Chapter 2
SHE IS MY MOTHER
DESTINY
There’s a difference between running and fleeing.
I learned the hard way years ago. Running has a rhythm—your breathing settles, your mind stays a step ahead, and every stride is intentional. Fleeing is different. Fleeing is what happens when fear moves faster than thought.
I started out running, but about thirty minutes into the forest, I wasn’t sure it was still a forest.
The western woods were thick and uneven from recent rain, with undergrowth clawing at my legs. I had slowed without meaning to.
Iron posts stood every forty feet, linked by low-frequency barriers strong enough to alert the compound if crossed. Marcus called them psychological infrastructure—more than protection, a line in the dirt marking Monroe’s boundary from the outside world.
Sixty yards.
That was all that separated me from the moment I finally stepped completely outside the pack’s reach—away from backup, safety, and the people who had gradually, stubbornly become my family before I even realized it was happening.
There it is, Isdisa said.
She had been quiet but present until now. I felt her move with me, watching, waiting, letting me burn off my urgency. That was her way. We had spent months learning where one of us ended and the other began. She rarely interrupted unless she believed I was ready to listen.
You've been waiting to say something.
I've been waiting for you to stop running long enough to listen.
Isdisa...
That wasn't a yes.
I slowed to a stop and slipped my hand into my pocket, wrapping my fingers around my phone. Mom's picture filled the screen. Every time I looked at it, something inside me twisted. She wasn't a memory anymore. She wasn't a story I had built in my head to survive. She was alive.
That's all the reason I need, I said quietly.
No, it isn't.
Her voice wasn't harsh. Isdisa had very little patience for what she called my old survival habits, but she never spoke to me with cruelty.
I don't have time for this.
You've been running for thirty minutes. You started slowing down before you reached the creek because your body already knows what your mind refuses to admit.
I lifted my eyes to the iron posts marking the edge of the compound.
She's my mother. She's trapped somewhere, and I'm the only one who has that picture.
Are you positive?
The question stopped me.
I stared at the phone in my hand, realizing I didn't have an answer.
I...
Or do you only know what Redmon wanted you to know?
My chest tightened.
I know she's scared.
You know because you were.
The words settled over me before I could argue with them.
I know exactly how she feels.
The memory came back without permission.
I was sixteen when they locked me in a stone room. They beat me until I couldn't stand. They starved me until hunger no longer felt like hunger, and every day I waited, hoping rescue would come.
My throat burned.
No one came.
I looked down at Mom's picture again, my vision blurring around the edges.
I know what it feels like to wonder if anybody is looking for you. I know what it feels like to think you've been forgotten.
My voice cracked despite everything I did to keep it steady.
I'm not leaving her there, Isdisa. I can't.
For a long moment, she didn't answer. Instead, I felt her move closer inside me, surrounding me with the quiet certainty that had become as familiar as my own heartbeat.
I know.
There was so much understanding in those two words that it nearly broke me.
You aren't trying to save only Dana.
A tear slid down my cheek.
You're trying to save the sixteen-year-old girl who never got rescued.
I closed my eyes because she was right.
I was speechless.
I know how scared she is because I was her. Every minute she's in that room; I remember what it felt like to wait... to hope... to wonder if anybody was ever coming.
Another tear slipped free.
I can't make her live through that. Not when I know where she is. Not when I can save her.
You won't.
Her confidence wrapped around me.
Because Dana isn't alone.
I opened my eyes.
And neither are you.
I looked back toward the compound.
That girl survived because she had no one. She had to become everything she needed.
Her voice softened.
Honor what she did for us. She kept us alive.
Then her tone hardened just enough to make me listen.
But stop asking her to make today's decisions. She doesn't know this life. She doesn't know your mate. She doesn't know your pack.
I let out a slow breath as the pieces finally began to fit together.
The attack hadn't been random. Redmon had waited until the compound was under siege before sending the picture. Fifty-three miles northeast. Come alone. One hour from the people who loved me.
He wants me isolated.
Yes.
He knows I'll run.
He was counting on it.
I looked at the boundary line again, and for the first time, I wasn't seeing freedom. I was looking at a trap.
So, what do I do? I asked quietly. Because I can't leave her there.
I'm not asking you to leave her.
Isdisa's presence settled beside mine, calm and unshakable.
I'm asking you to trust your mate. Trust your Alpha. Trust your Luna. Trust your pack.
She paused before saying the words I needed most.
And trust that you are no longer the only person coming to save the people you love.
I stood there for a long moment, staring at the line I'd been so determined to cross.
For the first time since the picture came through...
I took one step back instead of forward.
***
I stood at the line and realized that the farther I moved from the compound, the stronger the pull in my chest became. Strange. Persistent.
Ty.
I felt him while I was lying in a deep sleep in the hospital. It was the strangest but most comforting feeling I had ever experienced. A sensation deep in my chest. I never told him. In fact, I had not told anyone.
My first clear memory after that was Redmon showing up, Sage busting his balls, and Marcus making sure Redmon understood the full cost of coming for his mate and his family.
The next time I opened my eyes, cedar and sandalwood filled my senses. Ty was asleep in the chair beside my bed.
He had dark circles. He'd been there for a while.
I stared at the ceiling for ten minutes before he woke up. I used the time to run calculations, check exits, and measure the distance to the window. He opened his eyes, looked at me, and said in a deep, smooth voice:
Good morning. You hungry?
Just you hungry? Like we’d paused a conversation.
No pressure. No claim. No emotional weight but genuine concern.
***
They are coming, Isdisa said.
The words moved through me like a current.
How do you know?
Because they are water. And we are ice. And water always—
Finds every crack.
I stood at the boundary’s edge, the iron posts ahead of me, the forest behind me. Dana’s face still burned in my mind, but Ty’s presence pressed steadily at my back—moving, closing the distance, patient and inevitable.
Ice doesn’t run.
Ice holds.
Ice waits for the right moment, then moves with everything behind it, from a position of strength.
I let my hand fall away from my phone.
And I turned around.
***
TYRELL
I caught her scent almost a quarter mile back and slowed immediately.
Daphne and honeysuckle.
That specific combination had been driving us crazy since the first night she moved into my quarters, when the whole space quietly stopped feeling like mine and began to feel like hers, too.
Her scent was stronger here, fresh enough that I knew she hadn’t passed through long ago, but beneath it lay something sharper, something I recognized immediately.
Conflict.
Destiny in motion usually smelled of certainty. Focus. Precision. Even when she was angry, she held herself together. But when she tried to think her way through something emotional, it shifted—restless at the edges, tight, like a glacier deciding whether to crack or hold.
She was working something out.
I slowed my pace without fully stopping, moving carefully through the trees even though every instinct pushed me to close the distance. Kai stayed steady in my chest, calm and observant.
They are slowing, he noted quietly.
I know.
I had been tracking her stride pattern since the creek bed.
Light pressure on the left heel. Purposeful pace.
I knew her way of moving well enough now to tell the difference between caution and panic.
Her strides had gradually shortened over the last ten minutes, and that told me something important before I even saw her.
She was feeling the distance.
It wasn't only the unsettled bond. It was the compound.
Since the awakening — since Marcus and Sage completed their bond and the Monroe constellation began pulling itself into what it was meant to be — the compound had become a source. A tether. The accumulated energy of elemental bloodlines bonding, and as Gran said, completing a prophecy.
When all four of us completed our bonds, it would close the circuit and more than double what we were. We weren't there yet.
But Isdisa already knew what the tether was. And the further Destiny walked from it, the harder her own wolf was going to fight her feet.
Every instinct I had said, Go get her. Close the distance. Put myself between her and whatever she was running toward. Kai wanted that too. But water doesn’t force. Learning that lesson has taken me time.
I thought back to her first week in my quarters.
She arrived Tuesday night, guarded, measuring everything.
On Wednesday morning, I found a knife near the refrigerator, its handle facing outward.
By week's end, there were four more—near the front door, under the sink, beneath a couch cushion, and behind books on the shelf.
I never moved any of them.
I considered it once; I let it go because it wasn’t about the knives.
It was about the kind of life that teaches a woman to know exactly where the nearest weapon is before she can rest. That kind of survival doesn’t disappear because the danger has passed.
And no amount of love makes someone feel safe before they’re ready.
Sage explained that to me the first time I admitted I was frustrated.
A few weeks after Destiny moved in, I found her in the main kitchen one night and said more than I intended. She listened while making tea. She looked at me with that quiet certainty she carries when she’s about to say something you need to hear.
"Ty, your job isn't to teach Destiny how to feel safe," Sage said softly. "Your job is to be the man who's still there when she finally chooses it. She already loves you. Now she has to believe that loving you won't cost her."
So I learned not to rush her when the nightmares hit. In those first sharp seconds after she woke, what she needed wasn’t touch—it was space and the sound of my voice saying her name once, to help her orient herself.
Sometimes, after the panic passed, she let me pull her close. Other nights, she sat against the headboard, staring at the wall, and I stayed beside her until her breathing evened.
It took almost three months for the night terrors to stop.
I remember lying there, staring at the ceiling, as something quieter than relief settled over me, like watching something damaged begin to believe it might hold.
Not long after that, the knives stopped appearing.
I stepped through a break in the trees and finally saw her.
She stood about forty yards from the edge in the pale morning light, one hand near her pocket, no longer clenching the phone. The tension in her shoulders had shifted—still sharp, still her, but steadier.
Isdisa was close to the surface. I could see it in the stillness, in the way she held herself when she and her wolf were listening rather than fighting.
I stayed where I was, suppressing the urge to use my Alpha Command.
Water does not force, Kai reminded quietly. It waits.
So, I waited.
I watched her stand there, thinking. Watched her hand fall away from the phone. Then she turned slowly toward the compound—toward me—even though she hadn’t seen me yet.
She felt me.
That was when I stepped out of the tree line, and she saw me immediately. Neither of us moved at first.
I didn’t close the distance. Didn’t corner her.
Didn’t decide for her. I followed and waited because, after months of getting to know her, I understood something that mattered more than instinct.
She didn’t need someone stronger. She needed someone steady enough not to run when she was hard to love.
After a moment, she started walking toward me. Not fast. Destiny never moves quickly toward something unless she’s already decided it matters. Every step carried intention, and by the time she stopped in front of me, I could feel her warmth in the cool morning air.
“I was going to leave,” she said.
No defense. No apology. Just her truth spoken out loud.
“I know,” I said.
“I almost did.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I know that too.”
She held my gaze, weighing how much to give me.
Then, softer this time, she said, “I felt you. The further I got from the compound…” She paused. “I didn’t know it would feel like that.”
I didn’t tell her I already did. I didn’t mention the bond, or fate, or any of the things waiting between us.
Instead, I reached for her hand and held it gently.
“Tell me about the message.”