The Shadowcrest's gates open onto a compound that looks like it was designed by someone who'd heard of sunlight and decided to allow it. Glass and warm stone, gardens that exist for reasons beyond punishing someone on their hands and knees.
I barely see any of it. Dylan's question is still lodged between my ribs.
What exactly did you bring him?
I told him everything on our way here.
“Kailani called me in and instructed me to deliver him the drink—a crystal glass that she gave me herself.” I explained with an unexpected patience. “I don’t know what was in it. But I have no reason to hurt him,” I looked Dylan dead in the eyes. He didn’t flinch.
"And you didn't think it was strange?" Dylan had asked, eyes on the road. "Kailani being generous, Kailani asking you personally?"
"Of course I thought it was strange." My voice had come out raw and scraped. "But refusing her orders isn't an option. I follow them, or I bleed."
He'd gone quiet after that, jaw working, deciding whether the woman next to him had tried to kill his brother. He hasn't decided yet—I can tell by the way he tracks my movements as the convoy unloads, keeping me in his peripheral vision without once turning to look directly.
Kailani sweeps through the welcome like she was born on this soil, arm through Leon's, directing staff with a laugh that could frost glass. Leon walks beside her with the pleasant detachment of a man touring a facility he already owns.
His gaze passes over me twice without catching.
"The basement rooms would be more appropriate for my sister's situation." Kailani's voice carries sweetly across the foyer. "She's used to modest accommodations."
Dylan doesn't blink. "Suite 14, family wing. Already prepared." He pulls a folder from under his arm and hands it to me without meeting my eyes. "The children have reserved places at the pack school starting Monday."
He pauses, adjusting his sleeve with studied disinterest. "And the clinic has a position open for a doctor's assistant, if that's something you'd want."
My fingers close on the folder. He remembered—somewhere between suspecting me of hurting his brother and organizing our relocation, he remembered a throwaway conversation about medicine in a storage room that smelled like my blood.
"Yes, I'd like that. Thank you, Dylan." Too fast, too eager.
His name slipping out before I can catch it, like my mouth still thinks we're friends.
He nods once and turns away, already moving to the next task. The distance between who he was at Crescent Ridge and who he is now could fill every room in this compound.
Suite 14 is bigger than our entire servants' room back home. River spins in the center with her arms out, counting rotations, while Ashton opens every cabinet like he’s running a security sweep.
I should unpack. Instead I stand at the window digging my thumbnail into the wire ring until the skin whitens. Then I plead the kids to not go anywhere until Mommy comes back, grab a stack of medical intake forms—a legitimate errand—and head for the administrative wing.
I round the corner near the library and Leon is there, alone, reading his phone. My feet stop before my brain agrees, and he looks up with the expression you'd give someone you've seen around but can't quite place.
"Hello again. Skyler, right?" His smile is warm and perfectly generic, and it detonates inside my chest, the shrapnel catching on my insides. "Kailani's sister?"
Was Dylan right? Was the drink to fault for all this?
Or is Leon some kind of Oscar-winning actor—the same way he was Silas all those years ago?
I don’t know which assumption hurts worse. The fact that I might have done it to him. Or the fact that it was completely his decision to forget about a woman he promised peace.
"That's me." My voice holds by some miracle. "How are you settling in? After being unwell?"
"Much better, thank you. The doctor cleared me completely." He pockets the phone, giving me his full attention—polite, present, empty. Hurtful. "Were you looking for someone?"
"No, just delivering forms." I clutch them against my chest as a shield from yet another heartbreak. Doesn’t work. "Did you ever have the chance to walk the grounds at night, back at Crescent Ridge? The eastern wall has an old stone garden—it's supposed to be something in the moonlight."
A stone wall. Firelight. A wire ring warm from his skin—breadcrumbs to a life he can't taste, and this fact twists my guts.
His brow creases, polite and faintly confused. "I haven't explored much, didn’t have time. But I'll keep that in mind for the next trip, thank you for the suggestion."
I search his face—every line, every shift, the space between his brows where recognition should live. His eyes hold mine, clear and pleasant and vacant of everything that used to fill them when he said my name.
He isn't pretending. There is nothing there to pretend about.
"Enjoy your evening, Alpha." I turn before my face betrays me and walk back to the suite gripping the forms hard enough to crumple them.
When I’m back, River has already rearranged her stuffed animals on the windowsill by height and is narrating backstories to Ashton, who pretends not to listen while very clearly memorizing every word.
I sit on the bed and the mattress is absurdly soft—the kind of soft that feels like mockery after years on a surface barely better than floor. My fist closes around the wire ring and the metal bites into skin that has held it for seven years.
I was ready. Standing in that kitchen with his hands on mine and the water running pink, I was ready to crack open the door I'd welded shut. The readiness wasn't gentle or hopeful—it was ferocious, and terrified, and mine.
Now the door isn't shut. It's gone—replaced by a wall that doesn't know a door was ever there. Worse than years of silence, because silence could still mean he was searching. Could still mean the door existed somewhere.
Instead—black plaster where a promise used to be, smooth and indifferent.
"Mama." Ashton's voice from the window, quiet and level. He's watching me with those amber eyes—his father's eyes, running calculations from a face that hasn't learned to hide them. "I don't trust the Alpha."
I set River's dress down slowly, buying time my mouth doesn't know what to do with. "Why is that, Ash?"
"He looks at us like he doesn't know us." Flat and measured, not usual for a child and I know it’s my fault for not being able to give them life better than whatever this is. "People who don't know you don't protect you."
Six years old, and he's already built the walls I spent nineteen years without.
I want to tell him he's wrong—that Leon is his father, that the man who knelt on a corridor floor and promised ‘I won't’ is buried somewhere under whatever my sister might have poured into that glass.
I open my mouth and nothing comes out that isn't a lie, so I close it and do the only honest thing left. "Keep your eyes open, baby." I pull him against me and press my mouth to his dark hair. "That's always smart."
He nods against my chest—satisfied, grim, a veteran of a war he never enlisted in. Behind us, River hums at the window, rearranging animals by color now, building a world where everything has a place and a name.
My son is building walls against his own father. And standing in this beautiful room, in this beautiful pack, with the ring still cutting into my palm, I can't tell him he's wrong.