Chapter 5

Chapter 5

XENOIS

She laughed, a little watery, a little relieved, and pressed her face into my shoulder.

We stood there a moment longer, and I let myself remember—the way you let yourself remember something good in the middle of something terrible, grabbing at it like a rope thrown into deep water. Sophia, sixteen years old, laughing at something stupid I'd said outside the pack training grounds, the first time I'd realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life making her laugh like that. The years after, dating quietly at first and then not quietly at all, my parents' cautious approval slowly warming into real affection for her. The mating ceremony, her hand in mine under the full moon, the whole pack howling their approval into the night sky.

The pregnancy. God, I remembered the pregnancy—how sick she'd been those first months, how she used to press my hand against her stomach in the middle of the night just so I could feel the twins move, how she'd cried the first time Riley kicked hard enough that I could see it from across the room.

I remembered being in the room when she gave birth. Ollie first, screaming his outrage at the world the second he arrived. And then Riley—smaller, quieter, and gone from the nursery within hours, stolen by someone we trusted, a nightmare that took years to end.

I remembered the facility. The months of searching, the dead ends, Sophia's grief hollowing her out in ways I hadn't known how to fix. And then finally—finally—finding him. Bringing him home. Watching Sophia hold her son again after five years of believing she might never get the chance.

It should have felt like triumph, remembering all of it. Instead there was a strange, thin unease running underneath the memories, like a hairline crack in glass you only notice when the light hits it a certain way.

My eyes drifted, unbidden, to the hallway wall behind Sophia's shoulder. A row of family photographs, framed and hung with the kind of careful attention my mother put into things that mattered to her. Sophia and me at the mating ceremony. The boys as infants. A family portrait from what looked like a year or two ago, all of us gathered on the front steps of the pack house.

I frowned at that last one. Something about it didn't sit right, though I couldn't have said what. The angle of the light, maybe. Or the fact that I couldn't quite remember the day it had been taken, despite how recent it looked.

"What is it?" Sophia asked, following my gaze.

"Nothing," I said. "Just—déjà vu, I think."

She smiled, soft and a little sad. "It's been a long few days. Your parents almost died, Jerome's been circling like a vulture for weeks. I think we're all running on fumes."

"My parents," I repeated, and something in my chest tightened. "The fire. Jerome's people set fire to—"

I stopped. Tried to finish the thought. Couldn't.

There was an image in my head, sudden and vivid and wrong—my parents standing over a pyre, flames climbing high into a dark sky, a woman's scream cutting through the crackle of burning wood. I could feel the heat of it on my face even now, phantom and impossible, a memory that didn't seem to belong anywhere in the story I'd just been telling myself.

"Xenois?" Sophia's voice, concerned now. "You went somewhere just now. Where'd you go?"

"I don't know," I admitted, rubbing at my temple, where a headache was building behind my eyes like pressure before a storm. "I keep—there's something at the edge of my thoughts today. Like a word I can't remember, or a room I know I've been in but can't place. It's probably nothing. Stress."

"Probably," Sophia agreed, though her eyes lingered on my face a beat too long, searching for something I couldn't identify either.

She reached up and brushed her thumb along my jaw, and I caught sight of the faint, thin scar along the inside of her wrist as she did—pale and old, the kind of mark that should have had a story attached to it. I opened my mouth to ask where it had come from, and the question died before it fully formed, because surely I already knew. Surely I'd been there when it happened. A mate bond that old, a life that intertwined—there was no version of things where I didn't know the story of every mark on her body.

Wasn't there?

"We should find the boys," Sophia said gently, stepping back and taking my hand. "They'll want to know I'm safe. And you need to rest, even if it's just for an hour."

"Right," I said, and let her lead me down the corridor, toward the sound of the pack settling back into some semblance of order, toward our sons who were waiting for us both, whole and safe.

I didn't look back at the photographs.

If I had, I might have noticed that the woman standing beside me in the family portrait had a slightly different set to her shoulders than the woman walking beside me now. I might have noticed that in the picture of the twins' birth, hung two frames down, the hand gripping the newborn wasn't quite the hand I now held in mine.

But I didn't look back.

I only followed the voice I loved down the hallway, certain—utterly, foolishly certain—that I had never followed any other.