“Okay,” he says. Just that. No argument, no push,no attempt to talk me round. He just accepts it, and walks to the door, and the restraint in his shoulders as he goes is worse than if he’d fought me on it.
He walks to the door. He pauses with his hand on the latch.
“I’ll be close,” he says. “If you need me. For anything. I’ll be close.”
Then he’s gone. The cottage is cold. I sink to the floor with my back against the sofa, arms wrapped around my knees, and I sit there for a very long time, trying to find the edges of a world that no longer has any.
Chapter 17
Fallout
Roan
I makeit as far as the oak tree across the lane before my legs stop cooperating.
I lean against the trunk and press my forehead to the bark and breathe. “Shit,” I say to nobody. Then again, quieter: “Shit.”
The night air is cold against my skin, which is good, because the rest of me is on fire. I just showed her the wolf. I told her everything. And she looked at me with those exhausted, brilliant eyes and saidleave.
She didn’t run.
I keep coming back to that. Of everything that happened in that living room, the fact that she stayed on the sofa and looked at me with those exhausted, brilliant eyes and didn’t run is the thing I can’t stop turningover. She watched me become the wolf, and her first instinct wasn’t fear. It was observation. She catalogued me. She noted the bone structure, the mass distribution, and the soft tissue. She looked at the most terrifying secret I possess and treated it like a case study.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I do neither. I lean against the tree and listen to the cottage behind me. I can feel her. Not the details, not yet, but the shape of it. Confusion. Fear. And underneath both, something shifting, like the ground before an earthquake. I lean against the tree and listen to the cottage behind me and I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.
She’s not angry yet. That will come later. Right now, she’s in shock, processing, doing what Phoebe does when the world stops making sense. She’s sitting in her cottage putting the pieces together with that relentless, methodical mind, and the picture they’re forming is going to change everything she understands about her life.
I did that to her. Not the heritage, not the emergence. Those were coming regardless. But the timing, the loneliness of it, the weeks she spent frightened and confused while I kept secrets and called it protection. That’s mine.
I push off the tree and walk home.
The cabin is dark and cold. I’ve lived here for three years, and it still looks temporary. No pictures on thewalls. No clutter on the surfaces. A bed, a table, a kitchen that contains exactly enough equipment to keep a man alive without requiring him to care about food. The home of someone who never planned to stay.
I don’t turn on the lights. I sit at the kitchen table in the dark, and I feel the bond.
Something’s different. Before tonight, she was a pull I could almost ignore. Now she’s a weather system. I don’t get her thoughts, nothing that precise. But I get the pressure changes. The temperature. And right now, the forecast is a storm I caused.
She’s afraid. That’s the loudest note, a cold, high frequency that makes my wolf press against the inside of my chest. But underneath the fear, there’s something warmer and steadier that I recognise because I feel it too, every time she’s near me. She’s still reaching for me. Even now. Even after the wolf, the truth, and the impossible biology. Some part of her is still oriented towards me, not by choice, but by nature.
Which is exactly the problem, isn’t it?
She didn’t choose this. She didn’t choose to move to a village full of wolves. She didn’t choose to find me bleeding in the forest, didn’t choose to feel the bond when she touched my fur, didn’t choose to start dreaming about her bones reshaping. All of it happened to her, and I was the cause, and the fact that I didn’t know doesn’t make it better.
I think about my mother.
I don’t do this often. The memories are kept in a locked room in my head, taken out only when necessary and put back quickly. But tonight the lock is broken, sprung by what I said to my father in the main house, the accusation I’ve been carrying for years and finally threw at him:I’ve watched you do this my entire life.And now the memories come, whether I want them or not.
She came to Mistwood as a schoolteacher. Whatever she was before, whatever she carried or didn’t carry in her blood, by the time she left, she was the Alpha’s mate and the mother of his only son, and somewhere in between, she became something she’d never imagined being. The pack changed her life. My father loved her with the consuming, total devotion of a bonded Alpha, and she loved him back, and it still wasn’t enough to prevent the slow erosion of the woman she’d been before.
She used to tell me stories about her life before Mistwood. The flat in Edinburgh. The friends she’d left behind, the career she’d given up, the version of herself that existed before my father’s world swallowed hers. She told them like fairy tales, as if that woman was a character in a book rather than someone she’d been.
I was twelve when she died. Heart failure, thehuman doctors said. Exhaustion, the pack whispered when they thought I couldn’t hear. She gave everything to the pack, and the pack took everything she gave, and nobody, not my father, not the Beta, not anyone, thought to ask if she had anything left for herself.
I won’t do that to Phoebe.
The thought is clear. Sharp. It cuts through the self-pity, the guilt, the exhaustion. Whatever happens next, however she responds to what I’ve told her, I won’t let the pack consume her the way it consumed my mother. I won’t let my father’s expectations or the pack’s needs or the weight of the Mistwood name turn her into someone she’s not.
If she chooses this, if she chooses me, it will be on her terms. Fully informed, with every door open, including the one that leads away.
