6
1334 Words
Caius
Three years away, and the Alpha Mansion still smelled like home.
I came through the front doors already yelling, because that's how you're supposed to arrive after three years. Loud. You come home loud or you don't come home at all. I had eleven hours of road behind me, a duffel bag over my shoulder, and a plan.
The plan was simple. Hug Darius. Insult Zephyr. Find little Wren Ashwood and tease her about that warrior boyfriend of hers until she turned red and threw something at my head. Classic Caius homecoming. I'd been rehearsing the jokes since the border.
"Where is she? Where's my girl?" I bellowed up the staircase. "I drove eleven hours, somebody point me at Wren Ashwood before I start knocking down doors!"
What came down the stairs first was Darius, moving fast, and one look at his face tore up my whole plan.
I know my best friend's faces. I grew up on them. There's Alpha Face, there's Paperwork Face, there's the face he makes when Zephyr wins at cards. This was none of those. This was the face from the night their parents didn't come back from the border patrol.
My grin died. "Who?"
"Caius..."
"Who do I need to hurt, Darius?"
He got me by the shoulder and steered me into the study, and in a low voice he told me everything. The house Wren bought. The unlocked door. Selene. The things Kellan said through that bedroom door, word for word, and my best friend made himself repeat them, and I stood there feeling my blood change temperature.
That fat girl.
I've got a reputation in three packs. Caius Ashford, the funny one. The one who never takes anything seriously, who jokes his way through funerals and border wars. People forget that a man doesn't get to stay the funny one in a world of wolves unless there's something underneath the funny that nobody wants to meet.
Kellan Vayne came very close to meeting it that morning.
"Where is he," I said. Quiet. My wolf was already up and moving, rolling his shoulders under my skin.
"Banished. Last night." Darius's jaw flexed. "Zephyr and I handled it."
"Handled it? He's still breathing, so nothing's handled."
"Caius." He stepped between me and the door, and his eyes had that Alpha weight in them. "Believe me. There's a list, and there's an order to the list. But right now she doesn't need three men promising violence. She needs..." He stopped. He rubbed his face, and for a second he looked young and helpless in a way an Alpha never gets to look. "I don't know what she needs. We tried ice cream."
"You tried ice cream."
"There was also a movie. Zephyr brought tissues."
I stared at him. "I'm gone three years and you two turned into a self-help book. Where is she?"
She was in the sunroom, wrapped in a blanket on the window seat, and the sight of her hit me harder than I was ready for.
Wren Ashwood had always been the bright thing in this house. Sixteen years old, sneaking us leftovers when Darius's father worked us half to death in training. Nineteen, laughing so hard at my impressions that she once fell off that exact window seat. She was soft and warm in a family of granite, and the whole time we were growing up, this room was only ever the sunroom because she was in it.
Now she sat there with swollen eyes and her arms around her knees, looking out the window like the glass had personally lied to her, and behind me my wolf made a sound I'd never heard him make.
Careful, I told him. That's Darius's little sister.
"Well," I said out loud, dropping my duffel with a thud. "This is a terrible welcome party. No banner. No cake. One sad girl in a blanket. I want to speak to the manager."
Her head turned. Her eyes went wide.
"Caius?"
"In the flesh. All of it excellent." I spread my arms. "Three years patrolling the northern territories, and I come home to find out everything falls apart the second I leave. I can't step out for one minute with you people."
Her mouth wobbled. For a second I couldn't tell which way it would go, tears or not, and my chest actually hurt waiting.
"You got uglier," she said.
Oh, thank the Goddess. "Take that back."
"The beard is a crime, Caius."
"This beard has its own admirers. There are letters." I crossed the room and dropped onto the other end of the window seat, and up close I could see everything, the raw eyes, the way she'd cried herself hollow, and I made a decision, right there. Kellan Vayne was a problem for later. Right now I had one job, the same job I'd had since I was fifteen years old and this family took me in.
Make her laugh.
So I went to work. I told her about the northern pack's Alpha, who was terrified of geese, and the ceremonial dinner a goose got into. I told her about my partner on patrol who howled in his sleep in perfect show tunes. I did my impression of Darius doing paperwork, then my impression of Zephyr at a birthday party, which is just me standing completely still against the wall, holding a juice box, saying nothing.
"That's not what he... okay, that's exactly what he looks like," she admitted.
"He hasn't blinked since 2019, Wren. Somebody should check on him."
And then it happened. Halfway through the story about the goose dinner, second telling, with extra details I was mostly inventing, Wren laughed. Not a polite laugh. The real one, the one from the window seat years ago, where her whole face opens up and her nose scrunches and she puts her hand over her mouth like joy is something she has to catch.
For the first time in days, Darius told me later. She smiled like that for the first time in days.
Something moved in my chest, slow and heavy, like furniture being rearranged in a room I thought I knew. Three years in the north. Three years of border snow and bad coffee and letters I always meant to write. I'd missed home, sure. But sitting there watching Wren Ashwood laugh at my terrible goose story, I understood with sudden, uncomfortable clarity what home had actually meant, all this time.
I'd missed that smile. Specifically. Personally. Like a limb.
We talked until the light went long and gold across the floor. Eventually Darius appeared in the doorway making noise about dinner, and Wren stood, gathering her blanket, and said she wanted to rest before eating.
"Hey." She stopped in front of me. "Thank you, Caius. I forgot I could still laugh. That's... you have no idea what that's worth today."
"Cheapest thing I own," I said. "Take as much as you want."
And then she hugged me.
It should have been nothing. I've hugged this girl a hundred times. Birthdays, goodbyes, the day I left for the north. A hundred hugs, and they were all just hugs.
This one wasn't.
She fit against me, warm and soft, her cheek over my heart, and my wolf surged up so fast and so hard that I actually stopped breathing. He pressed against the inside of my skin like he was trying to get to her, and through the roar of blood in my ears I heard him, clear and stunned and absolutely certain, saying one word I had no business hearing.
Finally.
Wren pulled back, smiled that smile at me one more time, and walked out of the sunroom.
I stood there, frozen, heart slamming, staring at the empty doorway.
"No," I whispered to him. "No, no, no. That's Darius's little sister."
My wolf just settled down in my chest, smug and warm and patient, like he knew something I didn't.
Like he'd known for years.
- Writer
