Chapter 86

I drove home too fast. Or perhaps it only seemed that way because I didn't exactly remember driving. My hands stayed locked around the steering wheel. My phone lay facedown on the passenger seat, silent. It didn't matter. Ethan was alive. He was going to be okay. I repeated this to myself because I needed something to hold on to to stop shaking. But I couldn't. Because he had been hurt. By my dad.

The same dad who had suffered and strained behind barn doors, who had come back to us by inches, climbing through memories, love, and my mother's yellow scarf. Same dad who had smelled Ethan on my skin and set the murderous thing beneath his own skin free to sink its teeth into Ethan without waiting for an explanation.

The last thought cut like a knife.

The last thing I expected when I turned into the driveway was him standing there.

And yet, there he was.

He stood in the yard between the porch and the barn. For a second, my brain refused to make sense of him. He was wearing old jeans and a dark shirt that was buttoned wrong near the collar, and his feet were bare in the wet grass as if he had dressed in pieces without noticing what he had forgotten. His hair was matted and wild, his face hollowed out. Bruises darkened one cheekbone, one shoulder, and the side of his throat where the shirt hung loose enough for me to see torn skin already half-knitting itself closed. Scratches crossed his arms where the skin was visible below his rolled-up sleeves. A deeper bite mark curved along his forearm, ragged and red at the edges, already healing.

His face was tired and pale, like he had spent the whole night running until the wild, savage thing in him had worn itself raw.

I saw the ruin in him. Regret, perhaps. I understood it. A part of me was relieved that he was standing here, clothed, on two legs. Another part of me blazed with anger. Not just because of what he had done to Ethan. That was only the fuse. Everything else had been gathering inside me for months, and now it had found a target.

The car jolted to a stop. I killed the engine, shoved the door open, and got out so hard the door slammed behind me with a sound that brought Jack onto the porch before I had taken three steps.

Dad did not move. He stood there, shoulders slightly bowed, eyes fixed on me with an expression I could not bear to read.

"What did you do?" I hissed.

Jack came down one porch step. "Kelsey."

"I want to hear it from his own mouth!" I screamed, shaking. "What did you do to Ethan?!"

Elise appeared behind Jack, one hand on the doorframe. Hailey's face flashed in the gap beside her, pale and frightened, before Elise turned and said something sharp and soft at once, guiding her back inside with a hand on her shoulder.

Dad's eyes flicked toward the door. That tiny movement lit another match inside me.

"No," I said, crossing the yard toward him. "Don't look at her. Look at me!"

He remained silent and immovable. He did not even lift his hands. His eyes met mine.

Jack said my name again, louder this time, but I was already in front of Dad, close enough to see the torn place near his collarbone where Ethan must have caught him, close enough to see that his pupils were human and devastated.

I shoved him. Both hands against his chest. For the tiniest fraction of a second it was like shoving a mountain. Then his body unlocked and he stumbled back. Not because I was suddenly strong enough to move him. Because he let me. The knowledge passed through me even in my rage, and somehow that made me angrier, because even his refusal to defend himself felt like another thing I had not asked him to give.

"How dare you?" I hissed. "How dare you?!"

His mouth parted slightly. No sound came out.

"After everything," I spat, and the words began coming faster, ugly and unstoppable. "After you dragged us to this nightmare town and then ran into the woods and left us here to be eaten alive by everything you refused to explain. After months of us living around your grief, around your sickness, around your broken bond, around whether today you might be human enough to recognize your own children or too far gone to come near the door without the danger of killing us."

"Kelsey," Elise said from the porch, her voice shaking now.

I ignored her.

"I stood outside that barn," I said, shoving him again, weaker this time, though he still gave ground as if I had struck him harder. "I stood there in the cold with nothing but memories and a prayer to pull you back. I watched Hailey cry herself sick because she wanted her dad. I watched Jack and Elise tear themselves apart trying to keep you with us and keep us safe at the same time, and I did it, okay? I did it. I stayed. I tried. I cared so much it hollowed me out."

Dad's face had gone grey beneath the bruises. Jack had come down into the yard now, but he stopped several steps away, tense as a loaded pistol.

"And then for once," I said, my voice breaking so badly I almost lost the words, "for once there was something that was mine. Not yours. Not Hailey's, or anyone else's. Mine!" I slammed my palm against my chest.

Dad blinked once, slow and tired.

"Ethan saw me," I continued. "Not as a bloodkin, not as a walking disaster, not as your daughter or something that had to be managed. Me . And now you took that too. You smelled something you didn't like and you went full barbaric on a guy I..."

Dad flinched. I bit my tongue.

"You had no right." The words left my lips half-whispered. Broken.

His voice came then, barely above a breath. "I know. Kelsey, I'm..."

"You don't know," I interrupted, tears blurring my sight. "You don't know shit! You don't know what it was like to live on the edge of your grief for months and be grateful for scraps of you like they were enough. You don't know what it is like to love your dad and be afraid of him at the same time. You don't..."

Jack's face tightened. Elise had one hand over her mouth. Dad stood still and took it, every word, every cruel piece of it, without moving away.

"I hate you," I spat. The lie came out sounding like truth because part of it was truth in that moment, and that was the thing I would hate myself for later.

Dad did not breathe.

"I hate you," I said again, slower, worse, because I was crying now and still could not stop. "I hate that Mom was the one who had to go. I wish she was here instead..." My throat collapsed before the final two words could leave it. Because even as my mind burned, my body refused to finish that sentence. It was finished anyway, its meaning hanging clear in the air around us.

The silence fell down like a verdict. Even the trees seemed to stop moving.

At once, I wished I could take it back. Because it had come from the worst place in me, the place where all of my grief, anger and pain gathered and pressed until I turned them into a blade and aimed it straight where it would cut the worst. But it was a double-edged blade because it pierced something in me too. And it hurt. It hurt so much I couldn't breathe.

Something in Dad's face simply extinguished.

Elise made a small sound behind me. Jack said, very quietly, "Kelsey."

My chest hurt. The words I'm sorry, I didn't mean it hung on the tip of my tongue, aching to get out. My mouth opened, and for a moment I almost said them. Then I saw Ethan in my head, and the apology died somewhere in my throat, tangled with fury, shame, and a grief so old it had spilled into everything.

I stepped back. Dad did not reach for me. That hurt too. Everything hurt too much to sort.

"I can't even look at you," I said.

Then I turned and ran.

I heard Jack move as if he might follow, then Elise's soft, urgent voice stop him. I did not hear Dad at all. I went past the kitchen, past the living room with parts of the remote still lying on the carpet, past Hailey, who stood near the stairs clutching Mr. Winkle and asking something I didn't hear, and straight to my bedroom.

My phone, the only lifeline to Ethan, remained silent.