all I could do at the moment. Maybe I’ll change my mind someday, maybe I won’t.
Four days before we were scheduled to return to work, we came back home. No press at our door, no threat hanging over our heads.
But we were still afraid to leave Jo alone. Aranya was in jail, but the people above him, the real ones running the network, were still free. We didn’t know whether they’d try to retaliate. We didn’t know what they might do to her. And she was scared too; we could see it.
The next morning, we drove to Bridgeport to buy everything we’d need to lock the house down. We bought smart cameras for every part of the house, inside and out. Motion-activated, night vision, real-time phone access, cloud storage. We put them everywhere except our bedroom and bathrooms.
We replaced the door locks with biometric ones; only our prints and Jo’s work.
Now every door has a sensor, and every window has a break alarm.
We gave Jo a smartwatch with a panic button and GPS tracker; one tap sends our phones her exact location.
We also installed an app on her phone that does the same.
Still, I knew it’d be a long time before we felt safe again.
Now it’s the morning of our last day home, and we are playing basketball in the backyard after breakfast. At first, we played with her. She’s getting better, actually hitting the basket. But now it’s just the three of us passing the ball around.
I start sweating and yank off my shirt. Jay and Shane do the same. Jo’s scent reacts immediately: sharp, spiced, unmistakable. We take her inside within minutes, not even making it upstairs; we’re on her right there in the living room.
Pleasure. Closeness. Love. Joy. Home. It’s everything I feel when I’m inside her. It’s overwhelming in the best possible way. She’s my heart, living outside my body.
When we finish, Shane carries her to the bathroom to clean her up, and that’s when I remember the cameras. Yeah. We’re going to have to get used to those, remember to shut them off when things get private.
We eat lunch late, almost three in the afternoon, then put on a movie, one of our favorites. The kind Jo always says, “It’s so bad it’s good.”
We order pizzas for dinner. Tomorrow we’re back on the T1P diet, but today, we enjoy.
As we eat, Jo brings up the residency. “I’m not going back just yet.
But I will, sometime in the next few weeks,” she says, looking resolute.
“I’m scared to be out there, and I know you’re all nervous about it too.
But I can’t let them take my career from me.
If they scare me enough that I give up, they win. ”
She’s right. I know it’ll be hard as hell having her out of the house, alone and unprotected, but we can’t lock her up. We’ll have to give her every protection we can, and trust that it’ll be enough.
Later, we curl up with her on the nest, her sweet scent filling every breath with calm, and I remember everything we went through to get here with her.
Balls tried to set us up. Even wrote to the MAB, trying to sabotage our match with her.
But we got through it. Then Luc, disrespecting us in our own home.
Talking and acting like we were animals.
And all the people who stood with him, wanting us locked up because we didn’t react like dogs, wagging our tails to humans no matter what.
Then Aranya, and whoever’s behind him. They tried to destroy us. Tried to take Jo from us. And they almost did, but we take her back. And in doing so, we take him down.
He thought he could break us, but now he’s the one broken.
I hope that sends a message to anyone else who thinks they can cross us. We’re not the same pack we used to be, stray aegis trying to prove we’re controlled and safe.
Because we’re not.
We can be dangerous. We can be uncontrolled.
We can cut the leash humans think they still have around our necks.
The human world can throw whatever it wants at us. Like our pendant says: Whatever happens here, we remain.