“Does she know?” I ask.
“We’ve discussed it. She’s aware it’s coming, but I don’t think she truly understands what she’ll be facing. Not after what she’s been through.”
I nod. We’ll need to stock the cabin with enough supplies to last a week. Make sure she has everything she needs to be comfortable.
After Cassia leaves, I stand alone in the meeting room, staring out the window.
I clench my fists, feeling my claws press against my palms. Whoever they are, whatever they want, they’ll have to go through me first. Through all of us.
Blue is pack now. And I protect what’s mine.
Even if she doesn’t want to be mine.
34
Mo
Darius is back.
I’m at the kitchen table, two days later, eating breakfast, when the front door opens, and he walks in. He looks rough. Thinner than before, stubble thicker, dark circles under his eyes like he hasn’t slept in days. His clothes are dirty, and there’s sawdust in his hair and on his arms.
He stands in the doorway and looks at me.
Nobody moves for a second. Archer lowers his coffee. Elias stops mid-chew. Silas is still watching from the counter.
“I need you all to come with me,” Darius says. His voice is quiet. Not commanding, not ordering, just pleading.
“Where?” Archer says.
“The woods. There’s something I want to show you, Blue.”
I put down my spoon. Everyone is looking at me, waiting for my reaction. There’s something in Darius’s face I haven’t seen before. Not the usual hard alpha mask. Not the brooding—helooks nervous. Darius, the pack leader who killed men at sixteen and stared down an entire coup, looks nervous.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods and turns back toward the door. We follow him out, all of us, trailing down a path I haven’t been on before. Nobody talks. We walk for about five minutes. The path curves around a ridge, and then the trees open up.
I stop walking.
A lake. Small, maybe a hundred yards across, ringed by birch and pine. The water is dark and still, reflecting the trees and the sky so perfectly that it looks like two forests stacked on top of each other.
And on the near side, set back just enough from the water to be sheltered by the trees, is a cabin.
It’s small. One room, from the look of it, with a sloped roof, a little porch, and windows that face the lake. The wood is old, weathered to grey in some places, but there are patches of new lumber where someone has replaced boards and reinforced the frame. The porch has been rebuilt. Fresh wood, still pale, not yet darkened by the weather.
Darius has stopped ahead of us, standing at the edge of the treeline. He’s looking at the cabin, not at me, and his shoulders are tight.
“This was my parents’ place,” he says. “My mother was an omega; she used it during her heats. My father built it for her when they first mated, so she’d have somewhere private. Somewhere that was just hers.”
He pauses. Swallows.
“After they died, nobody came out here. I couldn’t. The roof caved in a few years ago, and the inside was a mess. Animals got in. Water damage. I figured it was gone.”
He turns to look at me, and his eyes are tired and raw and completely open.
“I’ve been fixing it up. That’s where I’ve been this past week. I know the cabin with all of us is…” He stops, searching for the word. “A lot. And I know that’s my fault. The chain, the way I handled everything. I can’t undo that. But I can give you this.”
He takes a breath. “If you’d rather have your own space instead of staying in the cabin with us, this is yours. For as long as you want it. No chains. No locks. No one comes in without your permission. It’s yours, Blue.”