I got to my car, sat in the driver’s seat, and just threw my fist at the steering wheel. “FUCK!” I screamed. My jaw ached from clenching. My eyes burned with a pressure I refused to release because if I started I wasn’t sure I’d stop.
My mother lied to me. Faked a terminal illness, staged hospital rooms, manufactured tears. My own mother, who I would have done anything for, looked me in the eye from a bed full of tubes she didn’t need and weaponized every ounce of love I had for her against me.
I sat with that. Let it settle into me, let the shape of it become clear, the full architecture of what she’d done. Every cough was calculated. Every tear was rehearsed. Every mention of my father was a lever she pulled because she knew exactly how to work the guilt she’d been building in me since I was twenty-four years old. She raised me to be loyal and then she usedthat loyalty to control me, and I let her, because I trusted her, because she was my mother.
Then my wolf moved.
Not a whisper. Not a tentative stirring. He slammed against my chest from the inside with a force that made me gasp, tearing through the wall he’d locked himself behind. Weeks of silence shattered in a single second, flooding me with something so intense I couldn’t separate the rage from the relief from the desperate aching need that poured through every nerve in my body.
He was back. And the grief and the fury at my mother were already fading behind a pull so strong it erased everything else, a compass needle swinging hard toward the only direction that mattered.
I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know if she’d see me, if she’d listen, if there was anything left to save. But my wolf was awake, my chest was cracked open, and the only thought I could hold was her name.
I started the car.
30
— • —
Finneas
Luca found her in three hours. Whitebrook, her grandmother’s house. I booked the first flight out and didn’t sleep, my wolf pacing inside me for the entire night, frantic, restless, throwing himself against my ribs with every minute that passed. Weeks of dead silence and now he wouldn’t shut up, pushing me forward like a compass needle locked on one direction.
I landed before nine, rented a car at the airport, drove with the windows down because the confined space was suffocating. Whitebrook was small, quiet, streets empty before ten, every third house with a garden. The address belonged to a house with a flower-covered porch, a weathered fence that needed painting, and more color in the yard than I’d seen in months.
I walked to the front door with my jaw clenched, fury and desperation tangled so tight I couldn’t separate them, and knocked.
The door opened and a woman looked up at me. Small, white-haired, sharp eyes behind reading glasses. She was maybe five foot four and she filled the doorway like a barricade.
She knew who I was. I could see it in her face, the way her jaw set and her spine straightened, the way she looked at me like she’d been expecting this the way you expect a storm you saw coming days ago.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” she said.
“Please. I just need five minutes.”
“No.” She stepped into the doorway, arms crossed. “You broke my girl. She came home in pieces. You don’t get five minutes.”
“I made a mistake. A terrible one. I love her.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Please, just let me...”
“She doesn’t want to hear it.” She pointed past me, toward the street. “Off my porch. Now. Before I get my neighbor’s dogs involved.”
She meant it. I could see it in her face, the same immovable stubbornness I recognized from Andrea, the same set jaw, the same level stare that saidI have made my decision and you can fight it or accept it but you cannot change it.I understood nowwhere Andrea got it from. This woman raised her. This woman put that spine in her.
I stepped back off the porch, onto the lawn, but I didn’t leave.
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
“Then you’ll be standing on my lawn for a very long time.”
“I’ll stand here as long as it takes.”
She looked at me for a few more seconds, measuring, then closed the door. The lock clicked.
I stood on the lawn. The morning was cool and gray, clouds low over the mountains, and it started to rain about an hour in. Light at first, barely there, then heavier, soaking through my shirt in minutes. Water ran down my face, into my collar, through the fabric until my shoes squelched in the grass.
