1
EMPTY ROOMS
DANIEL
Some mornings, the silence had teeth.
It curled around my ribs like smoke, whispered through empty spaces where warmth used to live. Claire's side of the bed had gone cold thirteen years ago. I still reached for her anyway. Every damn morning, my hand sliding across sheets that held nothing but the shape of what I'd lost.
Old habits. Old wounds. Same difference, really.
The room smelled like pine and cedar and something older. Pack house bones ran deep here, walls soaked in three generations of Callahan blood. My grandfather took his last breath in this room. My father, too. Claire had whispered my name in this darkness once, back when I could still pretend I was more than just Alpha. More than the thing holding our world together through stubbornness and spit and whatever remained of my spine.
I sat up. My back cracked loud enough to echo off the walls.
Forty-nine wasn't old by wolf standards. But grief had a way of aging you faster than years ever could.
Get up, I told myself.The dead don't need you lying here feeling sorry for yourself.
The floorboards bit cold under my feet. I dressed in the dark because that's what I'd done for thirteen years and muscle memory was the only reliable thing left. Jeans, flannel, boots that had seen better decades. Dawn hadn't broken yet, but the forest outside my window was already stirring. Wind moving through Douglas fir. The distant rush of Hollow Creek along the eastern boundary. An owl calling somewhere deep in the Evernight, its cry cutting through the pre-dawn stillness like a warning no one had asked for.
I stood at the window for a long moment, watching the tree line breathe. The forest pressed close on all sides of the house. Dark and patient. Waiting, always waiting, like it knew something I didn't.
Some people found that comforting. The embrace of nature, the sanctuary of the wild.
Me? I'd learned a long time ago that the forest kept secrets. And not all of them were gentle.
My wolf stirred beneath my skin. Not restless, exactly. More like it was listening. Tracking something I couldn't hear yet.
Soon, I thought, though I didn't know what I was promising.
I made it halfway down the stairs before I smelled the coffee.
And underneath it, motor oil and pine and that particular warmth that meant only one thing.
Evan.
My son sat at the kitchen table, laptop open in front of him, two mugs already steaming on the scarred wood surface. Twenty-five years old now, and every year he looked more like his mother. Those pale green eyes that shifted gray in certain light. The way his mouth curved when he was trying not to smile. Claire's patience wrapped in my stubbornness, and somehow he'd turned out decent despite having me for a father.
He wore a faded Ward's Garage hoodie, sleeves shoved up past his elbows, motor oil still staining the cuffs from yesterday's shift. His dark hair was getting too long. He needed a haircut. I'd mentioned it twice already this week, and he'd ignored me twice, which meant he was doing it on purpose just to annoy me.
Smart kid. Knew exactly which buttons to push.
He looked up when I walked in. “Morning.”
The sound of his voice still caught me off guard sometimes. Even after all these years. Even knowing that Nate Harrington had given him a reason to use it again.
I'd watched my son go silent after Claire died. Watched words get buried so deep I thought they'd never surface. Twelve years old and suddenly mute, communicating only through nods and written notes and that devastating blankness behind his eyes. The therapists called it selective mutism. Trauma response. I called it watching my boy disappear piece by piece while I stood there helpless as a dead man's prayer.
Then Nate came to Hollow Pines. And something in Evan woke up.
First it was single words.Yes. No. Okay.Then sentences. Then full conversations, quiet and careful butreal, and I'd had to leave the room the first time I heard him laugh because I couldn't let him see me cry.
“You're up early,” I said, keeping my voice steady.
Evan shrugged, pushed one of the mugs toward me. “Couldn't sleep. Figured I'd get a head start on the day.”
I took the coffee. Black, strong enough to strip varnish. Exactly how I liked it. The boy paid attention. Always had.
