CHAPTER 2

POV Kristen 

Three years is a long time to disappear.

I figured it out.

Cedar Falls was a human city, three hundred miles from Silver Blue territory .... far enough that no werewolf would bother tracking a scent that old, small enough that nobody asked too many questions about a young woman starting over, large enough to disappear into without being noticed. I had rented a one bedroom apartment above a laundromat on Calloway Street, taken a waitressing job at a diner called Patsy's where the owner paid me in cash while I got on my feet, and somewhere in between the six a.m. shifts and the sleepless nights and the slow, humbling, daily work of learning who I was without Derrik Cole defining the edges of me .... 

I had built a life.

Not a big life. Not the life I'd imagined at twenty, full of pack dinners and pup crowded holidays and a mate who looked at me like I was something worth keeping.

But mine. Completely, stubbornly, entirely mine.

"Mom." A small hand patted my cheek with the patient insistence of someone who has learned that this is the most effective method. "Mom, you're burning the egg."

I spun around.

The egg was, in fact, burning, the smoke just beginning to thread up from the pan. 

"Eli." I grabbed the pan off the heat, waving smoke away from the smoke detector with my dish towel. "Baby, I told you to wake me up by seven. Not six-thirty."

Elijah .... though he didn't carry the Cole name, because I had given him mine, because that was the one decision I'd made in the first week of his life that I had never questioned .... was sitting on the kitchen counter where I had told him not to sit approximately four hundred times. He was three years old and already devastating to look at in a way that made my heart do something complicated every morning. 

I had decided early on not to hate the parts of Derrik I saw in him. My son was not his father's sins. He never would be. 

"I was hungry," Eli said. 

"You are always hungry my boy "

"I'm a growing wolf."

I laughed.

I dispose of the burnt eggs and pick two new ones.

"Story today?" Eli asked, swinging his feet against the cabinet doors in a rhythm that was probably leaving marks.

"School today."

He wrinkled his nose .... my nose, exactly .... with the thoughtful displeasure of someone taking the argument seriously before rejecting it. "Same thing."

I got him dressed in the blue striped shirt he'd picked himself .... he always picked his own clothes now, a hill I had decided was not worth dying on. I braided his curls back from his face, which took longer than it should have because he had inherited my curl pattern and Derrik's density, a genuinely unfair combination. 

I walked him to Miss Donna's with his hand in mine, his little fingers wrapped around two of my fingers the way they had since he was a baby. 

It was a good morning. A normal morning. Normal was what I had built. Normal was what I was protecting.

I should have known they never lasted.

I was halfway back to the apartment, when I smelled it.

Wolf.

And underneath it .... something else. Something that made Mira stir for the first time in three years. Not a twitch. Not a flicker. A full body lift, like a dog who's been sleeping by the fire suddenly raising its head at a sound just outside the door.

What is that?

I stopped walking. My hand was already reaching for my phone, already calculating .... four blocks back to Miss Donna's, thirty seconds if I ran, I could get Eli and be in the car and on the highway before.... 

"You're quick for someone who has been inhiding."

A voice came from behind. 

Low. 

I turned slowly.

A man was leaning against the wall of the pharmacy across the street, his arms folded. He was tall .... very tall .... in dark clothing that should have made him easy to overlook but somehow did precisely the opposite. 

I had never come across him before. 

And yet Mira .... my silent, absent wolf who had barely whispered in three years .... pressed herself against my ribs and howled.

Mate.

I took a step back. "You have the wrong person."

"Kristen Vance." He said my name the way you say a name you've said to yourself many times before .... not reading it off a list, not performing it. Familiar. "Twenty-six. Former pack member of the Silver BluePack. Left three years ago under contested circumstances. One child, male, age three." His eyes moved over me, but landed somewhere else entirely

 "I don't have the wrong person."

My blood went cold. "Who sent you?"

"Was it Derrik?" My voice was steady. My hands were not. "Because if he thinks he can.... "

Something moved across his face .... something fast and sharp that he controlled before I could read it properly, a door closing before I could see what was inside the room.

"No," he said. "My brother is not aware I am here. 

Brother.

Dylan Cole.

The Alpha King.

Derrik's older brother.

The man who had left the Silver BluePack before I ever joined it .... spoken of in careful, lowered voices, the way pack members spoke of weather systems and old wars. The man Derrik had called cold, ruthless, and better off gone.

Mira howled again, louder, more certain.

Mate, mate, mate.... 

"Stop," I whispered to her. Out loud. Like a complete idiot.

Dylan Cole raised one eyebrow. "I didn't say anything."

"I was not talking to you." I straightened my shoulders. "Whatever Derrik told you .... whatever he sent you here for .... I'm not going back. My son and I are not going back. Tell him.... "

"Kristen ." He had crossed the street. I hadn't seen him move .... one moment he was there, and then he was here, close enough that I could smell him properly now, which was a mistake, because he smelled like pine resin and cold open air and something underneath that made my wolf press against my ribs so hard I had to consciously straighten my spine to keep from leaning toward it. "I didn't come here for my brother."

"Then why.... "

His gray blue eyes settled on mine. 

"Because you are mine ," he said quietly. "And I think, if you're honest with yourself, you already know that."