CHAPTER 2: NO MORE TIME

“The Vale offers a bounty of $50,000 to anyone…”

The smell of detergent and other cleaning chemicals assaulted my nostrils as the reporter's voice droned in the background. 

It had been three weeks since a bounty had been placed on my head, and my nerves were already stretched thin. 

When I saw the figure on the screen two weeks ago, my initial reaction was one of panic.

I had abandoned my day job because of the exposure, and taken to working the evening shift here at the laundromat. 

It was cash in hand, with no paperwork, the type of job, and exactly the way I needed it. 

I kept my head down as I loaded machines, sorted and folded clothes, and handed tickets across the counter with a smile that gave nothing away. 

“You look weirdly familiar,” a female voice said.

“I get that a lot,” I replied, not looking up from my task. 

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like someone?” she asked again, studying my face more openly than she ever had before.

Irritation and fear rose in me, but I did not let it show. “People say that sometimes,” I replied lightly. “I guess I have one of those faces.”

She took her ticket and moved away, but I felt her eyes on my back.

I exhaled slowly through my nose. 

My ex-husband was brilliant. $50k was nothing to a man like Ford Vale, but to the people around me, it was life changing. 

I could not even blame them for finding resemblance in everyone. I would have looked too.

I was mid-shift cleaning out a washing machine, back turned, when a chill shot down my spine. It was the feeling one got when they were being watched by something dangerous. 

I spun around, my fists raised defensively… and froze. 

My son was standing a few feet behind me with an impassive expression on his face.

I stared at him in shock. “Mavy?” I said carefully, “H… how did you get here?”

He blinked. “I walked."

“From the apartment alone?” I asked, rushing to him and checking his body. 

He nodded, looking unbothered. “Yes.”

I stared at him in shock. My five years old son had walked from our apartment three blocks away and arrived behind me without making a single sound. 

And the most unsettling part was that nothing about his expression suggested he found any of this unusual.

“Mavy—” I started.

“They are talking about you,” he said, cutting me off.

I paused. “Who is?”

“Hey.” A voice interrupted. 

I looked up to see a woman standing a few feet away, her brows slightly drawn together as she looked at me. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly. “But have I seen you somewhere before? You look really familiar.”

The room seemed to be still around me.

My heart slammed against my ribs, but my face did not change. “I don’t think so,” I replied with a small, polite smile. “I just work here.”

She hesitated, clearly unconvinced. “Were you on TV recently?”

I glanced up then, letting my expression settle into amusement. “Me on TV?” I said, chuckling. “I’m not that interesting.”

I did not give her time to think. “I need to get back,” I added, gently pulling Maverick with me.

I turned to see the woman from earlier standing near the door, talking to someone, her gaze moving between her phone screen and my face with the careful attention of someone confirming something. A young man by the machines was typing with the speed of someone who had just made a decision.

Even if they weren’t sure, the taste of $50,000 was enough for them to call a slight resemblance in. The awareness was spreading.

I moved faster, grabbing my bag from behind the counter, ignoring when my supervisor called my name.

“Maya, where are you going? You still have—”

“My son isn’t feeling well,” I cut in, not slowing. “I’ll make it up next shift.”

My hand tightened around Maverick’s as we pushed through the door and into the street. “Okay, baby,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Stay close.”

Running attracted attention, so I only walked fast. My gaze flicked from one face to another, checking, counting, measuring. But no one looked out of place. 

By the time we reached the apartment, my heart was pounding as if it wanted to burst out of my ribs. 

I locked the door behind us and immediately rushed to my drawer and grabbed the envelope of cash I always kept there for emergencies. “We’re leaving,” I said.

The go-bag was already packed, so all I needed to do was pack the necessary documents in the lining of Maverick’s backpack and pick up the spare phone wrapped in foil at the back of the freezer. 

Within eighteen minutes, we were done.

Maverick helped without being asked, carrying his own bag to the door, waiting while I did a final check. He had done this before, so he knew the drill better than any toddler should.

We rushed over to the car I had deliberately parked two streets over. I buckled Maverick into the backseat, threw the bags in the boot, and got behind the wheel.

I was reaching for the ignition when my eyes caught him in the rearview mirror, and something about his expression made me pause. 

“Mavy, what is it?” 

Instead of answering me, his gaze went unfocused for a second, like he was listening to something far away. 

I let out a gasp when his eyes suddenly glowed bright amber. It was luminous and completely, unmistakably supernatural. 

My breath caught, and for a second, I could not move or think.

I may be human, but I knew what those amber eyes meant. I had only ever seen them on Lycans whose wolves were fully forward, on adults mid-shift, and on Ford when the bond pulled hard enough to bring the animal to the surface.

Even for an Alpha bloodline, even for the strongest wolf genetics on record, a Lycan child did not manifest before thirteen. 

My son was just five years old. Why on earth was he showing signs of his wolf now?

“Baby,” I said carefully, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “Indoor mode, remember?”

He looked at me. The amber held for another second, then faded, his father’s dark eyes returning like a tide going out. 

“It’s okay, Mama,” he said, as if I had asked. “Don’t be scared.”

I faced forward, putting my hands on the wheel, and took deep breaths.

Fear and panic would need to wait. I needed to get us out of town before we were discovered. 

After driving nonstop for forty minutes, we stopped at a motel outside the city, the kind of place that took cash and did not ask for ID.

It had thin walls and thinner mattresses, with a television bolted to the dresser as if someone might steal it. I had stayed in much worse, even when I was pregnant.

Maverick was asleep within twenty minutes of us arriving, curled on his side with one arm around the stuffed wolf he carried everywhere, his breathing deep and even and completely unbothered by the fact that we had just left our lives behind.

After taking my bath, I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him for a while.

Silence settled around me, and with nothing left to focus on, my mind betrayed me…

——

The first time I saw the Vale estate, I laughed. Not rudely. But the involuntary laugh of someone whose frame of reference has been exceeded. 

I had grown up in an orphanage, then moved into a university dormitory. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the sight of Ford Vale pulling up to a pair of iron gates set into a stone wall that went on further than I could see, pressing a code, and driving up a private road lined with trees so old they had started to look deliberate.

“Say something,” he had said, glancing at me.

“I don’t have words yet,” I told him honestly, gazing around me with awe.

He gave me that smile of his that always made me feel like I was the most precious thing he had ever had. “You’ll get used to it.”

I had not believed him then. 

Sitting in the passenger seat of his car with the massive estate unfolding ahead of me like something from a film, I had thought: I will never get used to this. This is not my world. This is a beautiful, impossible place that belonged to a beautiful, impossible man, and I was here by some accident of fate that had the audacity to call itself destiny. 

The first four months were the best of my life. I understood that now, in a specific way, you can only understand something once it is over. 

Learning the rhythms of a man who showed love through attention, who never forgot anything I had told him, who made me feel, for the first time in my life, like being known completely was not something to be afraid of.

I had thought, "This is what it is supposed to feel like." 

I had been right about that part. I had just been wrong about how long it would last.

“Mommy.” 

The memory dissolved as my son’s voice pulled me back.

Maverick was sitting up in bed, looking at the door.

I straightened, blinking. “Why are you awake?”

He did not answer immediately. He was very still in the way he got sometimes, but this time was different… it made the back of my neck prickle. 

“What is it, baby?” I asked quietly, my heart pounding.

He did not look away, his eyes alert as I looked at the door. “They are coming.”