Marked By Silence

Chapter 4

What I Have to Hide

Kade

The father is talking, and I know I'm supposed to be listening, but half my attention is locked on the back seat of that car like a rope pulling taut.

"Alpha, thank you for letting us come here," he says, bowing his head with the kind of respect that tells me exactly what he's survived to get his family this far.

"Mr. Calloway." I make myself focus, make myself sound like an Alpha and not a man standing on the edge of a cliff. "Welcome to Stonebrook."

"Desmond, please." His eyes are red-rimmed with exhaustion, but steady. A warrior's eyes. I recognize the look — I've seen it on my own reflection more mornings than I'd like to admit, the particular tiredness of a man who's been holding a household together on will alone.

"Desmond. Your children are in the car?"

"Yes, Alpha. My son, Colt. My daughter, Briar."

Briar. Titan surges at the sound of her name like it's a physical touch, and I have to lock my jaw to keep anything from showing on my face. Even the name fits her, somehow — something sharp and living and a little wild, nothing soft or ornamental about it.

"I have a house prepared for you," I say, keeping my voice level through sheer force of will. "But first I'd like all three of you to formally join the pack. It's safer — no one mistakes you for rogues while you're settling in."

"Yes, Alpha. Whatever you think is best." He bows again, and something about the gratitude in it makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with the mate bond and everything to do with the fact that this man clearly hasn't had anyone look out for him in a long time. I think of my own father, gone eight years now, and wonder what he would have made of a man willing to run his whole family into the night rather than let one of them be taken.

I glance at Wes. "Escort them to the packhouse. I'll meet you there."

I need distance before I go anywhere near that car again. I need thirty seconds where Titan isn't screaming at me to go claim something I have no right to touch.

It doesn't work. The car door opens as I'm turning away, and she steps out, and the scent of her hits me full-force with nothing between us now, no glass, no distance, nothing but four feet of morning air.

She's smaller than I expected, and steadier — she holds herself like someone who's been trained to fight, shoulders back, weight balanced, even exhausted and scared in a strange territory. There's a bruise fading along one forearm, old enough that it must be from training rather than anything else, and I find myself cataloguing it before I can stop myself, the way I'd assess a warrior I was thinking of recruiting. Her eyes find mine, and I watch something flicker across her face — confusion, maybe, like she's trying to name a feeling she doesn't have words for yet.

She feels it too, Titan says, quiet with wonder. Even without her wolf awake. She feels it.

That should reassure me. It terrifies me instead, because it means I can't pretend this is only happening on my side, something I can bury and outlast until it fades. Whatever this is, it's already reaching for both of us, and she's a month from turning eighteen and has no idea what any of it means. She has no idea what I am, or what it would cost her to be tied to someone like me — someone whose own mate looked at their newborn daughter and walked away without looking back.

I think about every version of this conversation where I tell her the truth right now — you're my mate, I felt it the second you crossed the border, I've been fighting my own wolf all morning not to claim you in front of your father — and every version ends the same way. With a terrified girl who just fled one man's obsession, looking at another Alpha and seeing exactly the same thing.

I won't do that to her. Whatever this costs me, I won't be Voss.

"I'm sorry," I say instead, quiet enough that only she can hear it, and I don't even know what I'm apologizing for — for staring too long, for the fact that I can't seem to stop, for a decision I've already made without telling her any of it, for every year still ahead of us that I'm about to spend pretending this morning never happened.

Her brow furrows. "For what?"

I don't answer. I can't, not without saying too much, so I just hold her gaze one more second longer than I should, memorizing something I've already decided I can't have, and then I force myself to look away.

"Beta Wes will show you inside," I say, my voice coming out steadier than I feel. "I'll see you all shortly."

I turn and walk back toward the tree line before Titan can do something we'll both regret, and I don't let myself look back, even though every step away from her feels like walking against a current, like leaving something behind that I'm going to spend years trying to get back to.

You're making a mistake, Titan says.

I'm making the only choice that doesn't hurt her, I answer, and I almost believe it.

Behind me, I hear her voice, low and startled, asking her grandmother something I can't quite make out — and then, cutting through everything, her eyes on my back like a physical weight I'll be carrying for a long time to come.

I don't stop walking until the trees close around me and I can't smell her anymore, and even then I stand there a long moment, hands braced on my knees, breathing like I've run twice the distance I actually have. Titan is quiet now, but it isn't peace — it's the kind of quiet that comes after a fight neither side has actually won, just paused.

One month, I tell him, telling myself as much as him. We give her space to be a kid for one more month. We don't so much as look at her wrong. And when her birthday comes and goes, if her wolf still doesn't know us — we let it go for good. We don't chase what isn't offered.

Titan doesn't answer, which is its own kind of answer. He's never been good at promises he doesn't intend to keep, and some small, honest part of me already knows that a month of distance isn't going to be nearly enough to undo what already happened the second that car crossed our border.

I head back toward the packhouse to make sure the guest quarters are ready, telling myself the whole way that I'm doing this for the family, for the pack, for anyone but myself — and knowing, with the particular clarity that comes right before you do something you'll regret, that it's already far too late for that kind of lie to hold.

By the time I reach my office, Wes has already left a note on my desk confirming the family's formal induction into the pack, three names added to a registry that has never once, in five years of me signing off on it, made my hand shake the way it does now. I set the pen down and stare at her name on the page for longer than I should, tracing the letters like they might rearrange themselves into something less complicated if I look hard enough.

They don't. Briar Calloway. Seventeen years old, one month from eighteen, and already, somehow, the most dangerous thing that has happened to me in four years.