chapter 6: What's Left Behind
927 Words
Alex POV
I stood there long after the car disappeared.
Long after the sound of the engine faded. Long after the street went quiet and still and there was nothing left to watch.
I just stood there.
The pavement where she had been standing still felt warm somehow. Or maybe that was just me.
I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the empty space where her house used to feel full. The garden gate was still slightly open from where she had walked through it this morning. I reached over and closed it quietly.
Small things.
That was what was left. Small things that reminded you of a person.
And then the memories came.
They always did when I let my guard down.
I remembered the first time I saw her.
We were seven years old. She had just moved into the neighbourhood and she was sitting alone on the front step of her house with her knees pulled to her chest watching the other kids play. Not crying. Not asking to join. Just watching.
Something about that image had never left me.
I had walked over without thinking.
"Why aren't you playing?" I asked.
She looked up at me with those eyes — serious and steady even then.
"I don't know anyone," she said simply.
"You know me now," I said.
She had stared at me for a long moment like she was deciding whether to trust me.
Then she stood up.
"Okay," she said.
Just like that. Okay. Like it was the easiest decision in the world.
It was the beginning of everything.
I remembered being twelve.
We were at Riverside Park — our park — throwing stones into the water and arguing about something completely stupid. I couldn't even remember what it was. What I remembered was her laughing so hard she lost her balance on the bank and grabbed my arm to steady herself.
She held on for just a second longer than necessary.
I didn't say anything.
But something shifted in me that day that never shifted back.
I remembered being fourteen.
The night her mom died.
I had felt something wrong before my phone even rang — a pull in my chest, sharp and sudden. I had been out of bed and running before I fully understood why.
I found her sitting in the garden in the dark.
Not crying. Just sitting. The same way she had sat on that front step when she was seven — knees to her chest, watching something nobody else could see.
I sat beside her without a word.
We stayed there until morning.
She never asked how I knew to come.
I never told her.
I remembered being sixteen.
The year I turned and the world cracked open into something bigger and more complicated than I had ever imagined. The year I understood what I was. What I was meant to be.
The year I felt for the first time — or didn't feel — the thing every wolf waits for.
The mate bond.
I had stood beside Ella that whole year waiting. Hoping. Willing the universe to confirm what my human heart already knew.
But the bond never came.
She was not my mate.
The universe had been very clear about that.
And I had spent the three years since then learning to live with that silence.
I remembered yesterday.
Her face when she walked out of her house in that simple top and jeans thinking she wasn't enough.
She was always enough.
She was more than enough.
She had always been more than enough.
The way she went shy when I told her she looked stunning. The way she held the orphanage children like they were precious. The way she stood in her mother's garden this morning talking to someone who wasn't there anymore.
The way she walked into my hug without hesitating.
The way she held on.
I closed my eyes.
This was the part nobody told you about. Not the big dramatic goodbye. Not the tears or the long speeches. Just this — the ordinary silence that comes after. The space a person leaves behind that nothing else can fill.
I knew she wasn't mine.
I had always known.
No bond. No claim. No right under wolf law.
Just a boy who had loved a girl since before he understood what love cost.
The worst part wasn't losing her to Florida.
The worst part was knowing what was waiting for her there.
My phone buzzed.
Kai — my most trusted beta.
I already knew what it was about before I answered.
"How bad?" I said.
"Damon is moving faster than we thought," Kai said quietly. "He has people in Florida already Alpha. He knows where she is going."
My jaw tightened.
"Increase the watch. I want someone on her the moment she arrives. She doesn't see them. She doesn't know. But they don't leave her side."
"Understood."
I hung up.
Stood there one more moment.
I looked at my phone and typed three words.
Alex: Always. No matter what.
Then I put the phone in my pocket and looked up at the empty street one last time.
Seven years old. Sitting on a front step alone.
That was the first image I had of her.
And somehow even then — even before I understood anything — I had known.
She was going to matter.
"Stay safe pumpkin," I whispered to the empty street.
Then I walked away.
Because the world doesn't stop for heartbreak.
Even when it should.
- Writer
