Asking the entire pack to move—children, elders, all of them—would be a nightmare. And devastating for most since this isthe only home they’ve ever known. This doesn’t even factor in the cost of rebuilding everything again in a new location.
Also, wolves aren’t especially keen on giving up their territory. Goes against the very primal nature in their bones.
His head shakes, a tired sigh coming with it. “No. We can’t just abandon it. I couldn’t ask the pack to leave their home behind like that.”
“No,” I agree with a solemn curve at my mouth because I’m relieved he’s come to the same conclusion but also heartbroken we’re having this conversation at all. “Okay. Then do you want to go around and tear up everything you think was paid for with the dirty money? Rip out every addition, every update, and rebuild it all over again?” This idea doesn’t sound any better to my ears, but I offer it anyway. “That will take time and money, too. It’s also wildly inefficient, not to mention wasteful, but again, if it means you can sleep at night, I’ll get on board.”
I picture it anyway. Taking a jackhammer to the updated schoolhouse. To the little pack café that I’ve learned actually makes a decent latte. To the updates that’ve been made to the cabins where the pack members live that make life out here in the mountains more tolerable.
We’d be destroying things on principle.
Rennick is already shaking his head, seeing the ridiculousness in it himself before I’ve even finished the thought.
He shifts, lowering himself to sit on the rock so we’re closer in height, and when he pulls me with him, his cheek drops to rest on the top of my head.
“I still don’t understand why he did it,” he says, his voice going distant, his mind dragged back toward the memory. “My fath…” The word catches for a second time. He swallows it down and corrects himself. “Merritt didn’t need the money. That’s something my family has never been short on.”
I know. Everyone does. The Fallamhains have been wealthy longer than most packs have kept official records. It’s generational wealth that predates some of the oldest trees on this land. Over a hundred years ago, Rennick’s ancestors sold off their mineral mines in the region. Sold them before government regulation became the standard, sold them at peak dollar and then wisely invested every dime. The money’s been multiplying through the decades.
Merritt didn’t sell omegas because he was desperate.
He did it because there’s never enough money for people who already have too much. Because excess breeds entitlement and the world consistently rewards men like him. Enough money, enough influence, and suddenly morality becomes optional.
There was a sick kind of pleasure in it for him too. I saw it in his eyes—the way he got off on it. He truly believed omegas existed to serve alphas. To be claimed. Knotted. Used at an alpha’s convenience. And in his mind, selling them wasn’t cruelty. It was a correction. It was him putting them back were they belonged, filling the role nature intended for them.
“You’re waiting for it to make sense, Ren,” I tell him gently, fingers tracing a swirl across his tanned pec. “It never will. Not when greed was the motive.”
“You’re right,” he relents, still sounding a little distant.
This isn’t something he’ll be able to process all at once. It’ll take time. His relationship with his father was already an ugly, warped thing, where affection and approval came with strings attached. But now he knows the truth—that the cruelty didn’t stop there. It reached far beyond, further that he ever thought possible.
The truth of the past isn’t settling easy in either of us.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all, still grappling with my own quiet guilt and regret. Mom cut her life short, tying it to Merritt’s diseased one in one last, desperate measureto save me from being killed—or worse, sold to the coven of dark witches. A coven I now know I share blood with, a truth that makes my stomach twist every time I think about the psychopathic natures of the triplets who’d descended on Ashvale.
I’m learning to live with the harsh truth that all of it could have been avoided had I not gone out to the helicopter pad that night to see if what I saw in Merritt’s mind was real. That one reckless decision had a price and it was paid in blood.
But then again, Merritt had already decided I needed to die so I couldn’t mate with Rennick. No matter how it unfolded, there was never a version of this where we avoided a fight with the late Alpha.
But we could have possibly avoided everything else—this is a what-if scenario I’m positive will haunt me till my last breath.
“You’ll think of something,” I tell Rennick, quiet but certain. “A way to right the wrong. Or balance the scales, at least. I understand now that’s what mom was doing when she started the sanctuary. She knew she couldn’t bring the whole network down—couldn’t shut down all the clubs or stop the auctions. But what she could do is weaken their system by chipping away from it at a distance. She started removing pieces from their board.” I think of the clubs that were raided, of the rescue missions that pulled omegas out alive. The ones who stumbled through the manor’s front doors shaking and half feral with fear. And how once they left us, they did it standing on their own two feet, their demons no longer gripping them so tightly. Eyes bright with the possibility of a real future. Every piece of this was shaped and carefully tended to by Mom’s hands. “Taking in the survivors or any omega in need, that was her way of balancing out the hurt she knew was still happening out there. It was her way of refusing to let them keep winning.”
Rennick drags his cheek over the top of my head, scent marking me, then eases back so he can see me properly. His gaze lingers, searching, and I feel the change in him when he finds whatever he’s looking for.
“You were right,” he tells me, skimming the pads of his fingers down the side of my face. “She was extraordinary. And she was a badass.”
My mouth curls even as the grief flares. That’s the thing about missing someone, you learn how to smile through the ache of their absence. You learn that saying their name and telling their stories is what keeps them here.
“You said she was terrifying.”
“I still stand by that.” He doesn’t hesitate, smiling back, though it falters a beat later. “I’m so sorry you lost her, Noa, and I’m sorry for the role I played in it. If I’d known?—”
“Don’t,” I cut him off, covering his mouth before he can finish. “You don’t get to carry this. Not now. Not ever.” I’ve already told him this before when we talked things out after waking up in the nest, but I’ll keep doing it until he believes it and absolves himself of the guilt he’s carrying.
His eyes darken, but he lets me continue.
“Merritt was already a dying man when she bound her life to his. That choice was hers. She understood exactly how little time she had and knew our years together would be cut short. But she used that time to prepare me for a world without her, and she left safeguards in place to make sure I’d find my way back to you once she knew it would be safe to.”
