Chapter 2

You Should Have Stayed Gone:

He came back the next morning, which she hadn’t expected, though she should have.

She was on her second pot of coffee, her father’s coffee maker, older than she was, coughing and sputtering through every cycle like it resented being asked to work again when she heard boots on the porch steps. No knock. Just a pause outside the door, like he was deciding whether he had the right to come in without one.

He knocked anyway. She’d give him that much.

“It’s open,” she called, because it was, and because making him stand out there a minute longer felt like a small enough win to take.

Damon stepped inside and filled the doorway the same way he had yesterday, like the house had been built a size too small for him on purpose. He’d changed out of whatever he’d been wearing the day before into something plainer jeans, a gray shirt, no mark of rank on him anywhere obvious, which she found almost funnier than if he’d shown up in full Alpha dress. As if plain clothes could make this a normal conversation between normal people.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“Jet lag.” She didn’t offer him coffee. “What do you need, Damon?”

His jaw ticked at the use of his name without the title. She noticed it and didn’t care.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Actually talk. Not whatever that was yesterday.”

“That was me telling you I’m not staying long and I don’t need help. I think it landed fine.”

“Elena.” Just her name this time, quieter, and something in the way he said it nearly got past her guard before she caught it and shoved it back down where it belonged. “Why did you come back?”

“I told you why.”

“You told me the reason you’d give it to a stranger.” He took a step further into the room, and she made herself hold still instead of stepping back, because stepping back would mean something and she wasn’t going to give it to him. “I’ve known you your whole life, Elena. I know when you’re handing someone the short version.”

“Maybe the short version is all you get now.”

That landed. She watched it land, watched something flicker and tighten behind his eyes, and felt a small, ugly satisfaction in it that she wasn’t proud of and didn’t apologize for either.

“I deserve that,” he said.

“You deserve a lot of things. I’m not particularly interested in handing them out to you.” She crossed her arms, more to have somewhere to put her hands than anything else. “You rejected me in front of the whole pack, Damon. You told everyone I was too weak to stand next to you. And then you had me escorted off the territory like I was a problem that needed cleaning up. So no, I don’t especially feel like explaining myself to you now, five years later, over coffee I didn’t even offer you.”

He didn’t flinch away from that, which surprised her a little. He just stood there and took it, like a man standing still in the weather.

“I know what I did,” he said. “I’ve known what I did every day since I did it.”

“Good for you.”

“It wasn’t good for me.” His voice roughened at the edges. “You think I walked away from that easily? You think I’ve spent five years just fine? I made a decision I believed was necessary at the time, and it cost me the one thing I actually wanted, and I have lived with that every single day since, whether you believe it or not.”

“I don’t especially care whether it costs you anything.” It wasn’t entirely true, and she hated that it wasn’t entirely true, hated that some old soft part of her wanted to ask him what he meant by necessary, wanted to know what had been so urgent that throwing her out in front of the whole pack had seemed like the only option. She shut that part of herself down before it could get any louder. “You made your choice. I made mine. I built a life that doesn’t have you in it, and it’s a good life, and I’d like to go back to it as soon as possible.”

Something crossed his face that she couldn’t name it exactly, but it looked almost like pain, quick and unguarded, gone again before she could be sure she’d seen it right.

“Is that it, then,” he said. “You’ve got nothing left to say to me at all.”

“I didn’t say that.” She hadn’t meant to say it, actually, hadn’t planned on continuing, but something about the stillness in the room pulled it out of her anyway. “I have plenty to say to you. I just don’t think saying it would change anything, and I’m not interested in reopening something just to watch it no matter what.”

“It would matter to me.”

“It doesn’t matter to you. Not anymore. You gave that up.” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, and she hated it, hated that after five years and a whole ocean of distance he could still crack something in her voice with four sentences and a look on his face. “I need to finish going through my father’s things. I have a flight Thursday.”

He held her gaze another second, like he was weighing whether to push, and then, to her genuine surprise, he didn’t.

“Okay,” he said. Just that. He turned toward the door, and then stopped with his hand on the frame, not looking back at her. “For what it’s worth I am sorry about your father. He was decent to me even after everything, and I never told him I appreciated that. I should have.”

Then he was gone, and the house went quiet again except for the coffee maker still gurgling its way through the last of the pot.

Elena sat down hard on the arm of her father’s old chair and let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

Word moved fast in a small territory, and by the time Damon reached the packhouse, half his inner circle already knew Elena Voss was back.

Renata found him first, in the corridor outside his study, arms crossed, expression carefully arranged into something that was trying very hard to look like concern and mostly succeeding.

“So it’s true,” she said. “She’s really back.”

“She’s here for her father’s things. She’s leaving Thursday.”

“Is she?” Renata’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You went to see her this morning.”

He didn’t ask how she knew that. Word traveled. It always had, in this territory, faster than he could ever seem to outrun it. “I wanted to talk to her.”

“About what, exactly?” Renata’s voice stayed light, easy, the tone of a woman who had spent five years positioning herself as the obvious answer to a question Damon had never actually asked out loud. “Damon, she left five years ago. You told the whole pack she wasn’t fit to stand beside you. People have moved on. I’d hate to see you drag all that back up over a woman who’s leaving in three days anyway.”

“It’s not your concern, Renata.”

Something flickered across her face quickly, controlled, but there before she smoothed it back into practiced calm. “Of course,” she said. “I only meant the pack’s stable right now, Damon. It’d be a shame to unsettle that over something that’s already over.”

He didn’t answer her. He walked past her into his study and shut the door, and stood there a long moment with his hand still flat against the wood, his wolf pacing beneath his skin, restless, unwilling to accept a single word of what he’d just heard.

 Already over, Renata had said.

His wolf didn’t believe that. Neither, if he was honest with himself, did he.

Elena spent the rest of the morning in the study, working through the last of the desk drawers, and told herself the visit hadn’t rattled her half as much as it had. She was still telling herself that when her phone buzzed on the desk, an unfamiliar number, no name attached.

She almost let it go to voicemail. Habit, mostly she didn’t answer numbers she didn’t know, hadn’t in years, not since the kind of calls she used to get right after she’d left the territory, reporters and gossips and once, memorably, a pack member three states over who’d heard a garbled version of her story and wanted to know if it was true her own mate had put his hands on her. It hadn’t been true. People believed what made the best story.

But something about sitting in her father’s study, surrounded by the last of his things, made her pick up anyway.

There was no voice on the other end. Just a message, already loaded and waiting, like whoever sent it had wanted her to read it rather than hear it. A single line of text, no signature, no name.

  Your father didn’t die the way they told you. Ask the Alpha what he knew, and when he knew it.

Elena read it twice. Then a third time, her thumb hovering over the screen like the words might rearrange themselves into something less sharp if she waited long enough.

They didn’t.

She set the phone down on the desk, carefully, the way you set down something that might go off if you weren’t gentle with it, and sat very still in her father’s chair while the coffee maker in the other room finished its last, tired gurgle and went silent.