Chapter 3
785 Words
He doesn't go straight to Lilith.
Smart. Or maybe just a coward.
Kalen paces the treeline behind the pack house—long enough that the border patrol gives him a wide berth and pretends not to notice their Alpha losing his mind in small circles between the pines.
His wolf is pushing at the surface. I can tell by the way his neck keeps tilting back, nostrils flaring like there's something to find on the wind.
There isn't. I'm dead, Kalen. My scent doesn't linger anymore.
Finally he stops. Opens the mind link.
Declan. I need you to look into something.
The reply comes back within seconds—that low familiar buzz at the back of the skull that every pack wolf knows.
Name it, Alpha.
Lilith. A pause. Five years, full sweep. Movement, contacts, financial records. Everything.
Lilith? Alpha, is this about the border breach investigation?
It's not. Kalen's jaw grinds. I want to know how my pup died.
Silence on the link. Then: Understood. Within the hour.
He closes the link.
Stands there with one hand pressed against a pine trunk, head bowed, breathing.
I drift close enough that if I were anything more than cold air and unfinished business, I could touch his shoulder.
I was the one who should've been given an hour, I think. One hour for you to show up. Sixty minutes. That was all it would've taken.
I don't hate him right now. I've spent five years furious enough to burn the whole forest down, but watching him press his forehead against the bark like the tree is the only thing holding him upright—
I'm just tired.
---
He finds Roger on the eastern training grounds.
I think part of Kalen knew Roger would have the answers—because he didn't use the mind link, didn't summon him with an Alpha command. He walked here himself.
"Tell me about the medical supplies," Kalen says, without preamble.
Roger doesn't stop working the training dummy. He drives his elbow in, resets, drives again.
"You sure you want to know?"
"Tell me."
Roger stops. Turns.
"Lilith came to the cabin twice a month. Said she was checking on Ella for you." His voice is flat—contained the way a dam contains water. "Every visit, she went through the medical stores. Said Ethan was wasteful. Said she was cutting costs on your behalf." A muscle feathers in his jaw. "She swapped every high-grade silver-purge compound for basic herbs. Practically decorative."
Kalen says nothing.
"Third month, she stopped coming in person. Just sent word that supplies were covered." Roger's eyes stay on Kalen's. "They weren't. By month four, we had nothing. Ethan was rationing what he had, stretching it with prayers." His voice doesn't c***k. I've always admired that about Roger. "By the time Ella went into the final stage—there was nothing left to work with."
The silence that follows has weight.
I feel it. The way Kalen feels it. That particular quality of silence that means something irreversible has just been said out loud.
"She knew." Kalen's voice is barely above a murmur. "Lilith knew exactly what those compounds were for."
"She was the one who originally ordered them. On your authority." Roger's lip curls. "She knew exactly what she was doing."
Kalen puts his hand over his mouth.
It's a gesture I remember. He does it when he's working very hard not to say something—or not to feel something. The fingers press against his lips like a lock.
"The pup." His voice comes out rough. "If the supplies hadn't been cut—was there a chance—"
"Yes." Roger doesn't soften it. "Ethan believed Ella's wolf could have stabilized with proper treatment. The pup might have survived." He holds Kalen's gaze. "She almost certainly would have."
She.
I go still.
A girl.
I'd never known—not in those last fragmented hours of fever and silver pain—whether the pup was a son or a daughter. I'd called her ours, the pup, the life I was trying to hold onto.
But she. Roger said she.
I float in the bright useless morning light and something that's been numb for five years opens like a wound that never closed.
I'm sorry, I tell the daughter I never met. I'm so sorry I wasn't strong enough.
Kalen's hand drops from his mouth.
His wolf surges—I feel the burst through our broken bond, that wave of raw Alpha grief that makes every wolf within fifty meters stumble, ears flattening, suddenly unsure what just hit them.
He opens the mind link again.
Declan. That report. His inner voice is barely controlled. I need it now.
- Writer
