CHAPTER 5

POV Kristen

Derrik was standing outside my apartment building when I came home from picking up Eli.

I stopped dead on the pavement twenty feet away, Eli's warm hand wrapped around two of my fingers.

Then Derrik shifted his weight, and my body remembered everything.

Three years. I had spent three years doing the deliberate work of becoming someone who wasn't afraid of anything. 

And within two seconds, my body forgot all of it.

My hands went cold. Mira, who had been humming with that new warm frequency ever since the diner this morning, went abruptly, completely still.

Derrik looked .... different. He'd always been handsome. Broad shoulders, the easy physical confidence of a man who had never once doubted his right to occupy the space he was standing in. He still had all of that. But there were lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn't been there before. 

Good, a cold part of me thought that I wasn't proud of and didn't try to stop . Good. Let it cost you something. Let it cost you years of it.

"Mom." Eli held my hand, looking up at me with those grey eyes. "Who is that man?"

"Nobody important”. The lie tasted strange. 

"Kristen ." Derrik pushed off from the wall as I approached, and his voice hit me in the stomach the way it always had…. "Please. I just .... please just let me.... "

"Eli." I kept my own voice very even. "Go ring Mrs. Yun's bell, okay? Tell Mrs Yun that your mom said you can watch cartoons for a few minutes."

"Okay, mom," he said softly and ran off. 

Then I turned to Derrik.

"Five minutes," I said. "And you don't follow me upstairs."

He breathed like someone who had been holding his breath for a long time. "Thank you. Kristen , I've needed .... I've been trying to figure out how to say this, there's no version of it that's enough, I know that, I know there's nothing I could say that.... "

"Four minutes and forty seconds."

He stopped. Ran a hand through his hair. "I ended things with Priya. Over a year ago. She's no longer in the pack."

"Okay."

"I want you to know that I.... "

"Derrik." I raised one hand. "I really do not care about your relationship with Priya. "What do you want from me? "Why are you here?"

"I want.... " his voice cracked in a way I had never heard from him in five years, and I had to look at the pavement for a moment because I was not going to let that sound do what it was trying to do in me. 

 "I need to know my son."

There it was.

I had known it was coming. I had known it from the second his name showed up on my blocked contacts list two weeks ago. 

"You think I don't know that he deserves to know his father?" My voice came out quieter than I intended. "You think I have spent three years telling myself otherwise? He's your blood. I know that. I have always known that. And I have never .... not once, not on the worst nights .... put poison in him about you. He doesn't know your name. He doesn't know your face. And I have given him that as the only protection I could manage not knowing yet what you are."

Derrik's face did something that I made myself look at and not away from. He deserved to hear it.

"So." I met his eyes directly. "You want to know him. That is not automatically no. But it is not yes today, or next week, or on any timeline that you set. I need time "And if you push .... lawyers, pack council, Alpha authority .... I will disappear so completely that the resources of every pack in four territories won't find me. Am I clear?"

"Yes." Immediately. "Yes. Completely clear."

A silence fell. The street filled it .... a bus somewhere, someone's radio, the muffled sound of cartoons through Mrs. Yun's wall.

Derrik's eyes moved over my face with something I wasn't equipped to look at directly, so I looked at his chin instead.

"You look strong," he said it carefully "I just .... I wanted to say that. You look like someone who built something."

I pressed my lips together. "Go home, Derrik."

He nodded. Turned to go. And then .... because this was Derrik Cole, because he had never in his life walked away from something without the last word .... he stopped.

"Dylan is around ," he said quietly. "I know he's in Cedar Falls. Someone saw him." A pause. "My brother doesn't do anything without a reason. Whatever he's told you, whatever he wants from you .... I need you to know that Dylan is not capable of what you need. He wasn't before Vera, and he's worse now. He's not safe, Kristen . Not the way you need someone to be safe."

I said nothing.

"He doesn't attached ," Derrik said. "He thinks he does. But when things get difficult .... when there's something more important than the bond .... he chooses the work. He always chooses the work."

"Go home," I said again, quiet and final.

He left.

I stood on the pavement until his car was out of sight. 

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number. Cedar Falls area code. I knew before I opened it.

He came to you. Are you okay ?

I stare at those words for a long time.

Then my thumbs moved. How did you know he was here?

The response was immediate. I've been watching your building since this morning.

I looked up sharply .... down the street, across to the pharmacy, the parked cars, the ordinary gold lit afternoon .... and there, half a block away against a dark car, was a tall figure I would have known from twice the distance.

He raised one hand. Not a wave. Just an acknowledgment. I see you. I'm here.

My chest did something I did not have words for and was not ready to examine.

Why? I typed.

I had told you where I stand, he replied immediately. 

I kept my phone in my pocket and went inside 

But at the top of the stairs, in the hallway outside our apartment door, I stopped for a while allowing different thoughts to race through my mind. 

Mira was warm inside me. After three years of silence, she was warm, steady and constant and entirely certain. 

Don't, I told her. Please don't do this to me. I need more time.