4
1478 Words
Chapter Four
I pack a bag in seven minutes.
I know because I count. Counting is the thing I do when my brain is moving faster than I can manage it. When the ground has shifted and I need something mechanical to hold onto.
Seven minutes. One bag. Two changes of clothes, my phone charger, the small folding knife I have carried since the day I left Blackmoon, and the note from Caden's doorstep which I fold and put in the front pocket before I can talk myself out of it.
He is leaning against the hallway wall when I come out. He looks at the bag. He does not look surprised.
"I am not coming back for you," I say. "I am going for Jasper."
"I know."
"And when I have heard what he has to say and I decide I want to leave, you will not stop me."
"I will not stop you."
"Say it like you mean it."
His jaw tightens. Then: "You have my word, Sara. If you want to leave, I will drive you back myself."
I study his face for a long moment. Looking for the c***k in it. The place where the control slips and something calculating shows through.
There is nothing there but a man who looks like he has been holding his breath for three years and is only now starting to let it out.
I shoulder my bag and walk past him toward the stairs.
"Good," I say. "Then let's go."
He drives the way he does everything. Like the road belongs to him and the road agrees. I sit in the passenger seat with my knees together and my eyes forward and I watch the city I built my life in disappear behind us.
I did not say goodbye to Leah. I sent her a text that said family thing, back in a few days, do not worry, and I know she will worry anyway and I know I will owe her an explanation I cannot give her.
The silence in the car is not comfortable. It is not uncomfortable either. It is full, the way silences are between people who have too much history and not enough resolution. I am aware of him the way I am aware of a fire in a room. Not looking directly at it. Knowing exactly where it is.
"You said you have been watching my building," I say, somewhere around the forty minute mark. Still in the city's outer sprawl. Industrial blocks and wide empty roads in the grey early morning.
"Yes."
"For how long."
A pause. "Three weeks."
"You found me three weeks ago and you waited three weeks before walking into the bar."
"I needed to know you were safe first. I needed to understand your routine. Who you talked to. Whether my father already had eyes on you."
"And did he."
"Not until two days ago."
I think about that. About the two days between Aldric finding me and Caden walking through the door. About the calculation involved in that timing.
"You came in when you did because he found me," I say. "You were not going to approach me at all until he forced your hand."
The muscle in his jaw moves.
"I was trying to give you the choice," he says. "I was going to make sure you were protected without you having to know I was there. Without forcing myself back into your life."
I stare at the road ahead.
That is either the most arrogant thing I have ever heard or the most unexpectedly considerate. I cannot decide which. Both, maybe. Both things at the same time, which is the problem with Caden Black in a single sentence.
"You watched my building for three weeks and you thought that was giving me a choice."
"It was the best I could do."
I do not have an answer for that so I say nothing. He says nothing. The city falls away behind us and the road gets narrower and the trees get taller and my wolf, who has been sitting in my chest like a held breath since we got in the car, starts to stir.
She knows where we are going. She remembers.
I tell her to be quiet.
She does not listen.
We stop once, at a gas station at the edge of nowhere. Caden gets out to fill the tank. I sit for thirty seconds telling myself I am fine. Then I get out too because the car suddenly feels very small.
The morning air is cold and sharp. It smells like pine at the edges. Not Blackmoon yet, not exactly, but close enough that my body registers it as coming home and I hate that. I hate that my body still knows the difference.
I am standing at the side of the car when I notice the man at the other pump.
He is big. Pack built. I know the shape of it now, the particular density of someone whose wolf is close to the surface. He is not filling a car. He is watching me with the specific stillness of a predator who has been told to wait.
He clocks that I have noticed him. His chin lifts.
I hold his gaze. I do not look away. I do not take a single step back.
I watch his eyes move to a point over my shoulder and I know without turning that Caden has come around the car. I can feel him. I have always been able to feel him, that particular heat, that weight.
"Friend of yours," I say quietly.
"No," Caden says. Same quiet. Lower.
The man at the other pump makes a decision. He gets back in his car. He pulls out without looking at either of us again.
Caden watches until the car is out of sight. Then he looks at me.
"You did not move," he says.
"Why would I move."
Something shifts in his expression. Something that is not quite a smile but lives in the same neighbourhood. "Most people step back."
"I am not most people."
"No," he says, and his voice has changed in a way I do not have a name for. "You are not."
I get back in the car before that tone can do anything further to my composure.
We reach the Blackmoon border as the sun finishes rising.
The tree line changes first. Denser. Older. The road narrows to a single lane and then to something that is barely a road at all and my wolf is fully awake now, pressing forward, recognising every shift in the air.
Two wolves step out of the trees at the border marker. They see Caden and stand down immediately. Then they see me.
I watch the recognition move across their faces. I watch them look at Caden and then back at me, recalibrating.
I hold their gaze until they look away.
Caden says nothing but I feel him register it beside me. Feel the quality of his attention shift.
We drive through.
The compound appears through the trees and my chest does something I do not give it permission to do. Three years. I spent three years turning this place into somewhere I did not need. Into a wound I had outgrown.
I was lying. Obviously I was lying.
Caden parks. We get out. The compound is quieter than I remember in the early morning, only a handful of wolves moving between the buildings, but every single one of them stops when they see me.
I am about to ask where Jasper is when the main doors open.
And the woman who walks out stops every coherent thought I have.
Mira Vale. White shirt. Dark hair loose. She looks at me the way she looked at me on my eighteenth birthday, like I am something that has appeared in a place it does not belong.
Then she looks at Caden.
And she says: "You should have told her before you brought her here."
I look at Caden.
His jaw is set. His eyes are on Mira and they are not warm.
"Told me what," I say.
Neither of them answers immediately and that silence, that single beat of loaded silence, is worse than anything either of them could say.
"Caden." My voice comes out very steady. "What have you not told me."
He turns to look at me and I see it then. The thing he has been holding back since the bar last night. The thing that cost him every careful word.
"Mira is still here," he says, "because she is the only witness to what my father did the night before your rejection. She is the only one who can corroborate what Jasper knows."
He pauses.
"And because six weeks ago, someone tried to kill her for it."
- Writer
