His son Her secret

Chapter Two What I Carried Out With Me

"You're going to tell him." My mother stood in my bedroom doorway with her arms crossed, watching me fold clothes into a duffel bag I'd had since I was fourteen years old. "Maren. You have to tell him."

"I don't have to do anything." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was becoming the only skill I had left that still worked properly, the one thing three days of shock had actually improved. "He made himself very clear. Twice, so nobody could pretend they misheard. I'm not interested in handing Selene Rourke's future husband a reason to feel guilty about a mistake he already decided not to keep."

"This isn't about Selene Rourke. This is his child."

"This is my child." I folded a shirt with more force than the fabric had earned. "He gave up any claim to it the moment he said 'I reject the bond' loud enough that the whole valley probably heard the echo."

My mother went quiet a long moment. She'd been there, too. She'd heard it exactly as clearly as I had, standing three feet away from me in that hall, and I knew some part of her had spent the last three days hoping, the way I once had, that fate might still find a way to fix what a single ceremony had broken.

"Where will you even go?" she asked finally, the fight draining slowly out of her voice, replaced by something closer to fear. "You don't know anyone outside pack territory. You don't have money saved. You're going to be out there completely on your own, Maren, and now there'll be two of you to keep safe instead of one."

"Then I'd better start learning fast," I said, and zipped the duffel bag closed before either of us could say anything else that might talk me out of it.

"Somewhere without pack law," I said. "Somewhere I get to be a person instead of a bloodline. Instead of somebody's inconvenient mistake standing in the corner of a room, he's trying to build a treaty in."

I finished packing before dawn, while the house was still quiet, telling myself the whole time that I wasn't running away from anything. I was choosing something. There's a difference, even when it doesn't feel like one, even when your hands are shaking so badly around a duffel bag zipper that it takes you three tries to close it.

I almost didn't make it past the northern checkpoint.

Hollow Creek's patrol rotated every few hours as a courtesy arrangement with Thornridge, one that had only tightened in the weeks leading up to the alliance ceremony. I knew the schedule the way I knew most things about our dependence on the larger pack — resentfully, and by heart, from years of listening to my father complain about it over dinner. What I hadn't planned on, not once in the whole careful escape I'd mapped out in my head, was who would be standing post that particular night.

Jax Calloway. Corin's beta. Unmistakable even in the dark, by the way he stood, feet planted wide, shoulders squared, like he was perpetually bracing for something that hadn't happened yet.

I froze at the tree line, heart slamming so hard I was certain he could hear it from fifty feet away. Wolves have good ears. Betas have better instincts than that, and worse timing.

He turned his head slightly. I watched him go still — the particular, deliberate stillness of someone catching a scent they hadn't expected to catch — and understood, with a sick lurch low in my stomach, that he already knew exactly who was standing in the shadows behind him.

I didn't run. Running from a beta in his own patrol territory is a special, pointless kind of foolish. I stood there instead, duffel bag heavy on my shoulder, waiting to see what he'd do with what he knew.

Jax didn't turn around.

"There's a gap in the rotation in about four minutes." His voice came out flat, almost bored, like he was commenting on nothing more important than the weather. "Right past the old fence line, at the creek bend. Nobody covers that stretch until the next shift starts walking it."

I didn't move. I didn't understand yet what exactly he was offering me or why.

"I didn't see anyone out here tonight," he said. "Long, boring shift. Nothing worth reporting."

My throat tightened around something that wasn't quite gratitude and wasn't quite grief either. "Why," I whispered because it was the only word I had left.

For the first time, he glanced back over his shoulder, just enough that I caught his expression in the moonlight — tired, and troubled in a way that told me he hadn't fully made his own peace with what he'd watched happen in that ceremony hall.

"Because some things get decided by people who never have to live with the consequences," he said. "You didn't get a vote in what happened to you three nights ago. Seems only fair you get one now, while you still can." He turned back to the empty road ahead of him. "Four minutes. Starting now."

I ran.

Through the trees along the creek bend, duffel bag slamming against my hip with every step, heart in my throat, through the exact gap Jax had just handed me like a gift he wasn't supposed to give away — until the tree line thinned into unfamiliar ground beneath my feet, until Hollow Creek's particular hum against my skin faded slowly into something neutral and unclaimed by anyone at all.

I stopped once I was far enough that I couldn't feel the border anymore, doubled over, hands braced on my knees, catching my breath in ragged gulps of cold night air, one palm pressed instinctively flat against my stomach the way it had started doing on its own since the bathroom floor three nights before, as if my body already understood what my mind hadn't fully caught up to yet.

Somewhere behind me in the dark, I thought I heard a second set of footsteps come to a stop at the exact same moment mine did. Too far away to be certain. Too close, too precisely timed, to be nothing at all.

I told myself it was an animal. The wind moves through the trees. Anything at all besides what my gut was already, quietly, insistently telling me it was.

I didn't look back to check. I told myself that not looking was strength, and maybe it was, or maybe it was just fear wearing a braver word.

I kept walking, into land no pack claimed at all, carrying a duffel bag, a heartbreak, and a secret that was about to change everything for both of us, whether either of us was ready for it or not — and somewhere behind me in the dark, something had definitely stopped moving at the exact moment I had, and was, I was almost certain, still watching me go.