Chapter 57

Gabriel sat on the packed dirt floor with his back against the wall. The sweater Jack had brought him hung loosely on his body. His breathing came slower now, no longer ragged, yet somehow no less painful.

The world beyond the barn had gone quiet again. The house had settled into its night stillness, only a lamp in the kitchen still giving signs of life, like a hearth too far away to feel its warmth. For a long while he sat motionless, trying to gather the shards of memory and force them into a coherent shape.

The one thing he remembered clearly, with no haze over it at all, was the worry. Kelsey had not come home when she should have. She usually arrived at dusk, every day, almost like clockwork. He had memorized the exact length of the shadows in the barn at which he would usually hear the engine approaching. Today the dusk bled into night, and she did not return.

He had known something was wrong even from inside the barn, not simply because she was late, that alone could mean many things, but because of the way the air had thickened around her absence. He had heard his mother crossing the yard twice in too little time. Heard her speaking to his father in a hushed, quick voice, deliberately too far away and too quietly for him to catch the words. Something had happened to his pup, and he was sitting locked in a barn.

The memory of it made his teeth grit. He had pounded on the door and shouted until he got his father's attention, until he made him go after her. He remembered the slam of Jack's pickup door, the fading sound of the engine as it drove away. And then the waiting. Sitting down in the dirt with helplessness burning through him like a hot coal. He should have been the one to go after her. She was his pup. His responsibility.

Except he could not go, because he was a danger to his own child.

His head fell back against the wall with a dull thud.

That was the core of it, wasn't it.

He had allowed himself to become the thing that kept him from being a father in the moment his daughters needed him most. The shame of it flooded him again, hot enough to turn his stomach.

He remembered listening for Jack's truck on the road. Remembered every nerve in his body drawing taut at the sound of the engine returning. He remembered rising before the truck had even fully stopped, every part of him straining toward the yard, desperate for the one thing that mattered. Then the wind had shifted. Kelsey's scent had hit him through the cracks in the barn wall. Blood.

He had heard the worry in his mother's voice, and everything inside him had come apart.

Hurt, she was hurt.

What followed remained mostly broken, less event than sensation. A detonation inside him. The crude, ancient command that had obliterated all else.

Protect .

And beneath it, fused so tightly to the first instinct that he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began, another.

Kill. Destroy.

His hands curled into the dirt now as if they still held the force of that urge. He remembered the barn shaking beneath the impact of his body, even while the small, useless, conscious part of him tried to pull back. It was the only reason the structure was still standing. Even so, the wood had cracked.

And that was not the worst of it. The truth he loathed most sat at the center of everything, no matter how many times he tried to turn away from it. It was all his fault. He had brought his daughters to this valley because grief had hollowed him out and instinct had begun eating through him long before he admitted it. He had told himself that proximity to his own kind might make the broken pieces easier to hold together. Instead he had put both girls inside the jaws of the world he had once sworn to keep them from. And when that guilt had become too much to carry upright, he had done the most unforgivable thing of all. He had fled into the woods and let himself break.

Something bitter rose into his throat. If not for his parents, what would have become of Kelsey and Hailey while he was out there tearing himself apart in the dark? The same parents he had once rejected, and who had once rejected him.

A bitter laugh almost escaped him. He had spent years resenting them. Not without reason. He had chosen Diane. They had chosen the pack. And yet, when he failed, his father had taken up his burden without hesitation. His mother had kept his daughters inside the house while he howled and shattered himself against the walls.

Still, what else could he have done? Left them with Gerard? The thought rose bitter and instinctively repellent. Every baser part of him recoiled from it. The idea of leaving his young with another male, a human male, weaker, made something ancient in him rear up in protest. Yet beneath that revolt, the clearer part of him, the part dragged back inch by inch by shame and Kelsey's voice and Diane's scarf, knew the uglier truth. It might have been the safer choice.

Diane's scarf lay where he had left it, crumpled beside him on the floor. Even now the pale yellow fabric looked impossibly delicate in the half-light of the barn, absurdly delicate against dirt, splintered boards, and the sour smell of old blood. He reached for it with more reverence than he had ever given any relic, because that was what it had become. A relic. An axis turned into a crutch. He pressed it to his face and the scent filled him like sunshine. He breathed deeply, letting it fill him with light and warmth.

He did not believe in ghosts. And yet, with the scarf held to his mouth and nose, with the barn walls dim around him and his body still half-aching, he could almost imagine her standing beside him, wearing that look that had always seen through him like glass. He could almost hear her now.

No more running, Gabriel.

His fingers tightened on the scarf.

You do not get to bury yourself beside me while they still need you.

His throat worked once. He saw Kelsey in his mind, painted with the scent of blood and fear. Saw Hailey on the other side of a locked door, too young to understand why her father was suddenly forbidden to touch.

Enough.

The word moved through him, and he was not sure whether it came in Diane's voice or his own. Perhaps it did not matter.

No more wandering in the dark.

Yes , he agreed. He had done enough of that. Enough lingering at the edges of his own life while other people carried what should have been his to bear. Enough calling it grief when part of it had been cowardice. Enough letting the beast in him become excuse as much as affliction.

Live , the memory of Diane's voice seemed to say, not softly, but with the force of the woman who had never once allowed him to collapse into self-pity, not even while her own body was betraying her. She had made him promise to live, to remain for their children. He had promised, and then he had failed.

Anyone can fall down, Gabe , he could almost hear her say. It's the getting up that counts. You owe them that. You owe me that. You owe yourself that.

A long silence followed.

He opened his eyes. The house stood beyond the narrow barn window as little more than a softened block of darkness under moonlight, that single lamp still burning low in the kitchen. He stared at it for a long time, the scarf still in his hands. Jack had told him there had been an accident, that the car had swerved off the road. But he knew, with the clarity of a father whose instincts had been honed by fear too long, that it was not the whole truth. He did not know how he knew. He simply did. Something had happened to her. Something they didn't want him to know about.

The instinct twitched under his skin again, but this time it did not splinter him in half. Instead, it narrowed, gathered, and then settled into purpose with terrible steadiness. His children were in danger. They needed him. Both of them. And he could not remain in the barn like a chained beast, waiting for other people to clean up what he had made of their lives.

He bowed his head once over the scarf, then forced the wave down.

No more of this.

He rose slowly. His body protested, stiff from the floor and from too many recent changes, but held. The wall steadied him for one breath, then was no longer needed. He stood in the half-dark barn and looked toward the house. Something in him had moved too far to be undone. The fragments were still there, but for the first time since Diane's death, they were no longer pulling in separate directions. And somewhere inside him, Diane's voice, or what remained of it, seemed to light the way.

At last.