The mate he was forced to forget

Sera's POV Finn ceased breathing for 7 seconds. I counted. After 11 days of fever, his body finally gave out. I knelt on the kitchen tile with both hands on his face, his skin burning under my hands. Seven seconds. His chest didn't move. "Finn." I kissed his cheek, my voice split down the middle. “Open your eyes, look at me, baby, please.” His lids fluttered. He formed a word that never came. I brought him to me, his curls clinging to my collar bone, his body becoming strangely loose. I said, "I have you. I'm right here." He didn't answer. Four days ago, I sent the letter. Two pages. Everything: Finn's name, Finn's face, that he was dying, that he was Ryker's. I had been at the pack border myself, given it to the courier, and said to myself, "that's the toughest part over. Four days. Nothing. Not a word, not a messenger, not even a shred of response. He read it and he was silent. It was the only one that seemed to make sense, and it was the one that really did the number on me. I didn't have four more days. “Finn, stay with me.” I was already on the move, lifting him, his head resting on my shoulder. “Let's go, right now.” It took me 90 minutes to get to the border. I held my hand on the steering wheel, and the other hand stretched back, checking at every red light, checking, needing to feel him breathing under my hand. At the stop sign, I whispered, "Rise. Fall. Rise." The Blackthorn boundary line ran across the north road, — invisible, nothing more than a feeling, except that the moment you crossed it every wolf alive knew. I felt it. The bristles of the pack stood up on my skin like static. I went across it anyway. The patrol picked me up within a mile. Two young wolves had shifted at the roadside, wary, weapons half-raised, until they saw Finn slumped in the back seat and dropped them slightly. The taller one said, "You're trespassing. State your business." “My son needs the Alpha now, not in an hour.” “Ma'am, you have to turn around the car—" "Look at him." I choked on the words. “Look at his face, and tell me to turn around.” “I don't make that call, no one just calls the Alpha off a patrol stop.” “If I have to sit here at this border till the sun rises, I will; but my son doesn't have that long.” "Ma'am—” I repeated myself again, but more quietly, for shouting wasn't working and I was running low on other ammunition, "Look at his face! Just look." The shorter one leaned in, and I saw something change in his eyes when he saw Finn's jaw, Finn's eyes, the unmistakable Blackthorn set of his mouth even slack with fever. He straightened up quickly, as if he had touched something hot. "Cal." He spoke softly to his partner. "Cal, look at him." The taller one, Cal, leaned into the car and was very quiet. As he withdrew, he had completely changed his demeanor. "What's your name?" he asked me. "Sera Thorne." "Thorne." He said it as if it was important to him, and I knew that it was. Five years wasn't so long that the pack had forgotten. "Stay in the car." I said, "Call it in. Say, it's a territorial violation, tell them to send the Alpha himself, tell him to hurry, tell him Sera Thorne is here.” I had been waiting at the roadside for 11 minutes. I know, I counted each of them, one by one, with my hand on Finn's chest, feeling it rise, feeling it fall, afraid it wouldn't. I heard him before I saw him. The special way he walks, his feet on the gravel, used to mean that he was confident, now, after five years, it might mean anything. “That better be worth getting me out of council," said Ryker, and then he paused. I turned. Five years had not marred his face, but made it sharper; harder jaw, new lines fanned at the corners of his eyes, the same midnight blue that had haunted every one of Finn's expressions since the day he was born. His eyes went from me to the car. To the small shape in the rear seat. "Sera." After five years of silence, my name came out of his mouth in a way I wasn't expecting. "Ryker." “You are trespassing on Blackthorn property.” His voice was calm, even, as if he were carefully selecting each word, like it could explode. “Do you want to explain that to me?” “I wrote you a letter four days ago.” There was something that shot across his face, but I couldn't identify it before it was gone. “I didn't receive a letter.” "Don't." The word came out harsher than I intended. “No, don't do that, not tonight.” "Do what, exactly?" “Pretend. I know you read it. Four days, Ryker, and nothing — not a word, not a messenger, nothing — so don't stand there and tell me you didn't get it.” “I didn't receive a letter.” His jaw was tight. “I have no idea what or who you sent it to, but it didn't get to me. If I had received it, do you really think I would have let four days pass?” I didn't have a place to argue in my heart. “Whatever it is, I don't have time to do this with you right now, my son is dying in that car and he needs you.” “What do you need me for?” Instead of answering I opened the back door. Stepped aside so he could see. Ryker became very quiet. Finn's curls were dark and damp against the seat, his small chest rising too shallow, too fast, his face flushed with fever he'd been fighting for eleven days straight. His jaw — the unmistakable set to it that I saw in my own mirror on Ryker's face — was the same jaw, only five years younger, and ill with sickness. "Sera." His voice was barely audible. "How old is he?" I bit my lips and swallowed the answer. I said it, even though I didn't want to. "Five." There was a weight to the silence, teeth to it. I saw Ryker's hand reach up to the top of the car door and clench it so tight that his knuckles went white. "Is he mine?" I couldn't say yes, not yet, not with the patrol still standing three feet away and the whole pack about to know everything in the space of one sentence, so I said, "He has bloodlock. If he doesn't have the ritual, then he will not survive the week, he needs you.” Ryker didn't move. Didn't blink. For one never-ending second I watched him struggle with all the things I had just given him, five years of silence, a son he never knew existed, a question I hadn't answered out loud. Then his eyes turned back to Finn, to the little chest gasping for breath, and something in his face shut like a door being shut and bolted. He ordered “get out of the car. Now." He didn't look at me once more. I saw him reaching out to Finn, and I knew that whatever war I had just begun at this border, I had no time to be frightened by it. Finn didn't to have four more days. He had tonight.