His voice cracks on the last word. Just a break, quickly masked. But I hear it, and it hurts so bad.
“I know,” I say again, because it’s the only honest answer. I do know. Not from his side; from the side of a mother who walked into the dark and heard her son screaming behind her and kept walking.
“You could have told me.” He stands up. Moves to the window. His back is to me, and his shoulders are stiff. “You could have found a way. A message, a sign, anything. I’m not stupid. I can keep a secret.”
“Cameron, baby—”
“I wastaken, Ma.” He turns around, and the composure is cracking. “Six months. They had me for six months in that place, and the whole time—thewhole time—I thought you were dead. And there was nothing to get me through, you know that? Nothing. Not the hope of you coming for me. I just survived because my body kept going after my head gave up.”
The words hit me in a place beyond pain. These are words a mother never wants to hear. But the worst part is that I deserve it.
“If I’d known you were alive,” he says, “I would have had something to hold onto. One thing. Just one thing that wasn’t concrete and needles and—” He stops. Breathes through his nose. Resets. “But you decided I couldn’t have that.”
“If you’d known,” I say, and I keep my voice level now because one of us has to, “and they’d broken you—and they would have broken you, Cameron, because that’s what they do—then they would have had my location within a week. And they would have come for me. And they would have used me to find every family I’d relocated, every safe house, every contact in the network. The people I was protecting would have died.”
“So I had to suffer so strangers could live.”
“So your family could live.” It sounds empty as I say it, so I go on, reminding myself of the reasons as I speak. “The Hendricks in Louisiana… Lizzy Hendricks, she’s six years old. The Dunns in the hill country. Old Thomas in Kentucky, who taught you to whittle when you were nine. Those aren’t strangers. Those are your people. Your pack.”
He knows this. I can see him knowing it, the logic finding its footing even as the hurt rejects it. That’s the cruelty of being seventeen. You can understand something perfectly and feel the opposite of it at the same time.
“You didn’t trust me,” he says.
“I trusted you completely. I didn’t trust what they’d do to you.”
“Same thing.”
“It isn’t.”
“It felt the same. Itfeelsthe same.” He sits back down on the bed. The anger is still there. I can see it in the set of his mouth, the way his hands grip the mattress edge. But the initial wave has passed, and underneath it is something rawer.
“You know who came for me?” he says. “When I was in that place. When nobody knew where I was. When you were off saving everyone else.”
I go still.
“Merric.” He says the name with a weight that tells me it’s been accumulating since the day the alpha pulled him out of Aurora’s medical wing. “He didn’t know me. He didn’t owe me anything. But I said your name, and he helped. He drove past his own territory, brought his whole team, and brought me home.” He looks up at me. “A stranger did what my own mother couldn’t.”
The silence that follows has a physical quality. It sits on my chest.
He doesn’t understand. He can’t, not yet. Can’t see the full picture of what I was doing and why, can’t measure the cost of my absence against the lives it saved. He’s seventeen, and his frame of reference is six months of hell followed by a man who showed up when I didn’t. Of course Merric is the hero of his story. Of course I’m the one who left.
He’s wrong. And he’s right. And I can’t untangle which is which because I’m his mother, and his pain undoes all the good I’ve ever done.
“He’s a good man, Ma.” Cameron’s voice has lost its edge, settled into something I find harder to swallow. Not defending Merric; building a case for him. “He didn’t have to do any of this. He just did it.”
I hear what’s underneath the words. My son has attached himself to Merric Rourke. Not casually… deeply. An attachment that comes from being rescued by someone reliable when your whole world has been anything but. I’ve seen it before, the way a broken thing bonds with the first source of safety it encounters.
But this feels like more than trauma bonding. The way Cameron orients toward Merric, the way his body settles when the alpha is nearby… There’s something instinctive in it. Something that bypasses reason and operates at the level of blood and bone.
I wonder if Cameron feels it without understanding what it means. The pull toward a man he’s known for days that shouldn’t be this strong, this fast, this certain.
I wonder if Merric feels it too.
“I’m glad he was there for you,” I say. And I mean it, even though the words burn. Even though every syllable is an admission of my own absence.
“But you don’t like him.”
“I don’t know him. Not anymore.”
