Returning Home
The decision to return to the Blackwood mansion did not come easily.
Even after the formal challenge had closed the residual legal claim and Marcus Blackwood’s letter had offered a cleaner ending between the packs, the house itself remained a place Lila had not been willing to re-enter. The guest wing still existed. The doorway still existed. The memory of standing in that doorway while the mate bond ruptured lived too close to the surface for a casual visit. Yet certain practical matters—personal belongings left behind in the rushed escape, a few documents her mother had asked her to collect, the quiet need to see the place one final time on her own terms—eventually outweighed the instinct to stay away forever.
She set the conditions herself. Ronan would go with her. The
