His son Her secret

Leaving Ordinary Behind

"You can't ask me to just pack up and drive to Thornridge like the last five years never happened." I kept my voice low, aware of the thin kitchen wall between us and the back office, where Dahlia had Rowan settled with a coloring book and a promise of extra pancakes he hadn't questioned yet.

"I'm not asking you to forget them." Corin stood too close and not close enough at the same time, hands braced on the prep counter like he needed something solid to hold onto. "I'm asking you to let me protect both of you before Halden's courtesy visit turns into something worse."

"Millbrook has kept us safe for five years."

"Millbrook has kept you hidden," Jax said, coming through the back door, tension still coiled tight in his shoulders from whatever he'd checked outside. "That's not the same thing, and you know it isn't, not anymore. Hidden only works until someone finds the seam. They found it today."

I hated that he was right. I hated it more than I'd hated almost anything in five years, because hating him for being right would have been so much easier than what I actually felt, which was the cold, sick understanding that the life I'd built with my own two shaking hands was no longer big enough to keep my son safe inside it.

"What does Thornridge even look like," I asked, quieter now, "for someone like me? Someone from Hollow Creek, who left a rejected bond behind and came back five years later with a child nobody agreed to?"

Corin didn't flinch at the question, for which I gave him some grudging credit. "Complicated. The council will have opinions. Some of them will be ugly ones." He held my gaze steadily. "But you'll have my protection, formally, the moment you set foot on pack land. That's nothing, Maren. Whatever else comes with it."

"And Selene?"

Something shifted behind his eyes, careful now, the way a man walks around a subject he knows is going to hurt regardless of which direction he approaches it from. "The alliance was never finalized. It's been stalled for years, same as Jax told you. Selene knows I'm here. She knows why."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now," he said, and something in his voice — tired, honest, none of the smooth political control I remembered from that ceremony hall — made me believe him more than I wanted to.

Dahlia found me alone twenty minutes later, wiping down a counter that didn't need wiping, my hands needing something to do besides shake.

"You're going," she said. Not a question.

"I don't see another choice that keeps him safe."

"There's always another choice." She set her rag down, studied me with the same slow, careful attention she'd used on my first morning in her diner five years ago. "But sometimes the other choice is worse, and you're smart enough to see that even when you don't want to." She pulled me into a hug that smelled like coffee and cinnamon, and every ordinary morning, I was about to leave behind. "You call me. Every week. And if that pack of his gives you one single reason to doubt them, you get in a car, and you come back here, and I will personally stand on my front step with a shotgun and dare anyone to come collect you."

I laughed, wet and unsteady, and held on a moment longer than either of us probably needed.

Corin gave us an hour to pack, which turned out to be both too much time and not nearly enough. I stood in the small upstairs room that had been mine for five years, looking at the narrow bed, the single window, the dresser drawer where I'd kept the pressed feather Corin's enemies had left on my step once, years ago, and felt the strange, hollow grief of leaving a life I'd never wanted in the first place but had somehow, slowly, made into a home anyway.

Rowan didn't understand why we were leaving, not really, though he understood enough to know it mattered. He clutched his favorite stuffed wolf — a birthday gift from Dahlia two years back, worn soft at the ears — and watched me fold his clothes into the same duffel bag I'd carried out of Hollow Creek five years before, now patched at one seam and still, somehow, the only bag I owned.

"Is the castle man going to keep us safe?" he asked, small and serious.

"He's going to try very hard," I said, which was the truest thing I had to offer him.

We left Millbrook an hour before sunset, Rowan buckled into the back of Corin's SUV with a fistful of crayons and more questions than any of us had good answers for, Jax following close behind in a second vehicle that never once let more than a hundred yards open up between us the entire drive.

"That car's still there," Jax said over the radio, forty minutes in, voice carefully even in the way I was learning meant he was working hard not to sound alarmed. "Same one from outside the diner. Two cars are back. It has been matching our speed since the county line."

Corin's hands tightened on the wheel. "Options."

"Keep driving straight to Thornridge, or find out right now exactly how patient Halden's boss actually is." A pause. "Your call, Alpha."

I turned in my seat, checking on Rowan, who had fallen asleep somewhere around the county line with a blue crayon still loose in his fingers, entirely unaware that a car full of Grayfall wolves was tracking our position mile for mile along a dark, empty highway.

"Straight to Thornridge," I said before Corin could answer. "Whatever they're doing, they haven't tried anything yet. I'm not giving them a reason to start on an open road with my son in the back seat."

Corin glanced at me, something unreadable passing behind his eyes, and nodded once. "Straight to Thornridge," he confirmed into the radio.

The car behind us held its distance for another twenty miles, then peeled off at an exit without warning, taillights disappearing into the dark, and somehow that was worse than if they'd kept following — the not knowing whether we'd lost them, or whether they'd gotten exactly the confirmation they'd been sent to get.

I spent the rest of the drive with one hand resting lightly on the back of Rowan's seat, watching the dark tree lines blur past the windows, and not letting myself sleep at all.

Somewhere past midnight, Corin reached over and turned the radio down low, some old song filling the quiet between the front seats. It should have felt strange, sitting beside him again after five years of imagining this man as nothing but the cold voice that had ended my old life in four flat words. Instead, it felt like something I couldn't quite name — not comfort, not trust. Just the absence of being alone with it, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit.

"You don't have to talk," he said eventually. "I just didn't want the silence to be the only thing keeping you company back there."

"I've had a lot of practice with silence," I said. "Five years of it, most nights, after he went down for bed."

"I know." His jaw tightened. "I'm not going to pretend I understand what it cost you to build the life I'm now asking you to leave behind. I just need you to know I see it. Even the parts you haven't told me yet."

I didn't answer that. I watched Rowan's sleeping face in the mirror instead, small and peaceful and entirely unaware of the war gathering around him, and held onto that peace for as long as the dark highway would let me keep it.