“I… I did know him,” I told her. “But that was a very long time ago.”
“Aren’t you happy to be back here? Why did you leave?” Cassie’s questions came faster and faster, and she scrambled to crouch on the sofa. “Does my daddy live here? Can I meet him? Is he a wolf, too? WillIdo that?”
“Calm down, baby,” I laughed, despite my anxiety. I tugged her onto my lap. “You…” I paused, not knowing how much to say. “I can’t explain it all properly, but one day, you will change, similarly to how you saw that man—”
“Mason, Mommy,” she interrupted. “Uncle Jackson told me his name.”
“Yes, Mason. Like him, you’ll change.”
Her eyes rounded. “Will I be as big as him? Doyouchange?”
I started to feel slightly panicked, unable to smooth my thoughts out against the barrage of questions. “I—”
A knock on the door had me halting my answer. I stiffened.
Cassie’s head whipped around to face the door. She scrambled off my lap. “It’s the wolf! It’s the wolf!”
“Cassie, wait—”
She had already wrenched the door open, and my heart rate skyrocketed as I hurried over to her. But it wasn’t Theo, Boston, or any of the other pack members who I recalled being the worst, and who I dreaded seeing again. It was the alpha himself.
I told myself it was only a matter of time before any of them got too curious and knocked, wanting to taunt me back out of Honeycreek the way they once had. The way the man in my doorway had once let them.
Mason looked good—toogood, and my stomach turned. His hair was plastered to his forehead, damp with sweat, and the scent of smoke lingered on him. Ash smudged over his tanned face, and I swore my heart did not swoop. It couldn’t. Not again. I refused to let it.
“Can I come in?”
“We’re busy,” I said, trying not to shiver at the sound of his voice after days of avoiding him. Mason’s eyes flicked behind me.
“Doing…?”
“Stuff,” I snapped, about to close the door, but Cassie leaped up towards him.
“I found you!” she exclaimed.
“Cass—”
But she’d already run off, her excited giggles filling the silence between Mason and me. She came back, tablet in hand, and jabbed the screen with her small hands. Shoving the screen at him, she pointed.
“That’s you!”
Something crossed Mason’s face when he looked at the picture. I noticed when his attention went from himself in the picture to me. He gazed at it long enough that I cleared my throat, my irritation rising.
“I think that’s enough,” I said quietly. “Like I said, we’re busy, so—”
“Please, Bryce. Five minutes, that’s it.”
I would have given you every minute of my life, but you turned me down. I held my words back and shook my head. “Cassie, come on out of the doorway.” I went to close the door in Mason’s face, but he stopped me, a foot jammed into the gap.
“I’m sorry that I scared you earlier today.”
His eyes met mine, and something flared in them—anger, annoyance, maybe. But there was something else. Something I didn’t let myself think about because it felt too close to hope that he was actually the good person that June claimed him to be. That my memories claimed otherwise.
“What are you talking about?”
“The shadows,” he said. “I saw you and June come to the window, looking out. I’m sorry I scared you.”
I opened the door wider, glaring at him. “Come inside.”
