The Return - Cassia

The scent hit her first. Pine smoke and storm winds, cold and biting, threaded through the air like a warning. Sharp. Unmistakable. Dangerous. It coiled around her before she even saw the gates, wrapping itself around her ribs and squeezing until her breath caught.

Cassia stilled at the edge of the trees, boots sinking slightly into the damp, moss-slick earth. Her grip instinctively tightened around the two smaller hands in hers. Muddy, restless, unaware of the storm beginning to churn low in her chest. The wind whispered through the branches above, brushing over her skin with the same voice she remembered from a lifetime ago. One that still knew her name.

Beside her, two pairs of small feet shifted impatiently, crunching twigs and damp leaves beneath them. Behind them, the crumbling remains of the old highway stretched back into the hills like a broken spine. Cracked, swallowed by time and the kind of silence that came only after fire. Everything behind them was gone. Burned to ash. Buried in names she refused to speak aloud.

Everything ahead?

Technically, it was home.

But it didn’t feel like it. Not anymore. Not since the last time she stood on this land with a heartbeat too fast and a future ripped out from under her.

She hadn’t laid eyes on the Blackridge Pack lands in five years. Not since the night they’d dragged her before the Alpha Council and carved shame into her name. Not since the rejection that echoed through her bones long after the words had faded.

Not since him.

Not since Kade.

A tug on her sleeve drew her back. “Mama, are we here yet?” The voice was soft, impatient. Young, but already edged with something sharper. Something watchful.

She looked down to find Leo pressed to her side, his small hand clenched in hers. His face was round with youth, cheeks dusted with cold, but his eyes, ice blue, too pale, were older than they should’ve been. Eerily still. Not hers, not fully. And that truth, unspoken and heavy, gnawed at her with quiet precision.

Her heart twisted in her chest, a painful, private ache. She bent just slightly, brushing a thumb across his cheek.

“Yeah, baby,” she whispered. “We’re here.”

But nothing about it felt safe. Not the woods, not the wind, not the land that used to know her name. The Blackridge gates loomed ahead, just as she remembered. Iron twisted through with pine branches, the faint shimmer of old runes etched deep into the metal, half-swallowed by rust and time. The forest seemed to hold its breath as they approached, the trees too still, too quiet, as though even they remembered what had happened the last time she crossed this border.

High in the canopy, just above the treeline, discreet cameras blinked to life, tracking movement, cataloguing scents. She knew they’d already locked onto her. Her face, her pheromones, the children flanking her sides like shadows. Every inch of her was already being processed. Labeled. Flagged.

She wondered if he was watching.

If Kade was somewhere inside that fortress of wood and stone, spine stiff, shoulders tense, trying to make sense of the tremor in the bond that had never fully snapped. She hadn’t felt it in years, had trained herself not to, but now, it pulsed like a bruise, deep under her skin, dull and slow and waking up.

Would he recognize it? Would he scent what walked beside her now? What followed in her blood?

Cassia reached into her coat and pulled out the papers. Creased, weather-worn, the edges soft from fingers that had folded and refolded them too many times. Custody clearance. Council protection. A fragile, legal tether meant to keep them alive, nothing more.

She held it in one hand, her other still gripping Nova’s shoulder, grounding herself in the present.

A breath.

The forest exhaled with her.

Then, groaning low like something ancient in pain, the gate began to move. Metal scraping metal. A shuddering sound that cut through the silence and echoed into her bones.

Cassia straightened instinctively, spine locking into place. Her shoulders squared, her expression calcified into something unreadable, and her heart began to pound, not fast, but deep. A thud-thud-thud like distant drums calling her back into a war she swore she’d never fight again.

She glanced down, her voice dropping low, sharp with command.

“No matter what happens,” she said, barely louder than the creak of the hinges, “you stay behind me. You do not shift. You do not run. Do you understand?”

Nova nodded instantly, clutching Leo’s sleeve. Leo didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. His jaw was already tight. His feet already planted.

Two small heads bobbed in perfect unison, too solemn for six-year-olds, too knowing. But then, they’d never really been allowed to be children, not in the way others were. They didn’t cry when they were hurt. They didn’t ask questions she couldn’t answer. They didn’t flinch when the world turned cruel. Cassia had made sure of that. Taught them how to move silent, how to mask their scent, how to still their breath until even wolves might pass them by. How to vanish.

She hadn’t done it out of strength. She’d done it out of desperation, out of love. The savage kind, the kind born of blood and fire and fear.

Snow fell around them in soft spirals, catching in Nova’s hair and melting along Leo’s lashes. Flakes like ash, fine and slow, drifting across the pine-dark clearing beyond the gate. And then a figure stepped into view.

Her pulse jumped.

Tall. Broad. Still.