Chapter 55

Ethan remained staring in the direction in which Kelsey had disappeared with Jack, his body unwilling to move. Or, if he wanted to be truly honest, unwilling to move in the direction it had to.

It felt like forever before he finally forced himself to turn and look at Nell.

She stood still, waiting, her eyes hard and tired around the edges.

"You look like you've been through hell and back."

He shrugged. "I can imagine."

Her expression darkened. "What the hell happened? It reeks of blood everywhere."

In as few words as possible, he told her.

She cursed under her breath. "I knew it. I knew they were up to something when I didn't see them at the lot, and with the way they've been watching you lately..." Her gaze sharpened. "I freaking warned you, Ethan." She grasped her head with both hands. "I should've insisted on accompanying her home. I knew something was off. I..."

"Hey." Ethan grasped her wrists. "Stop it. You're starting to sound like a human. It wasn't your fault. How did you know where to find us, anyway?"

She shook his hands away. "Kelsey didn't text me. I knew you were probably following her again. I knew if Matt or Ryan were going to do something, they'd do it here, in the woods." She swallowed. "I just couldn't imagine them stooping so low as to cause a car accident." She looked back at him, her gaze sharpening. "And you're welcome for saving your ass earlier."

Ethan's shoulders fell just a fraction. "Thanks." The word was quiet, as if it cost him something to say it.

Nell glanced in the direction Jack had gone. "Yeah, I don't think old Blackwell really bought it." She rubbed at her nose. "But that's a worry for another day." She turned back toward her brother. "We have a much bigger problem now. This just broke open, Ethan. The pack will know." Her eyes narrowed. "Dad will know."

Ethan's fists clenched at his sides. "I'm aware."

She shook her head with the wariness of a soldier who had been fighting someone else's battles for far too long.

"Maybe it's for the best. I really don't know how to help you anymore."

Without waiting for a reply, she turned, shifted into fur, and ran westward.

Ethan swallowed, allowed himself one more glance toward Blackwell land, and followed.

***

By the time brother and sister reached the Greystone house, the whole first floor was lit.

That alone was wrong.

Their house usually held its light differently, warm and measured, one room at a time, the way their mother preferred it. Tonight it glowed too brightly through the windows, every lamp burning in alarm.

They shifted, Nell reaching for the clothes she had left folded below an old blackberry bush and tossing a pair of sweatpants into the hands of her brother.

They walked the rest in silence.

Ethan climbed the porch steps with blood crusted in stiff patches across his skin and the taste of iron still thick in the back of his throat. Each movement pulled at something torn along his side. His right shoulder and left thigh throbbed where teeth and claws had sunk deep. The cold should have bothered him. It barely registered.

Kelsey was alive.

That single fact still sat at the center of him like a heartbeat.

Everything around it felt secondary. The blood on his body. The awareness of Nell beside him. The house ahead. His parents.

He knew before stepping through the door that his father would already know.

Jason Greystone stood in the middle of the kitchen when they entered, broad shoulders squared, one hand braced flat against the table. He was still in the dark sweater he'd worn that morning, though the collar sat more open now, like he'd been tugging at it. His face had the sharp stillness Ethan knew all too well.

His mother, Natalie, stood by the counter with the medical kit already open and a basin of hot water and several clean towels waiting by her side.

Neither of them looked surprised.

That was somehow worse.

Nell closed the door behind them with deliberate care. The latch clicked too loudly in the silence.

For a moment no one spoke.

Jason's eyes moved first to Ethan's shoulder, then his ribs, then the streaks of blood drying across his chest and stomach. His gaze slid past him to Nell, taking in the twigs caught in her hair and the rigid line of her mouth.

Then he looked back at Ethan.

"Sit," he said, without a shout.

Ethan remained where he was.

Nell, standing half a step behind him, touched his elbow once, firmly. He allowed her to steer him toward the kitchen chair because he knew exactly how much worse it would get if he forced his father to repeat himself.

The back of the wooden seat bit cold against his lower back.

Natalie came forward at once with the basin, clean cloths, and the rest of the supplies.

She did not touch him immediately. She took a long, hard look at his face, then down his body in a detailed assessment, her face going pale under the kitchen light. Anger sharpened it somewhat, but not fully.

"What happened?" she asked, her tone cool and deliberate.

Jason answered for him.

"Before you tell me what you did out there," he said, every word level, "you are going to explain why the parents of Matthew Cole and Ryan Holden contacted me an hour ago to apologize for the conduct of their sons, and in that apology thought it useful to mention that my heir has been visiting the boundary of Blackwell's inner ring after school with enough consistency for half the valley to notice."

The room went still.

Natalie's hand, still holding the antiseptic bottle, tightened around the plastic until it crackled.

Nell inhaled once through her nose.

Ethan looked up slowly.

So that was how his parents knew already.

Those two boys, half-crippled, half-feral, dragged home bleeding and humiliated, their parents arriving at Jason's door or calling his phone in a frenzy of apology and panic. Shame first, naturally, accompanied by fear. Heads bowed, submission declared like a white flag. Then the bite hidden in the middle of it.

Your son has been following her.
Your son has been lying to you.
Your heir has been ruined by a bloodkin just like ours were.

And underneath, unsaid, he's no better.

Jason's gaze did not leave Ethan's face.

"Did you imagine," he asked quietly, "that you could keep this from me forever?"

Ethan felt the old reflex rise first, the one that had nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with dominance. He wanted to say it was handled. He wanted to say he had left those mutts alive only by a thread. He wanted to say none of it mattered beside the fact that they had laid a trap for an innocent girl and dragged her into the woods, wounded. That they had been on the verge of tearing her apart. And that he had secured Greystone authority and prevented a war with the Blackwells in one go.

What came out instead was, "They used her as bait."

Natalie's head lifted sharply.

Jason's expression darkened a shade.

"They put nails on the road," Ethan continued. "Forced the car off. Took her into the woods to draw me in and challenge."

"Yes." Jason's mouth flattened, his voice smooth as silk over a blade. "And they succeeded in drawing you in because you were exactly where they expected you to be."

The muscle in Ethan's jaw twitched. "What does it matter? They challenged me and lost. Now they'll never be able to challenge anyone ever again. Or did their parents forget to tell you that part?" The tone of his voice carried venom.

"No, they have not," Jason said calmly. "They told me exactly what you've done to them." He let the words fall in the space between them. "You've dealt with it as an alpha heir. That's the one thing in all of this you managed to do right. The only reason I even bother with this conversation in the first place."

The silence that settled hit harder than shouting would have.

Natalie set the antiseptic down with too much precision and finally stepped in close enough to clean the worst of the blood from the gash in Ethan's shoulder. The first press of cloth against torn flesh made his jaw lock.

"You lied to us," she said quietly. "You lied to both of us, repeatedly, and let this go on under our roof."

Ethan stared at the grain of the kitchen table.

Across from him, Nell spoke first.

"It wasn't like that."

Jason's head turned toward her.

"No?" he asked. "Then please, enlighten me."

Nell crossed her arms, though the movement looked more like holding herself together than defiance.

"Bloodkin scent affected almost every male in school, in various degrees, including Ethan." She let out a breath, giving her brother an apologetic look and watching the muscles in his jaw work. "He fought it. Then it turned into inversion," she said. "I thought we had time to contain it. Stop it before it took root into..." She paused.

"Don't you dare finish that sentence." Natalie said, closing her eyes and putting the bloodied cloth into the basin.

Jason gave one short laugh that held no humor at all.

"You thought."

Nell's chin lifted. "Yes."

He turned fully to her now, the shift in his attention so sudden it changed the air pressure in the room.

"And while you were thinking," he said, "you decided to conceal it from me. And your mother."

"I decided not to ignite a political fire without understanding what we were actually looking at. Bloodkin aren't lupine. Obviously, they're not regular humans, either. We didn't know what this might turn into. And we didn't tell you because we knew you wouldn't know either."

Natalie looked at her daughter with something like disbelief.

"Nell."

"No," Nell said, and for the first time there was real heat in her voice. "You both told us the story about bloodkin our entire lives. You told it like a warning to avoid humans and expected us to just accept it."

Jason's eyes narrowed.

"It is a warning."

"Is it?" Nell shot back. "Or is it a cleaned-up legend built around a massacre none of you actually understand as well as you think you do?"

That hit.

Not because it showed in Jason's expression, but because the temperature in the room seemed to drop as he fully faced his daughter.

Natalie stopped cleaning Ethan's shoulder mid-motion.

"What did you find?" she asked before her husband had a chance to take Nell's words as a challenge.

Nell looked from one parent to the other.

Then she told them.

About the archives. About Moira and the human trapper. About the children born from that union. About the first daughter, Lizzie, and the way the pack had started to change around her at the onset of puberty. The agitation. The inversion patterns. The split in the pack. The massacre. The Blackwell ruin. The famine on the Winters side. Flint Greystone and Blackwell elders stepping over corpses to found the town.

She laid every brick down with the same cold factuality it had been written with.

By the time she reached the end, the kitchen had gone very quiet.

Natalie's face had lost all remaining color. Jason had not moved at all. There was something in their expressions when she mentioned famine and Flint Greystone that suggested they knew more than they admitted. Ethan had the impression Nell saw it too, but she let it pass.

When Nell fell silent at last, Jason spoke.

"So," he said, "we are exactly where I feared we might end up. Only worse."

Natalie put the ruined cloth aside and reached for another.

"I knew the whole Gabe Blackwell situation was bad news from the beginning. But, of course, you males knew better. You thought you could contain it. Here it is, your containment." She threw her hands in the air, motioning to Ethan's wounds. "I told you..."

The look Jason gave her was cold enough to make her freeze and look away for a second before she returned his gaze and said, equally cold, "The girl has to go. It's non-negotiable."

Ethan was on his feet before he knew he had moved.

Pain tore white through his side. The chair legs scraped hard against the floor.

"No, you can't!"

The words came out raw.

Natalie fixed him with a sharp look. "I don't care what you want. She needs to go before this inversion of yours has a chance to..." She trailed off as the corner of her mouth curved down in disgust.

Nell sprang forward. "Mom..."

"Enough." Jason cut the conversation down.

His hand landed on Ethan's injured shoulder and the pressure of it almost drove him back to his knees.

But he didn't back down. Instead, he looked at his father with the kind of clarity that only came after anger and fear had already burned everything softer away.

"You don't get to decide that."

Jason's eyes went flat.

"I do," he said. "That is exactly what I get to decide."

"You don't even know if removing her would fix anything."

"No," Jason said. "What I do know is that keeping her here has resulted in my son and heir being compromised and challenged. That alone is enough for me."

"Enough to let him suffer the inversion?" Nell interjected. "Possibly even go mad?"

Natalie pressed her mouth into a flat line and folded a cloth that didn't need folding.

Jason's eyes narrowed. His presence seemed to fill the room. "No true alpha heir goes mad from inversion alone."

Ethan gritted his teeth.

Nell took a step to stand beside her brother, her hand tightening once on his shoulder before falling away.

"If you decide that unilaterally," she said, her voice flat now, all fire drained into steel, "how do you think the Blackwells would react?"

Jason looked at her. Natalie went very still.

Nell went on before either parent could interrupt.

"Gabriel Blackwell is walking on a razor's edge of becoming fully feral. Old alpha Jack is not going to let anyone remove those girls just because we say so. He retired of his own free will. He may reconsider that decision if you dare to break up his family and risk his son's sanity."

Something ugly crossed Natalie's face at the mention of Gabriel.

"Is that what you want to become, too?" she asked, looking Ethan straight in the eyes. "Another alpha heir choosing his own ruin?"

"Natalie," Jason said, softer now. "I know your history with Gabriel Blackwell left a bad taste in your mouth, but it was a long time ago. This isn't about him."

"Except that it is." She stood up. "Everything always circles back to him. He made his choices twenty years ago. He alone should suffer for them. Not the pack. And certainly not our son."

Silence spread between them, thick and suffocating like smoke.

"It's not only about the Blackwells," Jason said flatly. "By morning, Gary Winters will know enough to ask questions."

Natalie's mouth flattened.

"Then I suppose you'll have to speak to him as well," she said.

"And Jack," Nell added.

The grim expression on Jason's face carried weight.

"Yes." The single syllable hit the room like a stone.

Ethan looked from father to mother to sister and realized that both of his parents had long since moved past the point of asking whether he felt anything for Kelsey.

Because, to them, it was irrelevant.

He understood why. It made sense. It was what the alpha couple did in times of crisis, skipping sentiment and going straight to containment.

He didn't want to laugh, but a small, ugly sound escaped him anyway.

Jason turned back toward him.

"You will stay away from Blackwell land," he said. "From the boundary as well. You will not contact that bloodkin beyond hello and goodbye. You will not force this further into public pack view. And the arrangement with the Winterses will be honored." His eyes narrowed as the air around him seemed to compress. "And regarding inversion, you will deal with it like an alpha heir, not a lovesick pup. Grit your teeth and push through like a male worthy of your position. You will not shame me or this family beyond this. Is that clear?"

The way Jason spoke made the words sound like a sentence.

To them, nothing mattered.

Not what had happened in the woods. Not the fact that Kelsey had stayed. Not that something between them had already crossed into a place where names no longer mattered because the truth had become physical and irreversible.

Ethan's mouth went dry.

A part of him wanted to rise, to say no, to challenge anyone who objected, even his own father.

But his mind held enough sanity to know better. Only his fingers twitched once.

"I suppose there's nothing I can say to make you understand," he said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

That earned him a sharp look from his father's eyes. "Understand? What is there to understand?" He stepped closer and leaned down until his face was inches away from Ethan's. When he spoke, his voice was dangerously low. "Let me ask you this. Let's say the effect the bloodkin has on the pack magically fades away and you mate with her. She becomes alpha female. How does she enforce discipline among females? Furthermore, what kind of offspring do you think that union would produce, if any?"

Ethan clenched his jaw until it hurt. "I don't know."

"Exactly. You don't." Jason leaned away. "I will not have my only son burn down our family line the way Gabe Blackwell burned his. Is that clear?" he repeated.

Ethan forced his jaw to unclench.

"Yes," he lied, because the truth was a battle for another day.

"We will speak again," Jason said after a while. "After I have spoken to both Jack Blackwell and Gary Winters. After I have decided exactly how this is to be handled."

Ethan felt bile rise in his throat but remained still.

Natalie set the clean bandages on the table with unnecessary force.

"Sit down," she said again, and this time the anger in her voice was threaded so thickly with fear that it weakened his resistance.

So he sat.

She cleaned his wounds and stitched the worst of the shoulder and leg while saying almost nothing more. Every now and then Ethan caught the tremor in her hands. Nell walked to the window and stood there with her arms folded, staring into the dark.

No one spoke Kelsey's name. They did not need to. She sat in the silence between them.

By the time Natalie tied off the last bandage, the house felt empty in its silence.

Jason had left the kitchen.

Nell still had not moved from her spot by the window.

Ethan looked down at the white bandage winding across his shoulder. He didn't feel any pain anymore and almost resented the lack of distraction.

Outside the house, the valley lay black and sleeping beneath the winter sky.

Inside, Ethan decided with absolute certainty that he would not let his future be written by old ledgers, nor by old males sitting around a table.

They all talked about the bond to Kelsey like a symptom of a disease they needed to prevent. But none of them, except Nell perhaps, knew it had already taken root within him.

And none except him knew exactly how deep that root had finally settled.

Not because of inversion alone.

Because of something that had been growing quietly for a long time, and had finally broken open in the woods that night. Something that went far beyond biology and instinct and into places no one in his house or in his world asked or cared about.

And no matter what his father said tomorrow, Ethan knew one thing with absolute, painful clarity.

He was not going to let them send her away.

He would keep his promise, no matter the cost.

He only needed to figure out how.