My Mate Forced Me to Watch My Father Die

The trees blurred past in dark streaks. My paws hit the snow and pushed off it and hit it again, and I was faster than anything I had ever been in my life.

And then she spoke.

*Father.*

The word landed inside my chest like a stone dropped in a well.

*Gone. They killed him.*

My stride stuttered. Snow flew up around my shoulders.

*Turn back,* Seraphine said. *Turn back. Tear his throat. Now. While he smells of her. While his hands still shake.*

I kept running. My lungs burned. Her fury was pressing outward against my ribs like something trying to reshape me from the inside, and for one long heartbeat I almost turned. I almost did.

*No,* I told her.

*Yes.*

*No, Seraphine.* I let her feel the word settle. *If we go back now, we die. Or worse — we get caged. He has forty warriors and a healer who obeys him. We tear his throat, and Patrick becomes the wolfless Omega whose daughter went feral. That is not what my father gets.*

Silence. A long one. Her fury did not vanish; it compressed. I could feel her turning it over inside us, examining it from every angle like a stone she did not want to put down.

*Then what,* she said finally. Not a question. A demand.

*Then we make it permanent,* I said. *Every piece of him. His title. His pack. His wolf. His name. We take it all, and we do it in a way he can never undo.*

Another silence.

*Slow,* she said, and I could feel her hate the word.

*Slow,* I agreed.

*I want his throat.*

*I know.*

*Later.*

*Later,* I said. *I promise you later.*

She settled — not calmed, settled — a weight leaning against the inside of my ribs, still furious, still grieving, but with me now instead of against me. It was not peace. It was something more useful than peace. It was an agreement.

I ran.

The scent came to me twenty minutes later — three wolves, closing from the northwest. Seraphine identified them before my human mind caught up. *Marcus. Two Deltas. One favors his left side. Fast, not smart.*

I did not panic. That surprised me. Three days ago the sound of Marcus's boots in a corridor would have made my hands shake. Now I simply catalogued him — his pace, his distance, the wind at his back giving my trail away — and I turned.

I ran toward the smell of chemicals.

The industrial corridor at the eastern edge of Nightveil territory was a long ugly stretch of exhaust vents and salt-crusted lots where the pack rarely went because the air burned a wolf's nose raw. I hit the first drift of chemical stink and Seraphine flinched — *bad, wrong, cannot smell* — and I told her *yes, that's the point.*

I cut through the loading yard of a plant that smelled like ammonia and old metal. My scent dissolved into it two paces in. I doubled back along my own tracks, backed thirty feet into a service alley, then leapt sideways onto the frozen creek that ran under the fence line. My paws hit ice. I ran the creek for half a mile before I broke off it onto stone.

Behind me, faint, I heard Marcus call a halt.

I did not wait to hear the rest.

By the time the sun rose I was past the territory line, past three highway underpasses, moving through the outer edge of a human sprawl where the only smells were diesel and coffee and wet asphalt. I shifted back in the shadow of a dumpster behind a shuttered gas station and pulled on the plain black clothes I had bound to my leg before the run. My hands did not shake. Seraphine watched through me, curious, quiet.

I walked into Manhattan on foot over the next two days.

I found a room above a laundromat on a street where nobody asked questions if the cash was right. It had one window, a mattress on the floor, a radiator that hissed. I paid three weeks in advance from the envelope Patrick had hidden inside the notebook — of course he had. Of course.

I sat down on the mattress.

I breathed in.

Lavender. Cold, clean lavender, and underneath it that faint crackle like the air before a storm. My own scent, in my own room, in my own lungs.

And I cried.

Not for Patrick. Not yet. For Patrick I did not have words or tears large enough, and I would not spend them on a laundromat mattress. I cried because I could smell myself. Because for three years I had woken up every morning and put another woman's fragrance on my skin with my own hands, and now the air I was breathing was mine, and my chest was rising and falling without burning, and somewhere under my ribs Seraphine was pressing her forehead against the inside of me like a wolf leaning into a hand.

*Ours,* she said. Quiet, this time. Not a demand. A fact.

*Ours,* I agreed.

I stayed in that room for three days. I did not go out. I drank tap water and ate crackers from a corner store bag and slept in bursts and woke up and breathed and breathed and breathed. My shoulders started to heal. The gauntness in my cheeks did not lift, not yet, but the breathlessness eased, and the raw places on my palms scabbed and itched and closed.

On the fourth morning I stood up, washed my face in the sink, put on the black clothes, and put Patrick's notebook in my inside pocket.

I went looking for work.

Somewhere in the city, I knew, there was a room with a piano and low lights and people who did not care what a wolf smelled like.

I just had to find it.