Chapter 4: Running from the Truth

POV: Stella Morris

Location: Pine Hollow Bus Stop

Timeline: One year ago

You know my grandmother well?

I held out his phone.

He glanced at the screen once, then crossed his arms over his chest.

"Pretty well." He paused, like that wasn't quite enough. "My bar's across the street from her shop."

I waited for him to keep going.

He didn't. His gaze drifted sideways, and when he spoke again, something in his voice had shifted.

"People in town say her daughter ran off with some guy." A beat. "Never came back."

I looked down.

There was a dead weed poking up through a crack in the pavement near my foot. The stem was bent almost all the way through, but not quite broken.

Ran off with some guy.

That was the human version of it.

The real version was that she followed a wolf. And she hadn't known what he was until it was too late.

I don't know exactly when my mother fell for Arthur Vance.

I only ever pieced it together from scraps — things the person who brought our food let slip, things Mom said without meaning to.

She met him outside of town. He was good-looking, well-mannered.

When she talked, he tilted his head and actually listened, never rushed her.

He told her she was different from everyone else around here.

She thought he loved her. She loved him back.

Then she got pregnant, left Pine Hollow, and walked into a world she had never known existed.

Arthur Vance. Pack Alpha.

He didn't want a Luna. He wanted a human woman who could give him a child.

A hybrid child meant nothing to him.

Once child's blood matured, it would be used to replace the metal-contaminated blood in his sister’s body, poisoned by a witch’s potion.

He had tested a lot of women. He chose my mother for two reasons.

Strong constitution. Easy to deceive.

The child was born.

She was named Stella Vance.

Stella Vance grew up in a locked cabin.

The only person who came was the one who brought food, and he would teach her a few words before leaving again.

She stuttered.

No one corrected her, no one stayed long enough to try, and eventually she stopped opening her mouth at all.

The stutter faded into silence, and the silence became permanent.

She knew every plank of wood in that cabin — which grain was rough, where the knots were.

Later, the delivery man brought her a carving knife.

She carved every day, until her fingers bled and the blade chipped, and then he'd bring another one.

She thought that was the whole world.

Then one afternoon, the cabin door was split open from the outside.

A woman stood in the doorway. Breathing hard. Blood on her hands. Eyes so red they looked raw.

The moment she saw Stella Vance, she dropped to her knees and pulled her into her arms.

"Today is Stella's tenth birthday," she said. Her voice cracked on every word. "It's a beautiful day. We're finally together."

Stella Vance didn't know this woman.

But Stella Vance recognized her scent.

It was a good one.

From that day on, Stella Vance became Stella Morris.

I didn't learn the full story until later, from Mom herself.

I had been taken from her the moment I was born.

After Arthur decided she had no further use, he came close to killing her.

She escaped into the forest on the same day she gave birth, hiding with nothing but the clothes on her back.

She stayed hidden. She waited.

Ten years, until the pack tore itself apart fighting over territory and the guards were pulled away and the locks went slack. With the delivery man's help, she got me out.

But she didn't go back to Pine Hollow.

She couldn't face Grandma Dorothy.

And because of me — I couldn't control the shift back then, not at all, and she couldn't bring something that dangerous into a human town.

She found an abandoned cabin near the pack's border. She took odd jobs, dealt in scrap lumber, kept us alive.

There was a rundown school nearby where most of the kids were edge cases like me.

Most of what Mom earned went toward keeping me safe during full moons. She always had everything prepared, every time, without fail.

She saved up and bought me a phone when I was fifteen. She said it was what kids in the human world used.

Later I made a friend at school — an omega, someone who also carved wood, someone who could get out maybe two words at a time.

Mom was so surprised she bought her one too, so we could talk whenever we needed to.

Seven years, in that cabin.

Quiet. Small. Real.

I loved those seven years.

It was an afternoon, after school.

I pushed open the cabin door.

The smell hit me before anything else. Blood.

I stood in the doorway for two or three seconds before I could make my legs move.

Mom was on the floor.

Beside her hand, a dark smear spread across the wood planks.

She had used her own blood to write three words, the letters already bleeding into the grain.

HIDE AND RUN.

I crouched down. Moved close to her.

Her hand shifted, searching, and found mine. She held on.

Her mouth moved. Almost no sound.

But I heard it.

I'm sorry.

I don't know how long I stayed there.

When her hand went cold, I stood up.

I buried her.

Then I ran — and I hadn't stopped until right now, standing at this bus stop, in front of this stranger.

I raised my head.

Wyatt was still there, arms still crossed.

I typed it out slowly, one word at a time, and held the phone out to him.

My mom was tricked by a man. She was too afraid to come back. Someone killed her.

He took the phone without a word. Read it.

The silence stretched.

He set the phone back in my hand.

"I'll take you to Dorothy."

He turned toward the road.

After a moment, he glanced back at me.

"Come on."