Chapter 2: Two Days Of Silence, One Moment That Changed Everything

Forty-eight hours.

That is how long I waited for a man who was never going to come the way I needed him to.

They moved my parents' bodies on the first morning. I watched them do it from the doorway of the east corridor, my arms wrapped around myself, still wearing the same clothes from the night before. Nobody offered me anything to change into. Nobody brought me food. One of the older pack women, Mirra, placed a cup of tea on the windowsill beside me sometime around dawn, and that was the closest anyone came to touching me for the first full day.

I did not drink the tea.

My wolf was quiet inside me in a way that scared me more than the attack had. She was not grieving. She was not raging. She was just still, like an animal that has been hurt so badly it stops making noise entirely and simply waits to find out if it is going to survive.

I sat in the hall outside my father's study with my back against the wall and my knees pulled to my chest and I called Jason seven more times between midnight and morning.

Seven times. Seven voicemails. Seven silences that stretched out after the beep and swallowed every word I tried to say.

On the fourth call, I managed to speak.

"Jason, it is me." My voice cracked on the second word and I pressed my fist against my mouth and waited until I could breathe again. "Something happened. Something really bad happened and I need you to come home. Please. I do not know who else to call. I do not know what to do. I just need you here."

I hung up before I started crying, because once I started I was not sure I would be able to stop.

On the second day, I finally reached Darius.

Beta Darius Crowe picked up on the second ring, and the sound of his voice, familiar and steady, almost broke me completely.

"Laila." He said my name like he already knew. Like the news had reached him before I had. "Are you alright?"

"No." The word came out dry, scraped hollow. "Darius, where is he? Why is he not answering? My parents are gone and I have been sitting here for two days and he has not called me back, not once, I have left him seven messages and he has not—"

"Laila." His voice was careful. That same careful I had already learned to hate. "He knows what happened. Word reached us both yesterday morning."

I went very still.

"He knows," I said.

"Yes."

"And he has not called me."

A pause. Not a long one. But long enough.

"He is on his way back," Darius said. "He will be there soon. Just hold on a little longer."

"Darius." I pressed my hand flat to the wall to keep myself upright. My legs had gone strange, like the bones had softened. "He knew yesterday morning and he did not call me."

"Laila, just wait for him. When he gets there, talk to him. Okay? Just wait."

Something in the way he said it, not reassuring, not warm, just urging me toward patience in a way that carried no comfort at all, settled in my chest like a stone dropping into cold water.

"Is there something you are not telling me?" I asked.

Another pause.

"Just wait for him," he said again. And then, quieter, like he was saying it to himself as much as to me: "I am sorry, Laila."

He hung up.

I stood in the hallway for a long time after that, my phone pressed against my sternum, staring at nothing. The estate around me was full of pack members moving through their roles with the kind of careful efficiency that felt like performance. People talking in low voices. Warriors posted at every entry point. Elders moving in and out of rooms with expressions that told me absolutely nothing about what they were thinking.

Not one of them came to sit with me.

Not one of them asked if I had eaten, or slept, or needed anything that was not a formal answer to a formal question.

I was the Alpha King's daughter. I had lived in this house for most of my life. I had grown up alongside wolves who were now pretending I was invisible, and I understood, in the flat and terrible clarity that grief sometimes brings, that they had already decided something about me that I had not been given a chance to dispute.

I washed my face in the bathroom near the kitchen. Changed my clothes for the first time in two days. I stood in front of the small mirror above the sink and looked at my own reflection and said, out loud, to the version of myself staring back:

"He is going to walk through those gates and he is going to hold you, and everything that comes after that you will face together. You are mates. That is not something that breaks over two days of silence."

My reflection looked unconvinced.

I ignored her and went to stand at the front of the estate.

The morning was grey and cold, the kind of Canadian winter morning that presses down on your chest without apology. I had been standing there for twenty minutes, my hands tucked under my arms for warmth, watching the gates, when I heard the vehicles.

Two black SUVs, moving slow through the territory road.

My heart kicked hard against my ribs.

I stood up straighter. Smoothed my hands down the front of my jacket. Tried to remember all the things I had planned to say, the words I had arranged and rearranged in my head across forty-eight hours of waiting. The grief. The fear. The pregnancy, that tiny fragile thing I had been so excited to share just two nights ago, before the world had ended.

The gates opened.

The first vehicle stopped and the door opened and Jason stepped out.

My breath came out in a shaking rush.

And then the passenger door opened.

She stepped out on the other side of the vehicle, and the world did not end in that moment, but it felt like it did. Selena. My cousin Selena, with her dark hair loose around her shoulders and her chin lifted and her hand, within three seconds of stepping out of that car, tucking itself into the crook of Jason's arm like it had always lived there.

I did not move.

Neither did he.

Our eyes met across the courtyard, and for one second, one single suspended second, something moved across Jason's face. Something that could have been recognition, or guilt, or the ghost of something that used to be real.

Then it was gone.

He did not walk toward me. He did not pull away from Selena. He did not open his mouth to say my name or acknowledge the two days of silence or the messages I had left or the fact that I was standing in front of him with my eyes swollen and my hands shaking and my parents buried in the ground behind this estate.

He just stood there.

And Selena looked at me.

I had known my cousin my entire life. I knew the particular way her mouth curved when she felt like she had won something. I knew the specific angle of her chin when she wanted you to understand, without her having to lower herself to say it, that you no longer mattered.

She was doing both right now.

"Laila." Jason finally said my name. His voice was low, controlled. A stranger's voice. "We should talk."

"Yes," I said. "We should."

But he was not looking at me the way a mate looks at the person they love after the worst night of their life. He was looking at me the way you look at a problem you have not yet figured out how to manage.

And Selena stood beside him, still holding his arm, and she did not let go.

My wolf, quiet for two full days, made the smallest sound deep in my chest.

Not a howl. Not a growl.

Just a soft, broken whimper. The kind of sound that means something inside you has recognized, before your mind has caught up, that the thing you were waiting for is not coming.

That it was never coming.

That it had already been replaced.

My eyes burned. I blinked once, hard, and refused to let a single tear fall in front of either of them. Not here. Not with the whole pack watching from their windows and their doorways, and the elders gathered on the hall steps, and Corin standing twenty feet away with that same careful suspicion still sitting behind his eyes.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out steady. I do not know how. "Talk."

Jason glanced at Selena.

She finally, finally unhooked her hand from his arm.

But she did not step away. She stood right beside him, shoulders squared, like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

And I understood then, before he said a single word, before the conversation that was about to happen, before everything that would come after it.

I understood that the forty-eight hours of silence had not been a tragedy.

They had been a choice.

The tears I had refused to shed in front of them burned the whole way down my throat instead, hot and private and furious, and I swallowed every single one.

Whatever he was about to say, I was going to stand here and hear it with my spine straight.

I owed myself that much.