CHAPTER TWO

“Please don’t hang up.”

That was all I managed before my throat closed completely.

The bus station was half-empty — a janitor pushing a mop across the far end, fluorescent lights humming that specific frequency that made everything feel slightly unreal. My bags were piled at my feet. The dress was doing nothing against the cold coming through the automatic doors every time they opened.

I pressed the phone harder against my ear and waited.

“Sera.” My father’s voice. Steady and low and exactly the same as I remembered it. “Hello, my daughter.”

That was it. That was all it took.

Three years of holding myself together and I came apart completely on a plastic chair in a bus station, crying in a way I hadn’t let myself since the day I left — ugly and total and without any dignity whatsoever.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out. “Dad, I’m so sorry, I’m so—”

“Stop.” Not harsh. Just firm, the way he’d always been firm — a hand on the shoulder rather than a door in the face. “Are you safe?”

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “Yes.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Not — not physically.”

He paused but I could hear him breathing. Could picture him exactly — in his study, the one with the dark wood shelves and the window overlooking the east courtyard, probably still dressed because he rarely slept before midnight.

“Come home,” he said. “You don’t have to explain anything tonight. Don’t explain anything until you’re sitting in front of me with something warm in your hands. Just come home.”

My other hand drifted to my stomach.

Come home, he’d said. Like it was still mine. Like three years of silence and one spectacular mistake hadn’t changed the address on anything.

Like I had not abandoned everything, to go chase after a dream with a man who wasn’t worth it in any way.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay. I’m coming.”

I flagged the cab with my bags still half-zipped, and as it pulled away I pressed my forehead against the cold window and made myself a promise — quiet, no ceremony, just me and the dark and the small lives I was already responsible for whether I was ready or not.

Never again. Never again would I make myself smaller to fit inside someone else’s idea of what I should be. My children would never watch me do that. Not once. Not ever.

The Voss palace looked exactly the same.

Same iron gates with the climbing rose that never quite died no matter the season. Same long gravel path with the lanterns on either side. Same pale stone face of the palace rising against the night sky, every window I’d grown up behind staring back at me like a question I’d finally shown up to answer.

I stood at the gate with my bags and felt the particular terror of a person who has been wrong for a long time and is about to face the people who knew it first.

The front door opened before my knuckles touched anything, and my mother came down the path at a speed that was impressive for a woman in house slippers, and then her arms were around me so tight I felt the breath leave my body.

“My girl.” Her voice broke clean in half. “I have missed you every single day.”

I held her back just as hard. She smelled like the cedar oil she’d worn my entire life and the warmth of the palace kitchen and home — that specific undefinable scent that only exists in the place you grew up — and I pressed my face into her shoulder and let myself be someone’s child for thirty uninterrupted seconds.

“I missed you too,” I managed. “Mom. I missed you so much.”

She pulled back and held my face in both hands, reading me the way she always had — and whatever she found there made her eyes go soft and fierce at once.

“Inside,” she said. “Right now.”

My father was in the sitting room.

He stood when I came in, and something about the simple fact of him — tall and still and solid, looking at me without accusation or satisfaction — broke the last organized thing in my chest.

I crossed the room and sank to my knees in front of him.

“I’m sorry.” The words came out stripped of rehearsal. “For leaving the way I did. For the silence. For giving up everything you built for me and throwing it away for someone who—” My voice cracked. “I was so stupid, Dad. I’m so sorry.”

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he lowered himself into the chair in front of me and put one hand on my shoulder — heavy, warm, unmistakable.

“Look at me,” he said.

I looked up.

“You are my daughter,” he said simply. “You made a choice and it cost you. That is between you and the years — not between you and me.” His jaw shifted. “You followed your heart down a hard road. It was important for you to do that…important for you to seek your own part and realize if it was meant for you or now. You’ve realized that and you have come to your sense. You learnt on your own without anybody imposing it on you. That’s just you being human.” He smiled, “Even Alphas make mistakes, Sera.”

Something loosened in my chest that had been wound tight so long I’d stopped noticing the tension.

My mother lasted approximately eleven seconds in the silence before leaning forward and saying, “Now. What happened.”

I laughed — wet and tired and real. “I…I really don’t want to do the whole story tonight.”

“That’s fine, headlines are fine—”

“Lena.” My father warned. 

“I’m just saying headlines—”

“Mom.” I looked at my hands in my lap. Then back at her. “I’m pregnant.”

The room went very still.

Then my mother screamed.

Not a short scream. A full, operatic, both-hands-to-her-mouth scream that brought one of the house staff to the doorway to check if anyone was dying.

“A BABY.” She launched off the couch. “Caden, we are going to be grandparents—”

“Lena—”

“We need to convert the east wing, the light in there is perfect and I’ve been saying for years that room has been wasted—” She spun to me. “How far along? Are you eating enough? You look thin, that is completely unacceptable—”

“Mom—”

“—I’m going to cook everything in this house—”

“Mom.” I caught her hands and held them still and looked at her bright, overflowing face. My throat tightened in a different way than it had all night. A better way. “There’s more than one.”

She stared at me.

“Twins,” I said.

The second scream was louder than the first.

My father stood slowly, walked to me, and placed both hands on my shoulders with the gravity of a man presiding over something that mattered.

“Welcome home,” he said quietly. “Princess.”

I straightened.

Princess. I had spent three years running from that word, trading it in for ordinary, for quiet, for a life that turned out to be smaller than everything I had sacrificed to get it. I had given it up for a man who had looked at everything I was and still chosen someone else.

Never again.

I took a long breath and let it settle back onto my shoulders like something that had always been made to fit.

“I’m back,” I said. And then, lower, to myself as much as him: “And I’m not leaving again.”