Melbourne Is Calling

POV: Imogen

She didn't answer it.

Standing beside the car, she let the Melbourne number ring until it stopped. The phone burned in her hand. Seven rings. Then voicemail. Then silence, broken only by the blood rushing in her ears. 

She waited.

No message came through.

Inside the car, Hayley had gone very still, the way she did when she sensed something she hadn't been invited to know. Her grey eyes found Imogen through the window. Wide. Uncertain. Her face crumpled, and she started to cry. Hayley had never been able to separate herself from what the people around her were feeling.

Quietly. That was the worst part. Hayley cried the way she did everything, without performance, without demands. Silent tears tracked down her face as she looked at her mother through the glass, absorbing whatever Imogen was feeling without knowing what to do with it.

Imogen pulled open the door and got in the car.

"Hey." She reached back and cupped Hayley's face, brushing the tears away with her thumb. "I'm all right. Okay? I'm fine."

Hayley looked at her with those too-knowing eyes and said nothing.

"Are we going home?" Declan asked from his window seat, apparently unbothered by the emotional tension in the back.

"We're going home," Imogen confirmed.

She started the car. Put it in reverse. Drove.

The twelve-minute drive back to the cottage passed in controlled detachment. Her hands stayed on the wheel. She used her indicators, stopped at a red light, and noticed only distantly that her fingers had gone white at the knuckles. She loosened them deliberately.

Her wolf paced in restless circles, not quite panicked, but alert like an animal that had caught a familiar scent and didn't like what it recognized.

Steady, she told it.

Her wolf's response was the psychic equivalent of an unimpressed stare.

She pulled into the cottage driveway and got the twins inside with the distracted efficiency of a woman functioning on instinct. Snacks appeared on the coffee table. The television went on, a weekday afternoon luxury she almost never allowed. Both children noticed the change, though neither commented.

Declan accepted a biscuit and the remote with the philosophical ease of a boy who had learned not to question good fortune. Hayley sat beside him, leaning slightly into his shoulder as she watched her mother move around the kitchen.

Imogen paced.

She was aware she was pacing. She did it anyway.

The Melbourne number sat in her recent calls like radioactive material. She looked at it three times without touching it. The rational part of her brain—the part that had kept her functional and organized for five years—worked through the possibilities with methodical speed. A wrong number. A pack administrator. Someone from Nightshade's business division who had found her through professional channels.

Her wolf dismissed every one of those possibilities.

There was a knock at the door forty minutes later. She knew Cooper's knock the way she knew most things about him, by pattern and repetition: two firm raps and then a pause before the third. She crossed the hall and opened it.

He took one look at her and said nothing. He simply stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and followed her to the kitchen, where he put the kettle on without being asked. He had been there often enough to know where everything was.

"Talk," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You've said that twice today. The average is once." He leaned against the counter and watched her with those steady hazel eyes. "What happened after you left the car park?"

She sat at the kitchen table. Then stood up again because sitting felt impossible. "I got a call."

"From?"

"Melbourne number. Unknown." She crossed her arms. "No message."

Cooper was quiet for a moment. She could see him processing it, connecting it to the rogue activity, the school incident, and everything that had been building over the past four weeks. He was not a man who needed things spelled out. It was one of the qualities she valued most about him and one that occasionally made him harder to deflect.

"Imogen." His voice was careful. "How bad is your instinct on this?"

"Bad." She pressed her fingers against the edge of the counter. "I might need to move the twins."

"No," he said quietly, but there was no softness in it. "You've built a real life here. Silvercrest would back you. Darcy would back you. Running isn't the only option anymore."

"You don't know what I'm running from."

"Then tell me."

Her wolf snarled, sharp enough to make her flinch. Not at Cooper. At the thought of it. His name in her mouth in this kitchen, tied to her children and the life she had scraped together from the wreckage he'd left behind. A protective instinct so deep she couldn't find its edges simply refused to yield.

"I can't," she said.

"Can't or won't?"

"Both. Neither." She exhaled. "It's complicated."

"It's always complicated with you." He pushed off the counter and crossed to the table. His hand found her shoulder briefly, warm and certain. He knew exactly how much pressure to apply and when to take it away. "Whatever it is, you don't have to carry it alone anymore. That's all I'm saying." 

She looked at him. At his honest, patient face. At the way he gave her his full attention without asking anything in return, something she had spent two years carefully refusing.

She opened her mouth.

Her phone rang.