Going Back

The drive to Darkwood dragged on for four hours. Marcus took the wheel. I sat next to him with my bag shoved between my feet, phone in hand, window cracked open just enough for a bit of air. I needed to feel it—something to keep me from sinking. I hadn’t slept the night before, and my pre-dawn coffee was doing nothing except reminding me how tired I was.

We barely spoke for the first two hours. That was fine by me. Marcus wasn’t the type to chatter for the sake of filling silence, and I needed the quiet. I wanted a stretch of time to be nothing before I had to start pretending to be anything else.

So I stared out at the passing landscape. Neutral territory’s got a looseness to it; everything feels unclaimed, like the land itself finally got to exhale. But edge past it, closer to Darkwood, and things tighten up fast. Pack land is different. There’s this sense of structure that settles over everything—and the Alpha’s presence, heavy in the air, so obvious you feel it whether you want to or not. My wolf felt it too.

This time, though, she wasn’t clawing inside me the way she used to after the rejection. No desperate pulling, no ache to belong. Instead, her awareness was quiet. Like approaching a place with old memories in the dirt—places that remember for you when you’re trying hard to forget.

I pressed my forehead to the window and breathed in the cold glass.

Marcus glanced over. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” I said. He left it alone. Good man for that.

We crossed into Darkwood just after eleven. My wolf went absolutely still. Not relaxed—just watchful, trying to sense if old ground was still hers. It wasn’t. I told myself that straight and clear. Then I made myself sit up, take my head off the window, and look at what was ahead.

Darkwood Pack territory looked the same from the road. Forest crowding right up to the asphalt. Stone border markers that had been there longer than anyone alive. The same way morning sunlight streamed in through the trees, all broken and golden and almost pretty enough to hide the sharp edges underneath.

Almost.

“Where is he?” I asked.

Marcus said, “At the packhouse. He moved back in once things got bad enough for the medics to need him close.” A pause. “He stopped shifting six weeks ago. His wolf can’t keep up with it anymore.”

Those words landed heavy. I knew what it meant up close—bond deterioration so advanced that the wolf side starts slipping away. First shifting hurts. Then it’s nearly impossible. Then it’s gone entirely. There’s nothing fair about it.

“Does the pack know?” I asked.

“They know he’s sick, but not how sick. He’s been hiding it, running meetings when he can barely sit up, making me give orders when he can’t. He doesn’t want to be seen like this.”

“Of course not,” I said quietly. It figured. Damien Cole, Alpha to his core, raised not to show pain or weakness. Vulnerability was a kind of failure for men like him. I’d spent four years trying to convince him otherwise. Clearly, it hadn’t stuck.

We reached the packhouse at eleven-thirty. I hadn’t been here in three years. It wasn’t just a building. It always looked like it had chosen to stay—stone walls tucked in behind ancient trees, roots sunk deep. Once upon a time, I’d loved this place. I’d walked through that front door believing I was stepping into the rest of my life.

I sat in the car for a beat, watching it, letting old memories sit heavy, and then I got out.

Wolves in the square stopped what they were doing. I felt their curiosity turn my way, rolling over me. A few faces I knew—like Berta, who taught me the old family bread recipe in my first Luna month, and two younger wolves who used to follow me around. Some kids stared just because I was a stranger.

Berta’s expression twisted with something I couldn’t read. I nodded at her. She pressed a hand to her chest in the old pack greeting, simple and familiar and too much for a moment I didn’t expect. Still, I kept my face careful and followed Marcus inside.

The packhouse still smelled the same. Nobody warns you about smells—the way they jump straight past all the walls, drag you back to memory whether you want it or not. Pine sap and old stone, and that warm, nameless thing that once meant home. My body remembered, even though it wasn’t home now. Somehow, that stung more.

Nadia met us in the hall. She looked tired, as you’d expect after an all-night drive, but you could see the steel there. Always focused when there was something hard to fix. She wrapped me in a brief hug—rare from her, which made it matter.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Stable. I pulled what I could from the house and gave him a compound to slow everything down while I ID the second contaminant.” Nadia dropped her voice. “He doesn’t know I’m here because of you.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

She nodded. “He’s in the study, insisted on working,” she muttered in that tone only doctors have after being ignored by stubborn patients.

Of course he did.

Marcus led me down the familiar hallway. I’d spent so much time in that room—pack business, late-night planning sessions, or just existing together, silent, comfortable. Marcus knocked, then let us in.

Damien was behind his desk, papers everywhere, pen in hand. At first, he looked like he’d expected Marcus—ready to be annoyed by the interruption—then he saw me.

He stopped cold.

I honestly didn’t know what I’d feel walking in. I’d braced myself for anger, grief, for seeing a stranger, some numbness maybe. But seeing how much smaller he’d become hit me in the chest. Sure, he was still broad, still had the face that stopped me the first time we met, but he was… faded. Something essential was burning down inside him. His skin had lost its color, lines worn deep that I didn’t remember, and the effort it cost him to stand was obvious in his eyes. He stood anyway—because he’d been raised to.

We stared across the study at each other. The last time I’d seen him, I was walking out of our kitchen with a bag slung over my shoulder and he couldn’t even bring himself to look at me.

He looked now. I dropped my gaze to the desk.

“Aria.” His voice was rougher, scraped raw.

“Damien,” I answered, keeping my tone professional—foundation-calm. “I’m not here for whatever you’re thinking. Something’s happening that needs my expertise, and when it’s handled, I’m leaving. No need to make this more than it is.”

He watched me for a long moment.

“Okay,” he said.

“The woman in your house—Selene. Tell me when she showed up, what she told you, what she’s touched, what she’s fed you. Everything.”

Something shifted in his face. Not surprise; more like a suspicion he’d been holding finally taking shape.

“Marcus told you,” he said.

“He gave me part of it. Nadia’s bloodwork filled in the rest.” I slid into the chair across from the desk without waiting—formalities weren’t for us anymore. “Sit down, Damien. You’re in pain and there’s no reason for you to stand.”

He sat, hands going still on the desktop. I remembered how he always had controlled hands. It was something I noticed right away about him years ago. Who knows what he was hiding now.

“From the top,” I said. “Tell me about the night she arrived.”

He looked at me with an expression I’d never seen on him before. Shame. Not the raw kind, but the kind that had settled in and grown roots for years.

“Aria,” he said. “Before I start, you need to know…”

“Damien—”

“Please.” His voice cracked—just a little, but I heard it. “There hasn’t been a day, not one, when I didn’t know I made the worst mistake of my life.”

The room went quiet. I could hear the world carrying on outside—the pack square, voices, laughter. Life rolling on, not caring about what was unraveling on the inside.

I looked at him and thought about Isla, hunched on my kitchen floor at two a.m. asking when the pain would stop. I thought about the three hundred wolves who’d passed through my foundation, each of them scraping something back from nothing. About that bag I packed in twelve minutes, the bond that burned like poison, and my wolf howling as I made the list of what to save and what to leave.

All of it.

Still, I said, “Tell me about the night she came to you.”

Because whatever he felt—whatever I felt—had to wait. Right now, what mattered was figuring out what Selene had done, how far it went, and how to stop it before time ran out. Everything else could wait.

He took a shaky breath. Then he started talking.