Chapter 4

The morning of departure arrived wrapped in mist. I stood at the threshold of the packhouse, holding Lydia’s traveling cloak with hands that did not tremble. I had learned, in the dark hours between discovery and dawn, how to wear obedience like a second skin.

"Mother, you’re creasing the silk." Lydia snatched the garment from my grasp, her nose wrinkling in that gesture she had learned from Marga.

I released the fabric. "Forgive me."

Shawn emerged from the study, his ceremonial leathers gleaming, every buckle polished to a mirror sheen by my own hands. He did not look at me.

Marga swept through the doorway, pristine, luminous, her white-blonde hair catching the weak morning light like spun starlight. She took Lydia’s hand naturally, the way a mother takes her daughter’s, and Lydia leaned into her side with a familiarity that lacerated.

"There, there, little swan," Marga cooed, adjusting Lydia’s collar with tender precision. "We shall see such wonders. The crystalline waters, the gardens of moon-blossom..."

She paused, turning to me with those eyes like glacial ice. "Stella, you mustn’t fret. I shall ensure they eat properly, rest properly. You’ve done the hard work of raising them. Now let me polish the stone you’ve quarried."

The words were velvet wrapped around a blade. I bowed my head, the posture of the invisible, the domestic, the dismissed.

The private shuttle waited at the aerodrome, its silver hull gleaming like a promise I would never touch. Kurt took his luggage from my hands without acknowledgment, his gaze fixed on the horizon where his manhood awaited. "Hold the territory, Mother. We’ll bring you back something nice."

Shawn paused at the hatch, his profile sharp against the sky. For a moment, a heartbeat, I thought he might turn. Might see me standing there in my frayed housedress, my pelt dull from years of neglect, my hands cracked from scrubbing his floors.

He stepped inside. Marga followed, her laughter chiming like bells. Lydia waved, but not at me. At the future I had built for them, from which I was excised.

The engines hummed, a low thrum that vibrated in my sternum. I watched until the shuttle became a speck, then a memory, then nothing. Until I could no longer smell Marga’s jasmine perfume on the wind, could no longer trace the authoritative musk of my husband’s presence.

Then I turned.

My hand moved before I could command it to still.

I dialed the frequency I had carried like a scar across twelve years. Static hissed, a sound like snakes in dry grass. Once. Twice. A third time.

Then—

"Hello?"

His voice. Older now. Roughened by time and the weight of command, by the burden of Alpha dominance. Yet still him. Still the Alpha of the Pearlcoast Pack. Still my father.

My throat sealed shut. I held the receiver as if it were the final rope preventing my descent into an abyss of my own making. Tears fell, silent and relentless, dripping onto the ticket clutched in my other hand.

I had rehearsed a thousand speeches. Apologies, explanations, justifications for my defiance, my absence, my failure.

Instead, I whispered the only truth that remained, the word splintering from me like bone fracturing under pressure.

"Father." The syllable tasted of blood and salt. "...Take me away from here."

Silence pooled on the line, thick and absolute, a chasm between his breath and mine. I could hear him, could sense the massive presence of him, the wolf beneath his skin pacing, considering, judging.

I waited for the condemnation. For the I told you so. For the door to remain closed, as I had closed it twelve winters ago when I chose a shadow over my blood.

The silence stretched, elastic and brutal, tearing at the last threads of my composure.

Then, against all expectation, against the weight of every cruel prophecy—

"I never closed the gate."

A pause. The sound of shifting weight, of a great beast rising from its throne.

"Wait for me."

The line went dead.

I sat in the gathering dark, the receiver still pressed to my ear, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.