Blood And Broken Promises

CHAPTER 3 - Running

"You can't leave," Demi said.

"Watch me," I replied.

We were in his room, two hours past midnight. The house was finally quiet. I had a bag half-packed on the floor between us and he was sitting on his bed looking at me with the specific expression he used when he was trying to stay calm and struggling badly.

"Dad will…"

"Dad is not who I'm thinking about right now."

"Zara." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You don't have to run from this. You have nothing to be ashamed of."

"I know that," I said. "That's not why I'm going."

"Then why?"

I looked at him — my twin, my other half in every way that was not biology. Sandy locs, Dad's jaw, Mum's patience in his eyes even when he was fighting it. I had told Demi everything my whole life. Every fear, every embarrassing moment, every secret that was too big for my own chest.

Not this one.

Not yet.

"I need to find out who I am when nobody here is watching," I said. It was true. It just was not all of the truth. "I have spent my whole life being Elijah Cole's daughter. The one with the weak wolf. The one who needs watching. I need to go somewhere I can just be a person."

He stared at me for a long time.

"You're coming back," he said. Not a question. A condition.

"Yes."

"And you'll tell me where you are."

"Yes."

"And if anything…"

"Demi." I crossed to him and put both hands on either side of his face the way Mum did when she needed him to hear something. "I am going to be okay."

He covered my hands with his and for a moment neither of us said anything.

"I hate him," Demi said quietly.

"I know."

"If he ever…"

"I know."

He let out a long breath. Then he stood and helped me finish packing.

I told Mum in the early hours of the morning.

She was in the kitchen when I came down, which meant she had been awake and waiting, because Mum always knew things before they happened. She was standing at the counter with two cups of tea already made.

I sat across from her.

She slid one cup toward me.

"I'm going to Ashford," I said.

"I know," she said.

"I need…"

"I know that too." She wrapped both hands around her cup. In the dim kitchen light she looked young, and tired, and like she understood more than I wanted her to. "Your Aunt Petra is in Ashford. She'll give you a room without asking questions. I'll text her before you leave."

I stared at her.

"You're not going to argue?" I said.

"Would it help?"

"No."

"Then no." She looked at me steadily. "But Zara. Whatever you're carrying. Whatever you haven't told me yet." She paused. "You know where I am."

My throat tightened.

"Okay," I said.

We drank our tea in the quiet. Outside the window the sky was beginning to shift from black to grey, that thin cold light that comes before dawn.

"He was wrong," she said, eventually. Not loud. Just certain. "About you."

I nodded.

"It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt," she said.

"No," I agreed. "It doesn't mean that."

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand once, firm and brief, and then sat back.

She let me go.

Ashford was loud in the way that felt like protection.

Nobody knew me here. Nobody had watched me grow up. Nobody lowered their voice when I walked past or appeared casually at my side in case I needed help I had not asked for. I was just a woman with a bag, taking a room above my aunt Petra's flower shop on a street with too many coffee shops and a bus stop that arrived on no predictable schedule.

It was, genuinely, the first time in my life I had felt something close to free.

Petra asked two questions. Were you safe leaving? Yes. Are you staying a while? Probably. After that she fed me pasta, showed me the room with the yellow curtains, and went back to watching her programme. She was my mother's older sister and she had spent twenty years living quietly outside pack territory. She understood some things without needing them explained.

I got a job at a café on the high street within the week.

I started sleeping through the night again about two weeks after that.

My wolf was still quiet. Mourning the bond in whatever way wolves mourn things, not loudly, not with drama, just with a particular kind of absence, like a drawer that used to have something in it.

I did not think about Caden Stone.

Or I tried not to.

Or I failed to try and thought about him constantly and told myself it was just the biology of the broken bond and it would pass.

At four weeks I noticed I was tired in a way that coffee did not fix.

At five weeks I noticed other things.

At six weeks I sat on the edge of Petra's bath with a test in my hand and stared at the result for a very long time.

Two lines.

My wolf, silent for nearly two months, made a sound I had never heard from her before.

Not grief. Not fear.

Something fierce. Something territorial.

Something that said: mine.

I set the test down on the edge of the sink. I looked at my own face in the mirror. Steady eyes. A jaw that did not shake.

"Okay," I said quietly, to myself, to the wolf, to the small impossibility that had taken up residence in my body without permission.

"Okay. We do this."

Outside the window, Ashford moved on without knowing.

And somewhere two hours north, in a house of cold stone and long corridors, a man who had walked away from the best thing that ever happened to him was beginning, very quietly, to unravel.