Page 28

The furniture is real. Not patched, not scavenged, not the kind of thing you cobble together from pallets and stolen lumber. A sofa, actual cushions, actual fabric, the kind of thing Arlene used to trace with her fingertips in catalogs she’d hide under the mattress. A dining table with six chairs. Bookshelves already half filled, spines lined up neat and straight like soldiers at attention. A kitchen with a stove that works and a refrigerator humming low and steady against the wall.

“Mommy! Mommy, come see!” Darlene’s voice comes from upstairs, high and bright and cracking with something that sounds almost like joy. “There’s a window! A real window! And a bed! And, ” Her footsteps thunder across the ceiling. “Damian, look! Look at the stars!”

Damian’s laugh follows, real, unguarded, the laugh of a six year old who has forgotten, for one single moment, how to be afraid. His boots pound up the stairs after his sister, and the sound of them, running, actually running, the way pups run when they’re safe, hits me like a fist to the sternum.

I follow Arlene from the living room. Her hand is pressed flat against her mouth. Her shoulders are shaking. The tears are silent, they track down her cheeks and drop off her jaw and she doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t sob, doesn’t do any of the things I’ve learned to brace for.

Clothes. I can see them through the open bedroom door, folded on the bed, hung in the closet, shirts and dresses and small things in small sizes that make my chest do something it hasn’t done in four years. Hope. Hope for a peaceful and safe life for my pups and mate.

Arlene turns from the bedroom doorway. Her fingers swipe beneath her eyes, quick, practiced, the way she’s wiped tears for four years in tents where crying was a luxury nobody could afford. But the smile she’s wearing won’t stay wiped. It keeps coming back, trembling at the corners of her mouth like something that’s been caged and has finally remembered how to fly.

Luna Selena steps past me. She doesn’t look at me. She looks at Arlene the way one mother looks at another, steady, warm, carrying no pity. Her hand finds Arlene’s elbow. Gentle. Light. The touch of someone who understands that too much pressure right now will break something that’s only just started healing.

“We’ll set up the nursery together,” Luna Selena says. Quiet. Like it’s already decided. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world, two women standing in a kitchen that smells like bread, planning a room for a pup that hasn’t been born yet. “I’ve got paint samples. Somewhere. Rylan keeps moving them.”

Arlene’s laugh comes out wet. She presses her palm flat against her stomach, that unconscious, protective gesture I’ve watched her make a thousand times, and nods. Just once. The tears start again, and this time she doesn’t wipe them.

I lean against the doorframe and watch. My wolf is quiet. Not the dead quiet of the cell, not the poisoned silence of the needle, the other kind. The kind that comes when there’s nothing left to fight. He’s watching too. Through my eyes. Through the bond. Taking it in the way I’m taking it in, slow, careful, like we’re both afraid the picture will dissolve if we look at it too hard.

I walk Luna Selena and Alpha Rylan to the door. Alpha Rylan promised we would become a part of the pack tomorrow. He said he set up warriors to patrol the house tonight for our safety and I understand. Until we have the pack scent, we are at risk. I nod, “Thank you Alpha. Luna.”

“You’re welcome Darian. You all rest. See you tomorrow.” Luna Selena responds.

After they leave. I go back inside. Upstairs, the pups are still running. Darlene’s voice carries down through the floorboards…“Daddy, come see! Daddy, there’s a window and it opens and everything!” and Damian’s quieter, steadier, the sound of him dragging something heavy across carpet. My chest does the thing again. That thing. The one I thought the rogue camp had burned out of me years ago.

Home.

The word lands in my skull like a stone dropped into deep water, and the ripples keep going, spreading outward through every part of me that’s been clenched tight for four years. My jaw. My shoulders. The place between my ribs where I’ve been holding my breath since the day my father’s council voted me out.

Home.

9

Arlene’s POV

The door clicks shut behind him, and the house goes quiet for the first time since we crossed the threshold.

I watch Darian from the top of the stairs. His hand stays on the doorknob a beat too long, his forehead pressed against the wood, his shoulders rising and falling with a breath that seems to cost him something. The hallway light catches the dried blood still crusted along his ribs where the Lycan’s claws found him, and something in my chest pulls tight, not pain, not quite. Something older.

Four years. Four years of no, four years of give Daryl time, four years of watching the camp eat my pups alive one meal at a time. And then, overnight, like a switch thrown, he’s packing. Not just packing. Packing for me. Ginger root. Raspberry leaf. The small cloth pouch he tucked into the inner pocket of his bag without comment, the way a man packs for a woman he knows is carrying his child before she’s told him.

Climb on my back. Don’t shift.

Not we’ll run together. Not we’ll shift and go. He told me to climb on. Like he already knew my wolf wouldn’t answer. Like he already knew about the pup before the branch, before the hospital, before Healer Thomas said the words out loud.

I can’t lose you again.

The words replay behind my sternum with the precision of something etched in stone. Not I can’t lose you. Again. The distinction sits in my chest like a splinter I can’t find.

I descend the stairs. My bare feet are silent on the carpet, real carpet, actual carpet, the kind that muffles sound instead of amplifying it. Darian turns at the bottom. His eyes find mine, and the look in them, Not relief. I expect relief. The look of a mate who’d almost lost his other half and hadn’t. That’s what should be there. That’s what the moment calls for.

What’s there is grief. Old grief. The kind that’s been lived in so long it’s stopped being pain and started being architecture, the load bearing walls of a man who rebuilt himself around an absence.

Again.

“Arlene.” My name in his mouth. Wrecked. Beautiful. The same way he said it in the hospital, the same way he said it in the tent that morning, the same way he’s said it every morning for six years except...

Except it’s not the same. I can hear it now. The difference. The extra weight. Like he’s been saying it across more than one lifetime and only just remembered.