Chapter Fourteen: Alpha in deep soup

The cottage door came off its hinges.

Not intentionally. Kadence hit it at full stride with his shoulder and the old wood simply gave way, the frame splintering outward like it had been waiting years for an excuse. He was through it before the pieces finished falling, his wolf fully at the surface, eyes blazing gold, every sense he had reaching ahead of him into the room.

Lavender. Old wood. The dying warmth of a low fire.

And his mother, sitting in the armchair by the fireplace with her hands folded in her lap, watching him the way she'd watched him since he was small. Like she already knew what he was going to do before he did it and had quietly made peace with it.

Alive. Unharmed.

Alone.

Kadence stood in the wreckage of the doorframe and felt the rage in him crest and break against nothing, because there was nothing to break against. No Rhydian. No Saskia. Just the cottage and the fire and his mother's careful eyes and the particular silence of a room that had recently held something ugly and was still settling back into itself.

"They're gone," Mirelle said. Soft. Certain. "They left about four minutes ago."

He couldn't speak for a moment. His hands were still shaking, blood dried dark on his knuckles from the wall at the pack house, and the wolf in him was pacing furious circles with nowhere to go and nothing to tear into.

He crossed the room in four strides and crouched in front of her chair, his hands finding hers, his eyes moving over her face the way they used to when he was twelve and checking for damage he was too small to have prevented.

"Did they touch you?"

"I'm fine, Kadence."

"That's not what I asked."

Mirelle looked at him for a long moment. Then she turned her hand over under his and squeezed once, firmly, the way she used to when he was younger and needed to be brought back into his body.

"I'm fine," she said again, and this time it landed differently.

He let out a breath that felt like it had been sitting in his chest since the phone call and dropped his head forward, just for a second, just long enough to feel the ground under him again. His mother's hand stayed in his, warm and steady.

Then she said, "Sit down. We need to talk."

He pulled the footstool close and sat, forearms on his knees, and waited.

Mirelle looked at him with the particular expression she reserved for things she had organized carefully in her mind before speaking. "They were here for about twenty minutes before I called you. Long enough to say what they came to say and show me what they wanted me to see."

"What did they show you?"

"A photograph." Her voice was measured. "A young woman's apartment building. Fourth floor. They knew which window was hers." She paused. "They were very calm about it. That was the point, I think. Not to hurt me. To make sure I understood that they already know where she is."

Something cold moved through Kadence's chest.

"They wanted you to tell me," he said.

"They wanted me to be frightened. And they wanted that fear to travel." Mirelle's chin lifted slightly. "They underestimated how much I dislike being used as a messenger for people with ugly intentions."

His mother studied him in the firelight. "She's your mate," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"And you've been running."

He didn't answer. He didn't need to. She could read it in him the way she always had, that quiet devastating clarity she'd never lost no matter how small the years had made her.

"I know why," she said. "You don't have to explain it to me." She looked down at their joined hands for a moment. "You watched what love did to me. You decided it was the love itself that was dangerous. So you built walls and called them discipline and told yourself you were being careful." She looked up. "But you weren't being careful, Kadence. You were just being afraid."

The words landed the way only his mother's words could, past every defense he had, straight into the part of him he kept in the dark.

"She's human," he said. "She works in a club. The pack won't—"

"The pack will follow their Alpha." Mirelle's voice was quiet but it had an edge he hadn't heard in years. "The question is never what the pack will accept. The question is whether you have the spine to lead them somewhere worth following."

Kadence stared at the fire.

"Your father didn't destroy this family because he loved someone," Mirelle said. "He destroyed it because he was a coward. Because when things became difficult he chose the easy thing, every single time, for twenty years." She squeezed his hand once more. "You have never once in your life chosen the easy thing. Don't start now."

The fire crackled between them. Outside the wind moved through the trees, low and steady.

"They know where she lives," Kadence said. Something had settled in his voice that hadn't been there when he came through the door. "She's alone. She doesn't know what she's in the middle of."

"No," Mirelle said quietly. "She doesn't."

He stood slowly. Bent and pressed his lips to his mother's forehead and held them there for a moment, then straightened.

He walked back through the broken doorframe into the cold and stood on the cottage steps with his phone in his bloody hand, staring out at the dark tree line.

He knew almost nothing about her.

Just a name.

Asha.

He didn't know her last name. Didn't know her address or her number or anything beyond what he'd seen from across a crowded room and what Ronan had managed to say in ten minutes in a corner booth. He had a name and a face and a bond that was sitting in his chest like a live wire, and somewhere on the other side of this territory the twins already knew more about her than he did.

That thought sat in him cold and heavy and completely unacceptable.

He pocketed his phone and went back inside.

He had a broken door to fix before morning.

And after that, he had work to do.