Chapter 3

My mother came at nine.

She knew I couldn’t handle greasy food, so she’d gotten up before dawn to make mushroom soup.

Dominic and Jo were at the elevator. The doors had started to close when they heard her coming down the hall.

“Rory? It’s Mom. I brought your pills.”

Dominic hit the button and stepped back out.

“Helen. What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been calling her all morning and she won’t pick up.” She held up a paper bag. “She left two boxes of pills at the house last night. She can’t skip these.”

Jo had come back out behind him, wearing my slippers with her heels hooked over two fingers and Dominic’s coat around her shoulders.

My mother looked at the slippers. She didn’t need to look at the coat. She could smell it from where she stood.

Her face closed.

“Where’s Rory?”

“Sleeping.” Jo got to the apartment door first and stood in front of it. “Helen, she wakes up mean. You probably don’t want to go in there.”

“I’m her mother. I’m bringing her medication.”

Jo didn’t move.

“Jo,” Dominic said quietly. “Move.”

Her eyes filled up on command.

“Fine. Everyone thinks I’m the bad guy. She scares us all with the sick act last night, she blows off her own ceremony today, and I’ve been running around for a week and I still can’t do anything right.”

Dominic’s forehead creased.

I knew that crease. He was caving.

My mother wasn’t.

“What sick act? Have you people read her chart? The doctor told you she can’t be woken suddenly!”

Jo’s expression changed.

“Helen, nobody woke her. I swear. We all had a few drinks, came home and went to bed.”

Dominic stood there without a word.

My mother turned to him.

“Dominic. Is that what happened?”

My mother has a bad heart. She found out about my first hospital stay, because there was no hiding it. Every stay after that, Dominic and I kept from her.

That was the only lie he had my permission to tell her. He’d promised me there would never be another one.

It took him one second.

“Don’t worry, Helen. She’s just asleep.”

He looked her in the eye.

“Nothing happened last night.”

I closed my eyes.

So this was what it felt like when it stopped hurting.

My mother looked at him for a long time.

She could have pushed past them both. She didn’t. In three years she had never once opened a door on me while I was sleeping, because six months ago a door was all it took.

She set the thermos down beside the doormat.

“Her chest has been hurting all week. She called me last night and said she couldn’t get a good breath.”

Dominic nodded.

“When you go in, check her color first. If you can’t wake her, don’t shake her. Call an ambulance.”

“I will.”

She walked a few steps and turned around.

“Dominic. Being late to a ceremony is nothing. What matters is that she’s okay.”

His face flickered.

“It’s nine thirty,” Jo said, pulling at his sleeve. “There’s a ballroom full of people waiting on you. Quit stalling.”

The elevator doors started to close again.

He looked through the narrowing gap at the apartment.

That door was fifteen feet away.

He let the elevator close.

The thermos sat on the floor by itself. My mother hadn’t closed the bag, and a folded medical record had slid halfway out.

I crouched next to it.

It was six months old.

That night, Jo had called him at two a.m. to say she’d been dumped. The sound of Dominic opening the front door woke me up.

My heart stopped for eleven seconds.

He carried me into the ER himself. Outside the trauma room he went down on his knees in front of a doctor, an Alpha, crying so hard he couldn’t stand.

When they discharged me, he moved us out of the pack house and into an apartment ten minutes from the hospital. He bought the most expensive soundproofing money could buy and rebuilt the whole bedroom.

He said it would never happen again.

Today he’d pried my hand off his leg with his own fingers.

Today he’d stood in front of Jo’s lie and made it his.

At nine forty, the building manager came up with two paramedics.

Dr. Ellis hadn’t let it go. He’d called 911 himself.

The manager was a Silver Ridge wolf named Walt. He put his phone on speaker and asked his Alpha if he could break down the door.

The line stayed silent for several seconds.

Then Jo’s voice, low, close to the phone.

“They break that door and last night comes out. The ceremony’s over. She sleeps twenty hours a day anyway, Dominic. You really want everybody laughing at me?”

I heard him breathing.

“Nobody goes in. She’s asleep.”

Walt swallowed. “Alpha, the paramedics are saying they need to—”

“That’s an order. If anything happens, it’s on me.”

Walt’s shoulders dropped.

He put his back against my door and told the paramedics to go home.