Chapter 13

POV: Nora Ash

He had never left.

He sat in that truck in Mae's lot all night in the rain and he did not tell me and he did not make a performance of it and when I needed him he was already there. Already turning the engine on. Already moving before I finished asking.

I stared at that fact for a moment. I let it be what it is without explaining it away or making it smaller or finding a practical reason for it that has nothing to do with what it actually means. Some things deserved to be looked at directly.

Then I typed three words.

*I need you.*

I watched the screen. The rain is heavier now, drumming the sticky window with both hands. Downstairs I could hear Mae moving in the kitchen, the specific sound of her efficiency, a cabinet, a drawer, water running, all of it purposeful and even. I watched the small grey ellipsis appear on the screen, those three dots that mean someone on the other end is deciding what to say.

Then they stopped.

His reply arrives in three minutes and forty seconds.

*Give me twenty minutes.*

I exhaled.

And then, before I can fully exhale ,before my shoulders can come down or my chest can open or my body can do the thing it does when something it was braced for relaxes I heard it.

The low, specific rumble of a truck engine turning into the back lot.

It was not in twenty minutes.

It was now..

I crossed to the sticky window and I yanked it open on the third try, always the third try, and the cold rain hit my face and I looked down into the lot and there it was a dark truck, engine running, headlights cutting through the grey morning rain. The door opened before I can move. He stepped out and he was already looking up, already looking at the window, like he knew exactly which window I would be at.

He did not drive from somewhere else.

He never left this lot.

He texted twenty minutes from fifty feet below me because he did not want me to know he had been here all night, and then came upstairs anyway because I said I need you and that was apparently the one thing that overrode whatever careful distance he had been managing.

I pulled the window shut and went downstairs.

Mae opened the back door before he knocked. He stepped into the kitchen and shook the rain off his coat and his eyes found me immediately, the way they always find me, that compass-needle certainty that I have stopped pretending not to notice. He looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us speaks for a moment and the kitchen held the silence without breaking.

"He mentioned my mother."

Cole went still.

Not the controlled stillness. The real one the kind that comes before the controlled version, the unguarded half-second before a man who keeps everything managed has time to manage it. Something moved behind his eyes. Fast and deep.

"What did he say?"

I gave him the full call. Every word I can reconstruct, in order, including the tone and the pauses and the specific warmth that was not warmth. He listened without interrupting. His jaw tightened once at my mother's name. His hands were loose at his sides but his knuckles are pale.

When I finished, he looked at Mae who looked back at him.

Something passed between them a look I have seen the edges of before, the look of two people who share a piece of information they have not yet given to the same room at the same time. My eyes moved between them and I felt it the way I feel most things now completely, immediately, before my brain has finished forming the question.

 "What do you both know that you have not told me?"

Mae put both hands flat on the counter.

Cole looked at me. He looked at me the way he looks at things he has decided to give fully rather than in pieces, and I know what that look means now, I have learned it in four weeks of Thursdays and three words from the road and a truck that never left a parking lot.

"Victor did not call you to offer information."

"I know."

"He called you to confirm something he already suspected."

I waited.

"Whether the awakening has started."

The rain hammered the windows. Mae did not move. I looked at Cole and the word awakening sat in the kitchen between us like the first match struck in a very dark room small, yes. But enough to see by. Enough to understand the size of what surrounds it.

"Has it?"

He asked as he looked at me for a long time.

"Nora. When you stood in front of my wolf the night you crossed my border and refused to run"

He stopped and continued 

"That was not courage."

"That was the beginning."

Mae reached under the counter and puts something on the surface between us. A photograph. Old, the edges soft with age. A woman I have never seen before, standing at the edge of a tree line in the early morning light. Silver-grey eyes. Dark hair. A stillness in her posture that I recognize not because I have seen it in someone else.

Because I have seen it in a mirror.

She looks exactly like me.

 "That is your mother. Taken here. In Creston. Twenty-three years ago." Mae said quietly and paused.

"Three days before she died."

And that there brought up all the emotions I never knew I had.