5
1234 Words
Wren
I woke up in my childhood bedroom with swollen eyes and a heart that remembered everything before my brain did.
For one soft second, I thought it was an ordinary morning. Then it all came back. The unlocked door. The laughter. That fat girl. I pulled the blanket over my head and decided I would simply live under it forever.
The door creaked open.
"She's awake," Darius whispered, terribly.
"You woke her up," Zephyr's voice replied, low and flat.
"I did not. I was checking."
I lowered the blanket. My brother, the Alpha of the Ashwood Pack, the man four hundred wolves feared and obeyed, stood in my doorway holding a tray stacked with three tubs of ice cream, three spoons, and a bag of the caramel popcorn I liked. Behind him, filling most of the hallway, stood Zephyr Nightbane with a laptop under his arm like a soldier carrying something he had been ordered to carry.
"What is this?" My voice came out scratchy.
"Breakfast," Darius said, marching in and setting the tray on my bed. "Chocolate, strawberry cheesecake, and one called Midnight Fudge Explosion that the shop lady swears fixes everything."
"It's nine in the morning."
"Ice cream doesn't know that."
Zephyr pulled the armchair from the corner closer to the bed, sat, and opened the laptop without a word. I stared at the screen as it loaded.
"Is that... The Notebook?"
"We read it helps with heartbreak," Darius said, very seriously, climbing onto the bed beside me and handing me a spoon like it was medicine.
"You read."
"We researched," he said. "Last night. There are articles."
I looked at Zephyr. The most feared warrior in three territories. The man who once cracked a rogue Alpha's ribs with one hit. He met my eyes calmly over the laptop and said, "The comments recommended tissues. I brought some," and set a box on my nightstand.
And that was how I ended up spending my first morning as a betrayed woman wedged between my brother and Zephyr Nightbane, eating Midnight Fudge Explosion straight from the tub while Noah wrote Allie three hundred and sixty five letters.
Darius cried first. He denied it, but I saw him wipe his face during the rain scene. Zephyr didn't cry, but somewhere in the second half I noticed he had stopped watching the movie and I felt his eyes on the side of my face every time I laughed at something, like my laughing was the thing he had come to see.
It didn't fix me. My chest still felt like a house with the door torn off. But for two hours, I wasn't alone inside it, and that was worth more than either of them knew.
When the credits rolled, Darius muted the laptop and turned to me with his Alpha face on. I knew that face. It meant a decision had already been made and I was about to be informed of it.
"You're moving back into the mansion," he said.
There it was.
"Darius..."
"Your old room is right here. The kitchen staff already know your favorites. There are guards on every wall." He counted the points off on his fingers. "You shouldn't be alone right now, Wrennie. Not in that apartment."
I looked down at the melted swamp in my ice cream tub, and I tried to find the words for what was wrong with that plan.
"I can't," I said quietly.
"Why not?"
"Because he's everywhere here." It came out before I could soften it. "Darius, I got ready for our first date in this room. He picked me up at that front door. He sat at our dinner table every Sunday for two years. The garden, the head table, the hallway where he first held my hand." My throat tightened. "I dreamed my whole life with him inside these walls. Every corner of this house has a memory in it, and every single one of them is a lie now. I can't heal in a museum of my own stupidity."
"You weren't stupid," Darius said fiercely.
"I know. I mean, I'm trying to know." I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. "But I can't do it here. And I can't go back to my apartment either, because he's been there too. There's nowhere in this whole territory he hasn't touched."
The room went quiet. Darius opened his mouth, clearly about to solve the problem by Alpha decree, when Zephyr spoke.
"Then leave the territory."
We both looked at him. He closed the laptop slowly, and for the first time since I had known him, he looked almost careful. Like a man walking on ice he wasn't sure would hold.
"My mansion has a guest wing," he said. "In my pack's territory. Private floor, its own kitchen, its own entrance. Nobody would bother you. Nobody there knows Kellan, and he has never set foot across my border in his life." He paused. "No memories. No lies in the corners. Just quiet, until you're ready to come back here."
I stared at him. Zephyr Nightbane, who famously let no one within arm's reach, who lived alone in that huge house in the Nightbane territory like a myth people told at bonfires, was offering me a wing of it.
"You don't have to do that," I said.
"I know."
"I'd be in your space."
"The wing is empty. It's been empty for years." His dark eyes held mine, steady and unreadable, and something in my chest, in the place where my wolf lived, went warm and still. "It should be used."
"Absolutely not," Darius said. Then he frowned. Then he sat with it, and I watched my brother argue with himself in real time. Zephyr's territory bordered ours. Zephyr's pack was the one pack on the continent nobody in their right mind would ever attack. And Kellan's parting words were still hanging over all of us like smoke.
She is going to regret ruining my future.
"It's the safest place she could be and you know it," Zephyr said quietly, watching him.
Darius exhaled through his nose. "You'd have guards on her wing."
"She'd have my whole pack."
I should have taken longer to think about it. A smarter girl would have. But I thought about waking up tomorrow in this house, walking past the dinner table, the garden, the front door, all those pretty painted lies, and my answer was already out of my mouth.
"Okay," I whispered. "Not today. I need to pack, and I need a few days to say goodbye to my apartment. But... okay. I'll come."
Something flickered across Zephyr's face, there and gone too fast to name. He only nodded once, like we had agreed on the weather.
But under my ribs, my wolf did a slow, happy turn, like a dog settling in front of a fire, and I pretended very hard not to notice.
That was when we heard it. A commotion downstairs, the front doors booming open, and a voice I hadn't heard in three years echoing up the staircase, loud and bright and impossible.
"Where is she? Where's my girl? I drove eleven hours, somebody point me at Wren Ashwood before I start knocking down doors!"
My spoon froze halfway to my mouth. Darius groaned and dragged a hand down his face.
Zephyr went very, very still.
Caius was back.
- Writer
