The Second Time I Chose Me

CHAPTER 3

My father was waiting on the steps of the Crestfall pack house when we arrived, and I was out of the car before Dayo had fully stopped it.

He caught me. Both arms, the way he used to when I was small, and I pressed my face into his shoulder and held on.

"Hey," he said. Quiet. Just that.

He didn't tell me it was okay. He didn't say I was safe. He didn't fill the air with words that would have sounded good but meant nothing. He just held me, and my father was large enough and solid enough that being held by him felt like standing inside something that couldn't be moved.

I stayed there longer than I should have.

"Let her breathe, Felix." Dayo passed us with both my bags. "You'll crush her."

"Mind your business." My father didn't let go.

I laughed into his shoulder, and that was the thing that finally loosened me. I pulled back and looked up at him the wide face, the grey beginning at his temples, the eyes that were mine but older and quieter and carrying more weight.

"You look tired," he said.

"I just woke up this morning."

He looked at me the way he'd always looked at me when he knew I was giving him a technically true answer. "Come inside."

The Crestfall pack house smelled like woodsmoke and pine and something faintly like the metal polish they used on the training room floors. I'd grown up visiting twice a year, Christmas and summers when I was younger, and the smell of it had always meant safety in a way my mother's house which I loved simply didn't.

My father led me to his office, a big quiet room lined with bookshelves and one window that looked out over the eastern training fields. Dayo came in behind us and locked the door, which told me they'd already talked and already knew, more or less, what kind of conversation this was going to be.

My father sat behind his desk. Dayo took the chair by the window. I sat in the chair across from my father, and I looked at the two of them, and I tried to figure out how to start.

"From the beginning," my father said.

So I told them.

Not carefully. Not edited. I told them the way you tell a story when you have been holding it since before you woke up, when the weight of it has been pressing against your ribs from the inside. I told them about Callum, the bond, the years of devotion that felt like the realest thing I had ever done. I told them about Priya, the slow careful architecture of her lies, the photos she manufactured, the way she whispered things into Callum's ear for months before he started to believe them. I told them about the morning everything ended the medical wing, the restraints, the silver blade. I told them about my son, the weight of him on my chest for thirty seconds that I would feel for the rest of whatever life I was living. I told them about dying.

When I finished, the room was very quiet.

Dayo was looking at the window. His jaw was hard and still.

My father's hands were flat on the desk, pressed down like he was keeping himself seated through the pressure of them. His eyes were closed.

"Dad."

He opened his eyes. They were wet.

"I'm going to need a minute," he said.

"Okay."

He stood up and walked to the window and stood there with his back to me. His shoulders were working. I watched him breathe through it the particular heaving, controlled breathing of a man who had learned, through long practice, how to hold himself together in moments when he wanted to do the opposite.

Dayo looked at me. "You're sure it was the alpha's son? Callum Reeves?"

"Yes."

"And the stepsister gave the order for the…" He stopped.

"For no anesthetic. Yes."

Dayo's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes went flat in a way I recognized. He was filing it away. Quietly. For later.

"We're not going to do anything rash," I said. "That's not why I'm here."

"I know why you're here," my father said, without turning around. His voice was steadier now. "You're here because you want to make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Yes."

He turned. He came back to his desk and sat down, and he looked at me the way he looked at things he had decided to see clearly, without flinching.

"There are things I should have told you before," he said. "Things I've been holding because I thought I was protecting you. But after what you just told me…" He exhaled. "I think I was wrong to wait."

I sat very still.

"Marcus," he said. "Your mother's husband."

"What about him?"

"He knows what Priya is. He has always known." My father's voice was measured. "He is not a passive man, Zara. He is a man who has made deliberate choices to protect his daughter at the expense of other people. Including your mother."

The room shifted slightly. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that what happened to you in your first life Priya's campaign against you that kind of precision, that kind of long patience, doesn't come from an eighteen-year-old acting alone." He held my gaze. "She had help. And I think you already know whose."

I thought about Marcus at the breakfast table. The newspaper. The coffee. The way he had never once, in six years of living in the same house, made me feel unwelcome but also never once made me feel like I was his to protect.

Not passive. Deliberate.

Something cold settled in my stomach.

"He knew," I said. It wasn't a question.

"I believe so." My father leaned forward. "Which means this summer is not just about training you. It's about understanding the full shape of what you're up against before you go back in."

Dayo stood and moved to the desk, standing beside my father. Both of them looking at me now. "We're going to teach you things," Dayo said, "that most wolves your age don't learn for another decade. Combat, strategy, pack law, negotiation. How to read a room, how to read a person, how to move in spaces where people are trying to get something from you."

"How long do we have?" my father asked.

"Two months," I said. "The gathering is in two weeks. After that, Callum's pack will stop looking for me until the academic year starts in September."

"Then we start tomorrow at dawn." My father reached across the desk and held my face the way he used to when I was small, both hands, thumb brushing my cheekbone. "I'm sorry I wasn't there the first time."

"You didn't know."

"I know now." He let go. "And I am not going to waste what that costs."

Cassidy was outside the office door when I came out.

She was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her locs loose around her face, and when she saw me she gave me exactly two seconds before she crossed the hall and pulled me in.

"I've been here for an hour," she said into my shoulder. "Your uncle made me wait outside."

"I needed to talk to my dad."

"I know." She pulled back and looked at me, freckled face and sharp eyes that had always seen me more clearly than I liked. "Are you okay?"

"Ask me in August," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded once, slowly, like she'd decided to accept that answer for now and come back to it later.

"Fine," she said. "But you're sleeping in my room tonight and you're going to eat the food I brought you because I made it myself and it's good."

I let her pull me down the hall. She was talking before we'd gone three steps something about the pack's new training schedule, about the beta's son who'd embarrassed himself at the last run, about the movie she'd watched twice this week and wanted me to see.

I let it wash over me. The ordinary noise of a person who was glad I was here.

Outside the window at the end of the hall, the eastern training fields were lit gold with late afternoon light. I would be out there tomorrow at dawn, starting the work of becoming someone no one could take apart again.

Tonight, I was going to eat Cassidy's food and sit in the quiet of a house that felt like safety.

Tomorrow, I was going to learn how to make sure I stayed alive.