I don’t go after him. I don’t text him. I stand at the window. Watch the empty street. Feel the absence settle into the spaces his presence usuallyfills. When did I become a woman who stands at windows waiting for a man she’s known less than a fortnight?
That night, the dream comes again.
The forest. The running. The exhilarating certainty of a body that knows exactly what it’s for. But this time it goes further. This time, I feel my face change, my jaw extending, my teeth growing sharp and heavy in my mouth. My vision shifts, colours draining away and being replaced by a silvered clarity that turns the dark forest into something navigable, every shadow mapped, every movement tracked.
I’m on all fours. My not-hands sink into the leaf mould, and I can feel the heartbeat of the earth itself, slow and vast and ancient. Something is running beside me, close enough that I can hear its breathing. I turn my head and see golden eyes in a dark face, and the warmth that floods through me is so intense I can feel it rearranging the inside of my chest.
I wake up crying, and I don’t know why.
The clock reads 4:12 a.m. I lie in the dark with tears cooling on my temples and my body humming with a frequency I’ve never felt before, and I think:Something is happening to me.
Not stress. Not hormones. Not a vitamin deficiency.
Something is happening to me, and I don’t know what it is, and I have no one to tell.
I get up. I make tea. I sit at the kitchen table in the dark, and I don’t write clinical notes because there’s nothing clinical about this. There is no rational framework for what my body is doing. There is no blood test that will explain why I dream about running on four legs and wake up weeping.
My body knows things my mind refuses to accept. I’m just not sure how much longer I can keep refusing.
Chapter 15
Cornered
Roan
I spendSunday morning on the eastern boundary and come back to seven missed calls.
Three from my father. Two from Rebecca. One from Tom, which is unusual because Tom doesn’t ring unless something’s wrong. And a text from Rebecca that reads:Arthur went to your father. He knows. Call me before you go to the main house.
I stand in my kitchen with mud on my boots and my phone in my hand and feel the walls close in. Shit.
Arthur. The old man who’d tracked Phoebe across the bonfire field with his nose raised, reading her scent with the quiet attention of someone who’s been alive long enough to know when something matters. I’d watched it happen and did nothing, because I’d beentoo focused on my own observations to consider what it meant if others were making the same ones.
Arthur went to Chris. Not to Rebecca, not to me. To the Alpha. Because that’s how the pack works. That’s how it’s always worked. Information flows upward, decisions flow downward, and anyone caught in between gets managed.
I don’t call Rebecca. I don’t call anyone. I sit at my kitchen table and think about what happens next.
My father knows. He doesn’t know everything, not the mate bond, not the details, but he knows a woman with an unusual scent showed up at a pack gathering, and he knows his son brought her. Chris Mistwood can add those numbers. He’s probably already added them. Right now, he’s sitting in the main house with patrol maps and a cup of coffee, waiting for me to walk in so he can take control of the situation the way he takes control of everything.
And the thing that guts me, the thing I’ve been avoiding for days, is that part of me wants to let him. Part of me wants to walk into the main house and hand this over, let someone else carry it, let the pack machinery do what it does. Because managing Phoebe’s emergence alone is beyond me. I know that. I’ve known it since the bonfire, watching her senses sharpen in real time while I stood beside her pretending everythingwas fine.
I’m not qualified for this. I’ve spent my entire adult life refusing to learn the things I’d need to know, and now the one time those things matter, I don’t have them.
But handing Phoebe to the pack means handing her to my father. And I know exactly what that looks like, because I watched it happen to my mother.
My mother came to Mistwood with something sleeping in her blood, the same way Phoebe has. The pack welcomed her. They loved her. And then they consumed her, slowly, thoroughly, with the best of intentions, until every part of who she was belonged to the collective and there was nothing left that was just hers. She died when I was twelve, tired in a way that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with never being allowed to belong to herself.
I was seventeen when I refused Alpha training. My father called it rebellion. He’s been calling it that ever since, as if the word explains me, as if the problem is that I’m difficult rather than that I watched what the pack did to someone I loved and decided I’d rather be difficult than complicit.
But Rebecca’s voice is in my head, the same observation she keeps making in different words:Something’s changed in you.And she’s right, but not the way she thinks. What’s changed isn’t that I’m engaging with the pack. What’s changed is that I’m starting to see thedifference between avoiding something because I’m principled and avoiding it because I’m afraid.
Keeping Phoebe from the pack isn’t principle. It’s fear. Fear that I’ll do what my father does. Fear that the system will swallow her. Fear that I’ll have to step into the role I’ve been running from in order to protect her from it.
Maggie told me I’d do this my own way. She was right. But my own way can’t be silence anymore. My own way has to be something active, something that puts me between Phoebe and the machinery without pretending the machinery doesn’t exist.
I pick up my phone and text Rebecca.
I’m going to the main house. Don’t let him make decisions before I get there.
