Finally, Stone had stopped lunging. He was pacing again — slower now, his movements heavy with exhaustion. But he was still watching me. I could feel his attention like a weight on my skin.
"I had a vision when I was eleven," I said. "About the mountain. About a wolf who needed to be found." I paused, considering how much to share. Decided it didn't matter. He couldn't understand me anyway. "I spent years preparing. Learning everything I could about Denali, about survival, about wolves and being feral. Everyone thought I was obsessed. Crazy, maybe. But I knew — Iknew— that someday I'd have to go up there. That someone was waiting."
The pacing slowed.
"I thought it was Cal. When I found him, I thought — okay, this is it. This is what the visions were about. I saved him. Mission accomplished." I laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Then I found out about the rest of you. And I realized the vision wasn't about saving one person. It was about saving all of you."
Stone had stopped moving entirely.
He stood in the center of his cell, head turned toward me, those gold eyes fixed on the window. Not attacking. Not pacing. Just... listening.
Or maybe not listening. Maybe just too tired to keep fighting.
Either way, I kept talking.
"I don't know what your life was like before. Before the mountain, I mean. Before you went feral."
The words felt strange. Invasive. I was talking about the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to him like it was casual conversation.
But what else was I supposed to do? Sit in silence? Let the void between us grow until it swallowed everything?
"Cal doesn't remember much. Just fragments. Feelings without context." I pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them. Made myself small. "He remembers being cold. Being hungry. Being so scared he forgot what safety felt like. And he remembers you."
Stone's ear twitched. The only sign he was still paying attention.
"He remembers you staying behind and fighting." My throat tightened. "He remembers running, and looking back, and seeing you standing there. Facing something that should have killed you. Buying them time to escape."
The bond pulsed between us. Something shifted in it — a flicker of emotion I couldn't quite identify. Not rage, for once. Something softer. Something that ached.
"He thought you were dead," I said quietly. "All these years. He thought you'd died saving them, and he never forgave himself for running. For leaving you behind."
Stone turned away.
Faced the back wall of his cell. His shoulders were rigid, his tail tucked low. I couldn't see his eyes anymore, couldn't read his expression.
But I felt it through the bond. The grief he'd buried so deep it had calcified into something unrecognizable. The weight of years spent believing he'd failed the people he loved.
"You didn't fail them," I said. "You kept them alive. They survived because of you. Because you fought for them when no one else would."
He didn't respond. Didn't move.
I kept talking anyway.
"I had meatloaf for dinner last night. The dining hall kind — oversalted. James bent his fork in half because some students were saying things about me. Ivy threatened to destroy people socially, which is apparently something she can do. It was a whole thing."
Stone was lying down now.
Not relaxed — his body was still tense, still coiled with the readiness to fight. But he'd stopped pacing, stopped attacking, stopped doing anything except existing in the same space as my voice.
I didn't know if that counted as progress. Didn't know if anything I was doing mattered at all.
But I kept going.
"I'm behind in my classes. Tomlinson assigned a paper that I haven't even started. There's probably a quiz in Psychology that I'm going to fail." I sighed. "I used to care about that stuff. Grades, assignments, being a good student. Now it just feels... small. Insignificant. How am I supposed to worry about a paper when there are five people in this building who've lost everything?"
Stone's ear flicked toward me.
"Sorry. You five and Cal." I smiled weakly. "I don't know if you count Cal as part of the pack anymore."
