The. Mate Who Marked Me

Chapter 6

The Road Back

WREN'S POV

The necklace sat cold against my collarbone, tucked beneath my shirt where no one could see it, but I felt it with every step, a small steady weight that kept me anchored when the rest of me wanted to come apart.

Silas walked me to the edge of the property before I left, saying nothing for the first mile of silence between the cabin and the tree line. When he finally stopped, he didn't try to talk me out of it again. He just handed me a pack loaded with supplies I hadn't asked for, a water skin, dried meat wrapped in cloth, a second knife strapped into a sheath I didn't recognize.

"You packed for a war," I said, trying to keep my voice light and failing.

"You're walking into one." His jaw was tight, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder, like he couldn't quite look at me straight on. "I should be coming with you."

"You can barely make it up the porch steps some mornings." I meant it as a joke. It came out sounding like something closer to grief.

He huffed, but there was no real fight in it. "Watch your back. Trust nothing that smells like Ravenhollow anymore. That place isn't yours to walk into like you still belong there."

"I don't need it to be mine." The words tasted strange in my mouth, but true. "I just need to look him in the eye."

Silas studied me a long moment, the kind of look that used to make me feel like a child caught mid-lie, except this time I wasn't lying. He reached out and gripped my shoulder, hard enough to ground me.

"Come home," he said again, the same two words he'd repeated all morning, like saying them enough times might make them true by sheer force of will.

"I will." I hugged him before I could think better of it, breathing in woodsmoke and old leather one more time, memorizing it the way I'd started memorizing everything lately, like the world might take it from me before I got the chance to hold onto it properly.

Then I turned, and I walked.

The journey took two days on foot, longer than it should have, but I kept off the main roads, cutting through unfamiliar territory where no patrol would recognize my scent. The forest here didn't feel like the woods around Silas's cabin. It felt older, colder, the kind of quiet that pressed in against my ears until I could hear my own heartbeat too clearly.

I slept in short stretches the first night, back against a tree, knife within reach, waking at every snapped twig and shifting shadow. Nothing came. Nothing ever came, not since that first night at the cabin, but the feeling of being watched had never fully left me, a low hum under my skin that Silas's training hadn't managed to quiet.

By the second afternoon, the trees began to thin, and the land started to look familiar in a way that made my stomach twist. I recognized the ridge line first, the particular slope of it against the sky, then the creek that used to run high with snowmelt every spring, now reduced to a thin, tired trickle.

I recognized the burned house before I let myself understand what I was looking at.

The Doyle family had lived there. I used to walk past it on my way to the training grounds, had waved at their youngest son more mornings than I could count, a boy barely out of diapers the last time I'd seen him. Now there was nothing left but a blackened frame, half collapsed, weeds already creeping up through the ash like the earth had decided to reclaim it before anyone else could.

I stood there longer than I meant to, my chest tight, my hands curling into fists at my sides.

Kade did this.

I let the thought settle into me, sharp and useful, something to hold onto instead of the grief threatening to buckle my knees. I'd spent eight months building myself into someone who could stand here and not fall apart. I wasn't going to lose that now, not when I was finally close enough to make him answer for it.

I kept walking.

The training yard came next, and that one hurt in a different way, quieter, older. I'd spent years here being told I wasn't fast enough, wasn't strong enough, would never earn my place among wolves who'd been born knowing how to fight. Now the yard sat empty, the fencing broken in places, the packed dirt overgrown at the edges where no one had bothered to maintain it.

I almost didn't recognize Ravenhollow at all.

The packhouse still stood at the center of the territory, larger than I remembered, though that might have just been eight months and an ocean of grief distorting the memory. But everything around it had changed. New fencing lined the borders, taller, reinforced. Patrol routes I didn't recognize cut through paths that used to be empty. The wolves I passed on the outskirts moved with a discipline Ravenhollow had never had under Julian's father, let alone Julian himself, quiet and alert in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up.

None of them recognized me. A few glanced my way, assessing, the particular look of wolves cataloguing a stranger's threat level, but none of them placed my face. Eight months had changed me more than I'd realized. I'd grown leaner, harder, my movements sharper from Silas's relentless drilling. The girl who used to duck her head and hurry past every doorway wasn't the one walking through Ravenhollow's border now.

I made it almost to the edge of the packhouse grounds before someone finally recognized me.

"Well." The voice hit me like a slap, familiar in the worst possible way, syrupy sweet and dripping with false delight. "Look what the storm dragged back in."

I turned slowly, already knowing who I'd find.

Ivy stood a few feet away, flanked by two wolves I didn't recognize, her auburn hair longer than I remembered, styled to careless perfection despite the fact that we stood in a training yard and not a ballroom. A silver mark gleamed at her collarbone, the unmistakable shape of a Luna's bond mark, and something ugly twisted low in my stomach at the sight of it.

"Ivy." I kept my voice flat, refusing to give her the reaction she was fishing for.

Her smile widened, sharp at the edges. "I almost didn't recognize you. You've filled out." Her gaze swept over me, cataloguing, dismissive. "Still no wolf, though, I'm guessing. Some things really don't change."

"Where's Julian?" I asked, not because I wanted to see him, but because I needed to know how much of the outline my grandfather had given me actually held up.

Something flickered across her face, there and gone too fast to name. "Gone. Ran the moment things got difficult, same as always." Her voice hardened, bitterness bleeding through the polish. "Left me here to deal with the mess he made."

For half a second I almost felt something like sympathy. I crushed it before it could take root.

"I heard my mother didn't make it out." My voice cracked despite every effort to keep it steady. "I want to know what happened to her."

Ivy's expression shifted into something colder, more deliberate. "Your mother made her choice when she decided to stay and fight for a pack too weak to protect itself." She tilted her head, studying me with something close to hunger. "You should be thanking the new Alpha, honestly. Half this pack would have starved through winter under Julian's leadership. Kade's brought us more in eight months than Julian managed in his whole life."

The name landed in my chest like a struck match.

"Kade." I said it quietly, testing the shape of it, the same low burn under my skin flaring at the sound the way it had every time Silas mentioned him over these past months, a reaction I'd never managed to explain and had stopped trying to.

"Alpha Kade," Ivy corrected, sharp enough to draw blood. "And you'd do well to remember that before you go marching around his territory asking questions you have no right to ask."

"His territory." The words tasted like ash. "This was my home before it was his to take."

Ivy laughed, short and cutting. "Was it, though? Because from where I stood, this pack couldn't wait to watch you leave." She stepped closer, close enough that I caught the sharp floral scent of whatever perfume she'd taken to wearing, close enough that the two wolves flanking her shifted their weight, sensing the tension coiling tighter between us. "Wolfless Wren, home to collect a corpse and make a scene. How predictable."

Something hot clawed up my throat, sharper than anger, sharper than anything I'd felt in months of careful, controlled training. My hands curled into fists so tight my nails bit crescents into my palms.

"Say that again," I said, low and even, the same tone Silas used right before he lost his temper entirely.

Ivy's smile only widened, delighted by the c***k she'd found. "Wolfless. Motherless. Homeless." She ticked each word off like she was savoring them. "Honestly, I don't know why you even bothered coming back."

I moved before I fully decided to, closing the distance between us in a single furious step, my hand shooting out to grab a fistful of her perfectly styled hair.

She shrieked, stumbling backward, and the two wolves beside her surged forward on instinct, one grabbing my arm hard enough to bruise, the other snarling low in his throat, a sound that promised this was about to get a great deal worse before it got better.

"Enough."

The voice cut through the yard like a blade, low and absolute, carrying a weight that made every wolf in earshot freeze mid-motion. The hand on my arm released instantly. The snarling wolf beside Ivy dropped his eyes to the ground so fast it looked almost painful.

I turned toward the voice, my chest still heaving, adrenaline still roaring through my veins.

And froze.

Because I knew that voice.

I knew it the same way I knew the particular warmth of a hand catching me before I hit the ground in the rain eight months ago, the same way I'd know the sound of my own heartbeat if someone played it back to me. I hadn't heard it since that night. I'd told myself, over and over through eight long months of grief and training and rage, that I'd imagined half of what happened in that hallway, that no one's voice could really live in someone's chest the way his had lived in mine ever since.

I turned, and he was already looking at me.

Tall. Dark auburn hair, windswept like he'd just come from somewhere the wind had its say. Storm-gray eyes fixed on me with an intensity that stole the air straight out of my lungs, the same eyes that had looked down at me in the rain the night my whole world came apart, the same hands that had caught me before I hit the ground.

Ivy straightened beside me, smoothing her hair back into place, her voice pitching instantly higher, sweeter. "Alpha, I was just explaining pack law to…"

"I heard enough." His gaze never left mine, something unreadable moving behind those storm-gray eyes, something that looked almost like recognition, almost like relief, buried under a wall of careful control. "Leave us."

Ivy's mouth opened like she wanted to argue, but one look at his face killed whatever protest she'd been building. She shot me a look sharp enough to cut before turning on her heel, the two wolves trailing after her, throwing uneasy glances back over their shoulders the whole way.

Then it was just the two of us, standing in the wreckage of a training yard I used to call home, the man everyone called a monster watching me like I was something he'd been waiting a very long time to see again.

"You're the man from the packhouse," I said, before I could stop myself, my voice barely above a whisper. "The night I was rejected."

Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and complicated, gone before I could fully read it.

"I am." His voice was rough, careful, like he was choosing each word with more weight than the moment seemed to require. "I never got your name."

I studied him, searching for any trace of the monster I'd built up in my mind over eight months of grief and rumor, the man who'd torn my pack apart, who'd let my mother die, who'd taken everything I had left without so much as a second thought.

I didn't find him.

Not yet.

"Wren," I said finally, wary, unwilling to let my guard down even an inch despite the way my chest had gone strangely, dangerously quiet since he'd stepped into the yard. "Wren Ashby."

Something flickered across his face at the sound of my full name, sharp enough that I almost missed it beneath the stillness he wore like armor.

"Wren," he repeated, low, like he was testing the shape of it against something he already knew. "Welcome home."

I didn't correct him.

I should have.

Because for one terrible, unguarded second, standing

there in the wreckage of everything I used to know, it almost felt true.